Tom Young | Jim / 2022

transgression redeemed

by Douglas Messerli

 

Tom Young (screenwriter and director) Jim / 2022 [15 minutes]

 

A handsome British priest, Jim Fitzsimmons (Gary Fannin) in 1982 determined to resolve his continued illicit fantasies by hiring a rent boy for just one night. He visits the pick-up alley and takes home a young boy, Simon (Cary Ryan).

     Almost immediately, however, the boy seems far less experienced than the priest might have expected, shy and somewhat fearful about the encounter. Presuming that the boy’s seeming reluctance has to do with his being a priest, Jim offers him some alcohol to steady his nerves.

     The boy drinks but suddenly becomes ill and vomits, rushing to the bathroom. Jim comforts him in the bathroom, surprised by the behavior of a supposed to be an experienced rent boy. What we eventually perceive is that not only has the boy probably gone hungry for a long while but he is not acquainted with the effects of liquor.

      For while attempting to clean the dirty pants the boy has shed, the priest suddenly uncovers a billfold in his pocket. The revelation is startling, and Jim soon confronts Simon, asking him about his age. The boy, he discovers, is only 14, with no place really to live expect an occasional return to his mother’s house, where, because of his sexuality, he is not welcome.

     What was to have been a night of illicit sex and exceptional sinning, suddenly has become for the priest a moral dilemma as he realizes that the experienced rent boys he imagined are still children, thrown into the streets and forced, in order to survive, into offering themselves up for sex.

      The short film by British director Tom Young, is based on the real-life tale of Fitzsimmons, who spent much of the rest of his life befriending the street kids and working through his sermons and public statements to help change laws and give support to such boys and girls forced onto the streets in their youth.

      The film is moving, particularly in its early moments when the priest and boy are equally terrified of a situation they both desire and dread. But unfortunately, the film soon transitions into a kind of representation of the historical facts, losing much of its poignancy along the way.

      It would be fascinating to have a fully dramatized documentary about the subject of the priest who went astray only to be redeemed by attempting to help the very boys of which he had at first resolved to take advantage.

      The film was a favorite film among the 2022 Iris Prize nominees (given for short films “by, for, about or of interest to gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender or intersex audiences” each year since 2007).

 

Los Angeles, October 7, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (October 2023).