out of time
by
Douglas Messerli
Richard
Bloom (screenplay), Stewart Hendler (director) The Closet / 2008 [4 minutes]
In
this very short film, an older man (Jay Edwards) walks down the street with a
cane. His shoelace has suddenly become untied. On the other side of a high
hedge of trees a young boy (Andy Scott Harris) is playing with a small ball
which suddenly comes flying over the hedge.
The
man looks down upon the ball, reminding him of his childhood when he threw back
just such a ball for another young boy (Dalton O’Dell), whom he later visits
through his window. The two become fast friends, and for a few frames we see
the relation between the two quickly becoming something close to young love,
each time the boys entering through the window but leaving through the door.
But
one day, suddenly, the door becomes a closet, obviously the father (James Bolt)
of the boy from the 1940s, having sense his child’s relationship with the other
boy, having closing off the access between the two young innocents.
For a moment, it is more than a sigh of
loss and recognition of something that might have led to a relationship, but a
regret for how the world since has treated him. There he stands, still shoes
untied, not sure he can go forward without regret. His own age has removed him
from queer love, and now stands along simply as an old man with the Beckett
like dilemma, “I can’t go on/I must go on.”
Suddenly out of nowhere a beautiful young female child appears, Hope
(Chloe Bookmyer), bending down to tie his shoe. A minute later we see her
father appear, and behind him her second father, the two men obviously being
from a queer household, encouraging her to walk on with them.
In some senses, the last scene makes the
story even sadder since we know the old man has lost out on those possibilities
simply because of when he was born. Yet, obviously, this film does declare that
things have changed. There is indeed new hope for gay men and women, which this
couple and their daughter reveal.
This little film is so light and fragile
that it threatens to blow away at the slightest attempt to read in more than it
simply makes obvious. Yet, in its simplicity it expresses one of the most
complex and deepest of issues: how do gay men and women rectify that past. Some
of us cannot experience what so many younger queer individuals of our
generation can now enjoy. Perhaps we can only thank the heavens that if we came
of age in the 1940s, we did not have to suffer AIDS, we did not have to see our
friends die in order for us to survive. But there is still a sadness there, a
kind of saudade for a past that slipped through the hands in order to
survive.
Los
Angeles, November 10, 2026
Reprinted
from My Queer Cinema blog (November 2026)
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