childhood friends say goodbye
by
Douglas Messerli
Fernando
Reinaldos (screenwriter and director) Leo / 2023 [15 minutes]
This
short US film is a rather brave work, although you wouldn’t know it from either
Dekkoo, where I watched it, or from IMDb, which simply describes Leo as Kai’s
best buddy, with whom he plays basketball and decides to hide out with him in
the gym after hours to say goodbye with some nice pot before Leo goes away to
college on the West Coast, while beautiful Kai stays home flipping pancakes in
a diner.
In
some respects, the actual refusal of either description to actually name the
differences between these two young men can be seen as a rather healthy
perspective, but the film itself goes out of its way to make clear that Leo’s
love for Kai, which finally gets played out in kisses between the two, a shower
and perhaps more, is a bit different in this instance since Leo is clearly a
transgender individual whose scars from the removal of his former female breasts
are still quite visible throughout the film.
The
wonder of this little gem is that for Kai it doesn’t seem to matter, even
though it’s evident that he grew up with Leo as being a woman. That is what is
important here, not labeling Leo as transgender, but in recognizing that the
love Kai feels for him goes far beyond gender, and that despite his attempt to
hide his feelings for Leo, he ultimately reveals not only will he be sad the
next day for his absence, but that he has perhaps sexually loved him all along
as well, both as a female and a male, something that very few films have
actually shown us.
Here we finally realize a love that truly
does transcend gender, and that does hold firm despite the changes he has
obviously observed in Leo’s life as he has grown up near him. This is something
generational perhaps, or at least new in gay cinema, and it should be
applauded. Kai and Leo may not be right for one another; in fact, Kai himself
recognizes that Leo may some day become an important author while he will still
be flipping pancakes in the city (the film was shot around the Columbia
University sports center), but that does not stop them from confessing their
love before they move on.
The film is mostly talk, and structures
itself around a common trope in gay films, one of the two lovers immediately
moving on to a new world. But the theme is original and refreshing,
particularly in a time such as ours in which transgender individuals are being
so severely attempted to be again erased from our consciousness.
Los
Angeles, October 22, 2026
Reprinted
from My Queer Cinema blog (October 2026).
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