David Färdmar and Björn Elgerd | Vi skulle bli bra föräldrar (We Could Be Parents) / 2016

valentine to a scornful lover

by Douglas Messerli

RATING

Björn Elgerd (screenplay), Björn Elgerd and David Färdmar (directors) Vi skulle bli bra föräldrar (We Could Be Parents) / 2016 [15 minutes]

 

Sitting in a vast empty lot outside of an abandoned industrial plant, Erik (Björn Elgerd) points a camera at himself in order to make a movie for his former lover, Marely, who has broken off their deep relationship.

    Gradually we perceive that Erik, somewhat physically challenged (he seems to have partial nerve damage on his left side), has been amazed in the first place that Marely had fallen in love with him, stood up for him, and protected him from the verbal scorn of others. Over time, however, he came to recognize that their love was real, which provided him with the greatest joy of his young life.

    He expresses of all this to Erik, hoping to lure him back. But it may also be true that, although Erik seems to comprehend a great deal and speaks coherently, he may also be somewhat mentally challenged, given what we soon also discover.

   We observe him stop the filming midway as a car drives up. He gets in momentarily to suck the driver off, clearly being paid for providing the brief pleasure to the older man, holding up the currency for the camera to see when the car pulls away. When he sits down again before the camera, he makes clear that he knows that Marely has left him just for such acts, believing that he has been unfaithful. But Erik doesn’t see it that way.

     Erik, we discover, has long wanted a child and since Marely had been strongly against surrogacy from third-world countries were women are forced to undergo such pregnancies for money, he had been trying to raise enough money to pay for a willing surrogate mother from the middle class of the USA.

     Still, he has been afraid to tell all this to his lover for fear of what precisely has happened, that he would lose Marely’s love and be sent away.

      If Erik’s logic seems warped, he still sees some things quite clearly, as when he points out that he doesn’t feel like a commodity in prostituting himself since he is doing it for a cause that would give joy to them both, becoming parents. And if Marely feels that in choosing to do such a thing he has been disloyal to him, then he too must see him as a commodity, someone whom he bodily controls. His logic may be someone twisted, but he is also correct in his assessment. Isn’t the demand of monogamy a kind of sanctioned control, a demand to be the slave of another?

     Erik points out, in his twisted logic, that he has also donated sperm to several lesbian couples, so that perhaps he already is an unknown father. And he is happy that he has been able to provide these couples with what they need to discover the joy of parental love. He holds up a picture of two women for which he has donated sperm.

     Again, he begs for Marely’s return, now in tears.

     In the last scene of his film, we discover the device on which he has been filming this plea is a drone which he now sets into aerial motion so that Marely will be able to see the words he has written out over the parking lot of this desolate factory, where he now also may be living: “Jag älskar dig” (“I love you).

     In a strange mix of perversity, preposterousness, and an emotionally moving plea to have love return, Erik makes his case. And we feel moved by him, and wish that only Marely will watch this ridiculous valentine, forgive him, and return.

     No matter what Erik has made a strange case not only for his desire to be loved but to able to give love, since he promises that with or without his former companion, he plans to adopt a child. Whether or not that can truly come to be, we don’t know. But clearly in his world, miracles can happen.

 

Los Angeles, February 7, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (February 2026).

 

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Roger Lambert | A Seaside Story / 1986

let’s do it

by Douglas Messerli

 

Roger Lambert (screenwriter and director) A Seaside Story / 1986

 

British director Roger Lambert has filmed several tales of young gay or queer-oriented young boys, Follow You, Follow Me (1979) and I Want to Be Famous (1976) among them.

    Superficially his 1986 short film, A Seaside Story is ostensibly not a gay work, staring two young boys, Martin (Martin Plunkett) and Sam (Sam Butterfield) who go on vacation for a weekend together in Lyme Regis.

    If this might simply seem to be a recounting of a series of incidental events happening to the two 17-year-old friends who have very different interests, however, look closer. For Lambert’s work is a very subtle satire upon on several issues, including the heteronormative attitudes of young men out to simply get a kiss or possibly a fuck from a young female meet-up, the values of young boys with regard to the immediate pull of their testosterone and higher intellectual concerns, and a delightful satire regarding the younger generation in connection with the elderly.

    It all begins with the boys’ arrival at a guesthouse where they are met by an eccentric landlady (Gwen Nelson) who is absolutely delighted to meet up with the very youngest guests she has ever entertained in her basically elderly vacationers. She even rustles up a bottle of wine left to her by her long-dead husband for the only customers who have dared to ask for a wine list. Indeed, she dotes over the boys, particularly the far cuter Sam, who she encounters in a bath towel after he takes a shower, requesting that he change a light bulb for her, which, obviously means, accidently dropping the towel—much to her delight. Her comment: “In vaudeville they used to do it with feathers.” She holds it up, to protect him from our camera view more than from her own perusal.

    Martin, meanwhile has gone off to bed, imagining how next day he will meet up with the girls he’s already scouted out, Zaile (Zaile Burrow) and Sarah (Sarah Mitchell) who are vacationing with their mother (Sue Tracy) and her obnoxious boyfriend Phil (Phil Rowlands).

     The landlady invites the young boarder to come downstairs and have a nice night-cap with her, and Sam spends the evening playing Fats Wallers “Ain’t Misbehavin” and Cole Porter’s “Anything Goes” on the piano in the parlor with Gwen humming along. Martin, in fact, is a bit annoyed by all the late night music.

     The next day while Martin heads off to the beach to impress Zaile and Sarah, Martin sneaks off to the seaside village’s bushes where he comes upon a rare Monarch butterfly feeding off the milkweeds, probably having been blown off course from North American on its way to the Canary Islands or the Azores.

     Since Martin and his two new girlfriends seems rather disinterested, Sam runs back to tell the elderly Gwen of her news, who completely knowledgeable of local flora and fauna, dons her World War I military camping clothes, pulls out her tent, and marches off the watch the friendly Monarch.

     Since he shows utterly no interest in them, the girls ask Martin if his companion is gay. As a commentator on the IMDb site notes, Martin is somewhat of a “mullethead” who answers, “No, he’s just an ecologist,” under the illusion, evidently, that they’ve equivalents and you can’t be both.

     Just from his love of nature, and musically accompanied in this film by Porter’s “Let’s Do It, Let’s Fall in Love,” Sam camps out (quite literally, but also a bit in the contemporary gay sense) with Gwen and Zaile, having fallen in love with nature itself.     

     Martin gets his longed-for kiss from Sarah, as well as a wet drubbing from three young local boys whose soccer ball he has accidently kicked into the ocean. But Sam, the boy who’s more interested in the birds and bees that in the female species, seems to have all the real fun, discovering the beauty of the world around him and in the process completely transforming the life of a bawdy old woman and a young girl who, unlike her sister, is now perhaps more interested in making a new friend than in capturing a couple of quick smooches.

   If Martin ever happens to wake up, he might find a beautiful gay boy in love with life in the very next bed.

 

Los Angeles, February 17, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (February 2026).