awkward love
by
Douglas Messerli
Dan
Fry (screenwriter and director) The Gay Dad / 2008 [10 minutes]
Given
what I have seen now in four films (The Gay Dad, Bruise, Dancing
Around, and My Son’s Best Mate) I might suggest that Australian
director Dan Fry has “daddy” problems, particular since this film, taken from a
feature film of the same year, 2008, title Dutch Courage, also features
other of the directors real family members, his wife, daughter, and son.
Dan Fry, playing the central figure of this
film, Paul is a married man, father of two children. Paul is having problems
and seeks out in his next door neighbors apartment, some time to think, while
the neighbor, evidently a composer, intensely plays the piano, which obviously
becomes the score of this short work.
He first actually meets his neighbor in the
elevator, introducing himself. The male neighbor, returning with his small dog
which he’s evidently been walking, greets him but carries the conversation no
further, not even proffering his name.
Back in his own apartment, Paul watches his
two children playing a video game. Their mother enters, a woman dressed in an
outfit that appears to suggest she is an airline pilot. She sends the children
momentarily from the room for a “meeting” with their father, admittedly a
rather formal term to describe her need to discuss his “child-minding.”
Paul wonders what there is to discuss,
since he is there and already “minding” his children. She will be working night
flights for the next couple of weeks, Paul joking that he will then become a
“night owl,” a comment that does not go well with her. She also wants to
discuss money matter as well.
We watch the children, on the other side of
the door, carefully listening into their conversation.
He
tells his children, when the door finally opens, that he will be seeing them in
a couple of days, clueing us in that he and his wife are actually separated and
that the so-called “child-minding” has been arranged because of her job
requirements.
The children giggle, telling him, “We love
you, you piss-head,” which suggests, as the father later comments, a term they
obviously picked up from their mother, who has just previously also described
him as pissing off.
The term, he admits, despite the humor of
it, truly repulsed him.
Immediately after, we see Paul at the door
of his neighbor, asking if he might come in, the man answering, “If you really
want to.”
Wondering about the visit, he asks, “Am I too loud?”
“No, quite the contrary. Well in the
beginning yeah, but now I kind of like it. It’s been helping me to think a
lot.”
He’s not sure that his other Doris will be
able to think a lot through the noise, however, the neighbor responding, in a
rather odd accent, “she’s deaf.”
“I would offer you something to drink, but
I don’t have any alcohol,” responds the neighbor, who obviously knows that Paul
drinks quite heavily. But suggests water is just fine.
“What makes you think I might want
alcohol?” he rightfully asks.
The neighbor has seen him come out of the
local pub, although quickly making it clear that he’s not been following him.
And now we finally catch the neighbor’s
name, Karl (Johan Venter), Paul reintroducing himself, explaining that his
“not-specific” accent is Dutch, since he is from the Netherlands.
Karl wonders if he might him to play the
piano, since he’s working on a new composition, while Paul thinks.
And so begins a quite strange relationship,
Paul quickly learning that Karl lives only with his little dog. But soon Paul
gets what might be described as “cold feet,” particularly when Karl asks if he
might be going to the pub later. There seems to be something else afoot in both
their unstated interests in each other, particularly when Paul suggests that
perhaps he might come over again tomorrow and have Karl play for him, “It
really does help me to think.”
As the two stand facing one another over
the dog at their feet, Karl suggests that this would be when a musical
interlude might be appropriate, a funny comment given that a cellist is busily
at work in providing just such an interlude for Fry’s film.
In fact, we begin to realize that this
short is really quite comic in that Paul’s excuse to get to know his neighbor is
a ruse for—just as Karl’s piano playing is an unstated attempt at—a sexual
encounter.
In the next scene he, in fact, at the pub,
considering skipping his appointment at the Dutch man’s apartment to “hear him
tinkle.” He observes that he really enjoyed hearing him play the piano, but
that he is most uncomfortable with the “awkwardness,” without realizing that
much of the awkwardness is of his own doing since he cannot yet possibly even
explain to himself what has truly prompted his visit.
Paul does visit his friend again, who
openly admits, over his tinkling of the keys, that he couldn’t even sleep for
imagining his next visit and he imagined the two lying in bed together
listening to music and touching each other, needing each other—only his words
are spoken entirely in Dutch, and Paul obviously has no clue of what he’s
saying.
In the next scene Paul is back in his own
apartment watching his two children once more playing video games. And finally,
back in the pub Paul admits that he hasn’t yet been able to comprehend what
went wrong with his relationship with his wife Ashley, while simultaneously
admitting that their separation is related to his feelings, and that he knows
what the “feelings” are about because he’s had them before.
When Paul returns yet again to visit Karl,
his neighbor responds that he’s glad he came, fearful that he might be in the
pub all day. Obviously, things have come to a head at home, Paul having
admitted to his wife that he needed time to think. But here, in the now, Karl
touches his new friend’s had, explaining that in Holland people are quite
tactile. “We are not scared to show passion between people, not even between
men.”
Paul finds that it’s getting warm in the
room, but Karl reminds him that it’s autumn, and at that moment the neighbor
half stands and plants a kiss of Paul’s lips.
Ashley tells her husband, in the next
frame, that she has known for quite a while, she arguing that he will be okay.
In the film’s final scene, we finally get
the gay dad’s confession as he lays in bed with the Dutchman hovering lovingly
over him: “I tried this many, many years ago, but I couldn’t go through with
it. And then I got married and had the kids just to obliterate any unwanted
feelings that might pop up. And lo and behold they did again. And now I’ll
probably fuck their lives up.”
Karl responds, “But they love you, don’t
they? They’ll understand when they are bigger. They just want you in their
life. That’s all a child wants.”
The neighbor, now Paul’s lover, suggests,
as if it might be a stage cue, “You can laugh now.”
Paul turns to the camera, and for the
first time instead of the frown of contemplation on his face, only slightly
smiles.
I’m not sure that the children will be able
to later assimilate such an alteration in their father’s love life; but perhaps
with the openness of their mother and her blessings for his husband’s future
they will grow up to be able to embrace and understand the sexual differences
among people. Certainly we’ve seen the pain that such forced marriages have
resulted in, the subject of several films. Fry’s film at least gives us new
hope that a youthful mistake by a man unable to accept his sexuality does not always
end in a disaster.
Now if only Fry could move his camera a
bit further back from the intense closeups he enjoys, resist pushing his
figures at the very edges of the fame, maybe find another actor other than
himself to play his central characters, and change the color settings so
something richer than his usual beiges and browns, we might have a truly
excellent film in the can.
Los
Angeles, September 7, 2025
Reprinted
from My Queer Cinema blog (September 2025).
