Alexandra Seal | Wait it Out / 2018

marked for life

by Douglas Messerli

 

Armistead Johnson and Alexandra Seal (screenplay), Alexandra Seal (director) Wait it Out / 2018

[19 minutes]

 

Matt, a freshman in high school (a rather unbelievable Armistead Johnson, given his age when this film was made), with the word “Fag” inked on his forehead, is seeking advice his high school drama teacher (Mark Sam Rosenthal), who, although he thoroughly sympathizes with the boy—after all, he admits that he too is gay—suggests that his abuser will not be returning back for the next year, and advises Matt to simply “wait it out,” advice for a freshman that is nearly impossible to hear.

     Flash to NYC a few years later. Matt, now dressed in a suit, sits in the office of his quite obnoxious publisher, who hands him a copy of his newly printed book, Wait It Out, declaring that it will certainly become one of the best sellers of the year, although she is simply unable to take any time out to listen to his promotional suggestions.

     He returns home to find his female apartment sharer being fucked by a true lug-head of a body builder, who, when Matt, wonders what she has eaten that day (a protein shake, which he scolds her for, tossing out a package of almonds for her to eat), proclaims of a new diet, the fasting diet, in which, he explains, you don’t eat anything, and amazingly the fat just melts away.

     The reactions from high school students are phenomenal, so his publisher proclaims, but they don’t actually convert yet into actual sales; she has hooked him out with interviews to establish who he now is since he as long-ago bullied high school. Given what we have already seen, this does not seem to be a very good idea, since Matt has not apparently advanced in his life excepting by being fixated on his high school bullying.

     When she asks what he actually does every day, he replies that he goes to the gym, updates his social media where he claims over 4,000 Facebook friends (not possible, since Facebook closes it after 4,000). He is not in a relationship; he has no personal friends. So we see immediately that this will be a serious problem.

      Even when his roommate, entering a date site, attempts to hook him up with someone, our awkward hero can’t tolerate any of the offerings. He might as well be asexual. All he has worked for is utterly meaningless in his own life.

       She finally sets up a blind date with one of her trainers, Brad (Dave Coleman), a total stud. I would have fallen immediately into his lap upon seeing him at that age. They do meet up at a Mexican restaurant whose food doesn’t seem to please either of them. But there is a rapport, and Max suggests they go off to get a coffee and start everything over again. He is read to pay, but Brad insists, handing him his credit card, where suddenly Matt discovers that his fell name is Bradley Stern, the same boy from his Overlook High School childhood who had so bullied him.

    Suddenly Matt grows outraged, suspecting it is all some kind of sick joke, not even possibly perceiving the possibility that this man, now gay, has changed, since Matt, in fact, has never grown an iota, no changed from the moment he was bullied in his freshman year.

      To the equally now furious roommate who has hooked Matt up, Brad argues that he didn’t, in fact, even recognize him, insisting that in high school was a jerk, but now is a very different person. She explains where he lunches every noon, and arranges a meeting.

      Meanwhile, Matt has even grown paranoid, imagining that the has met up with him because of reading his book and recognizing his changed character name.

      When finally, Brad comes to apologize, he can’t even believe that Brad is now gay, and when he asks if the question, a co-worker—describes him (Matt) as bully—Matt still defending his position as an “anti-bully.” But since he has never allowed change in his life, he is, in fact, the new bully in town, insisting upon a traumatic past that he long ago should have overcome. If we haven’t before, we now become completely unsympathetic with our “so called” traumatized high school boy who has never grown up. And the film, accordingly, loses any weak appeal it might have previously pleaded. I have to admit, I’d long before lost all interest in what is basically a weak TV comedy routine in the manner of Will and Grace, never one of my favorites.

     Brad attempts to explain that he came out in college. But doesn’t at all have any meaning for Matt who believes that Brad obviously does not know the “gay” community, as it he were suddenly their major spokesperson. He rushes off.

     He turns back, adding, “I mean we’re a living and open community that embraces everyone, but not you?” If there was ever an example of bigotry, Matt has capsulized it in a few seconds.

