loving all the wrong people
by
Douglas Messerli
Craig
Boreham (screenwriter and director) Teenage Kicks / 2016
Australian
director Craig Boreham’s feature first feature film, Teenage Kicks, is
both an extension and fuller explanation of his 2009 short film, Drowning.
The same figures are involved, although some of the defining events of the film
move the work is slightly different directions.
Miklós Varga (Miles Szanto), the
17-year-old son of an inattentive father and a more than guilty and neglectful
mother (Anni Finsterer), is clearly in love with his best friend Dan (Daniel
Webber). They smoke drugs and masturbate together while watching lesbian porn
films, while Dan’s father cooks up a hearty if seemingly inedible meal in the
kitchen.
Everything might, nonetheless, be perfect
if only Dan weren’t straight and determined to engage in a disastrous
relationship with his wealthy girlfriend Phaedra (Charlotte Best).
Mik, moreover, adores his older drugged-out
brother Tomi (Nadim Kobessi), and is unable to resist watching him through door
crack as the man masturbates. This probably is not the first time he has
witnessed the act. Only this time he is caught, and Tomi, furious about the fact,
and perhaps finally made fully aware of his sibling’s sexuality, goes racing
off on his bicycle, with Mik, with deep a deep sense of shame and need to
apologize, stealing his father’s car to follow, a ridiculous chase which ends
up with Tomi being hit and killed by another driver.
Tomi, clearly this Hungarian migrant
family’s favorite, and seen as the savior of their already fractured family unit,
leaves a huge gap in all their hearts, particularly for Mik, who has lost not only
a sibling and friend, but a secret love.
In
his endless guilt, the young boy even vows to look after Tomi’s very pregnant
girlfriend Annuska (Shari Sebbens), all the while observing his true love Dan
is drifting away from him into the arms of Phaedra. Mik had dreamed that he and
Dan might run away together as they had long planned.
Even worse, Phaedra, fascinated perhaps by
the relationship between Dan and Mik, and, if nothing else, aware of its erotic
aspects for Mik, seduces the boy, encouraging him to masturbate her, and
proving, at least to Mik, that she has no long-term interest in Dan, even if he
remains blind to that fact until almost the end of the film.
Mik drifts off into a world of further
drugs, even a temporary exploration of heroin, and finally, as in the short
work, almost drowns, saved by Dan, to whom Mik finally confesses his love and
his painfully rejected in the act.
The young man becomes increasingly aware
that his inattentive father is not really his true progenitor; part of his
mother’s and father’s disinterest in his well-being has to do with the guilt
that for a short period of time in past the mother, Illona, had an affair with
her husband’s brother. Mik is the son of his titular uncle.
The increasing complexities of the plot
at times slow down and even drag the emotional core of Boreham’s movie. Too
often Mik is forced to pout is way through his various crises rather than actually
reveal them.
But
at the end, even after Dan has realized that his relationship with Phaedra was
a chimera and that his friendship with Mik was based on a love he cannot
return, the young man is still ready to run away from the small world in which
they are trapped. But now Mik, in his growing sense of responsibility, is not
ready to leave. He has learned, finally, who he is and realizes simultaneously
his familial duties. He becomes, in part, the son they always imaged Tomi to
have been.
As I wrote about the earlier short: “the
film provides no solution, not even an ending. The characters and we have come
to perceive the problem even if there can be no resolve. And recognizing that
problem, the tragedy of the short and brilliantly filmed work has been
revealed, its only purpose.”
One might argue, of course, that he now
is also trapped into a world of familial duties in which he will never be
happy. And there is every reason to suspect that he may never find the full gay
love he seeks. In some respects, I have to admit that I prefer the short, cryptic
version of this film, whose title more clearly characterizes its point-of-view.
Yet Szanto’s acting is so strong that one almost
overlooks the fact that the actor is on the far side of 17, some 7 years after
his appearance in Drowning. As Guardian critic Luke Buckmaster
observes:
“In
a demanding lead role, Szanto gives a brave baring-all performance,
unpredictable but acutely balanced. He holds himself so well; the contradiction
of an out of control character and an actor hitting all the right beats.”
Szanto won the award for Best Performance
in a Male Role at the 2017 Iris Prize festival. And some critics have favorably
compared this work with Anna Kokkinos’ 1998 movie about a gay Greek migrant and
his family in Head On, a film I review elsewhere in these pages.
Los
Angeles, July 1, 2026
Reprinted
from My Queer Cinema blog (July 2026).