     This time Matt storms home to discover his roommate in bed with yet another man, Reynolds (. Somehow he can assimilate the very worst of heterosexual society, without ever being able to embrace another gay man.

     When he explains what happens, Reynolds suggests that what Brad did took courage, showed “balls,” but Matt cannot imagine such a response so self-infatuated he still is with his high school struggles. By this time, I was simply ready to turn off this ill-conceived comic confection.

      Reynolds finally admits that what Matt has done has nothing to do with understanding. His reaction, as he points out, is pure anger. Together both his friend and Matt mock her boyfriend. Who asks a question: “So you had this guy apologize to you for something that happened years and years ago, and you had the nerve to not accept the apology?” Reynolds repeats, as he moves off in disgust, “Who’s the bully now?”

     Finally realizing what he has been doing, Matt reapproaches Brad, apologizing this time for his own behavior. Brad argues that he accepts it, with one condition, that he go out with him on a second date.

     Sorry, I can’t quite believe Matt’s confession nor Brad’s continued interest in the fucked-up man. But then, this glib film advertises itself as a romantic comedy, and like the stick on treatments of the censored days, it cannot resist going into fully unbelievable territory. Do I see Matt and Brad as having any future, definitely not. Matt was a loser in high school and remains one as a pretend adult. Brad has moved on. If your strategy is simply to “wait it out,” you may find yourself never again experiencing the world around you.

 

Los Angeles, September 14, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (September 2026).

 

Michaël Dacheux | L'amour debout (Love Blooms) / 2018

discoveries about the self

by Douglas Messerli

 

Isabelle Bourdon, Michaël Dacheux, and Emmanuelle Jacob (screenplay) Michaël Dacheux (director) L'amour debout (Love Blooms) / 2018

 

There are have been far too few and generally dismissive reviews of the 2018 French film, which I, watching it again the other night, quite enjoyed.

     Most certainly, the plot of the feature film from the very beginning is basically about rejection. Martin (Paul Debreil) has moved to Paris from his native Toulouse to attempt to reestablish a relationship with his childhood sweetheart, Léa (Adèle Csech), who has evidently proceeded him from their provincial home to Paris several months or even years before he sheepishly turns up in search of something he imagines might still be there.

     But, in the meantime, she has become an informed tour guide, beginning in the first scene with what a found as a rather fatuous reports on the former Paris market place, Les Halles, tragically closed in 1973, now turned into a shopping and cultural center whose several architectural monstrosities she praises. To give her credit, however, she later takes a group of far more interesting tourists to see the various homes in which Paul Verlaine lived before meeting Arthur Rimbaud.

     The tour is a long one, and when she finally finishes, she attempts to explain to the still naïve boy that she has found a new life in Paris, and, despite their former love, has longer has any room in her heart for their childhood friendship.

    Fortunately, Martin has his brother and sister-in-law who are even willing to put him up in his own room. But with two children, a noisy and busy house, it is not the kind of place this true cinephile, who back in Toulouse sponsored a film series of his most beloved films which few students bothered to attend, might find peace, let along even imagine how he might proceed in making his own movie. He attempts to get a room in a cheap hotel, but finds so sympathy there either, who suggest that he get an apartment.

     Yet, he has no money. Fortunately, as he leaves the hotel he runs into another former student from Toulouse, Tristan ((Thibaut Destouches), a young and eager, also very handsome, now PhD student of science, who quickly invites him to share his small apartment, offering first the couch, but finally luring him to share his own bed. If this hints of sexual delights, drop your hopes for such a situation, since the sleep-walking young man, is still a virgin and seems to be fairly asexual, long before such an identification was ever discussed. Based on Freudian theory, where he argued that sleepwalking attempts to fulfill unconscious wishes, mostly, he argue, an “effort to return to a safe, comforting place from childhood,” modern psychoanalytic theory often describes it as the primitive urges of the Id and the restrictions of the Superego.

   As I childhood sleepwalker, who once donned my winter coat and attempted to return to the cold out-door weather of Iowa, I would argue it was, for me, mostly an attempt of escape from the normality of my life. Although I always returned to my bed, I was desperately trying to explain to myself that I needed to move off and away. It finally leaped in my conscious mind, and I did precisely that, insisting my father send me away to another country during my senior year of high school. I never came back as the same person who left, and I think to his last dying day, my father believes it was the result of my political, religious, and sexual rebellions. I would imagine that Tristian also was attempting to enter a world of which he was terrified, since he had for so long immersed himself in scientific thought. Even he admits that he admired Martin, when he was a younger student, for his resolve and tenacity of show films that no one seemed to wanted to watch.

     One of the most painful moments of this film is when Martin hears that his bedmate is a virgin, he sees it was an almost saintly condition, something with which Tristan can die in bliss. I think this is simple bullshit. To not have been able to put the body into living the experience sexual activity is almost unimaginable, something like abandoning one the most delightful pleasures and meaningful activities of one’s life. Virgin’s are not saints; they are the most failed of human beings, I argue.

    But then Martin is confused about his own life, soon after beginning to realize that he is also attracted to men, and admitting to his bedmate that he has had same-sex relationships in the past, while trying to reassure him that he has no intentions of attempting any sexual activity with him.

      He does begin a workshop, with his brother’s help, on explaining to students how they might curate, as he had, a film series. But they cannot even imagine why they should want to do that, and why he is requiring such an arduous task of watching so many movies. Film theorist Jalal Toufic (whose first book I published), once described to me just such a rebellion of his students at San Francisco State University.

     It takes the interruption and explanation of their current teacher to try to make one particularly stubborn student why understanding why and how they the love some films more than others is crucial if you are all interested in movies. In short, film-going is not a passive activity. But the teacher’s actions, once more leaves Martin without any ability to explain his own reasons and methods.

    The teacher, however, has important connections with the French film world, even revealing that he personally knows one of Martin’s most beloved actresses, Françoise Lebrun, to whom he is soon introduced after a special showing of her major film at the Cinémathèque française, also meeting her next-door apartment dweller, Bastien (Samuel Fasse), with whom he almost immediately falls in love.

   Yet upon their first sexual get-together, Martin rushes away without consummating the sexual act, too confused still about his sexuality.

     Similarly, on one of her tours, Léa encounters a somewhat older avant-garde composer Jérôme (Pascal Cervo) who lives on a barge. She visits him, but also moves away after a kiss, not sure she wants to more forward because of the age difference.

      Both, determined now to stay in Paris, seems strangely out of sync with the residents of the “City of amour.”

      Françoise, however, goes shopping for a new couch, suggesting Bastien will help her carry in upstairs to her apartment, with the help of the volunteer Martin.

      The two men struggle with the couch, finally delivering it up to her apartment, both collapsing in Bastien’s nest door apartment, and soon after joining one another for sex, Martin obviously having come to terms with his sexuality.

     Léa, moreover, decides to continue with her relationship with Jérôme, who ultimately hosts a barge party for a Parisian celebration, replete with fireworks, Léa inviting Martin and his friends Bastien and Tristan. It appears at the party that Tristan hits it off with Léa’s roommate who works as an airline stewardess, so perhaps he will not have to suffer the curse of sainthood after all.

      Jérôme finishes his choral symphony, in which Léa now performs, inviting Martin to the performance. The two meet cordially and pleasantly afterwards, both having moved on in lives with acceptance of love and worlds outside of their childhood infatuation.

     This movie is also nicely punctuated with beautiful music by Schumann and Ravel throughout.

      Love Blooms is most certainly not a showy film, and it suffers, as do its characters, from all shorts of unsurety and fears for the future. But it is truly a beautiful and hopeful film, reminding us all again how we must abandon our notions, at times, we acquired in the past and boldly move forward into new love and perhaps even different sexuality. Why this lovely 2018 film has been so critically ignored is truly inexplicable.

 

Los Angeles, September 14, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (September 2026).