A movie that tells a gay man to grow up, but in a productive way.
For allt hat it is brutal, it retells the ending to Romeo and Juliet, with Romeo (our main character) living on past his dead by drugs boyfriend.
What has raised the stakes is that
Our main character dreamed up the entire scenario. The perfectness of every detail of both his love affair and his emotional closure with his parents—along with the initial framing shot of him at the typewriter—might suggest that this is all wish fulfillment, or rather, self-reflection done by the main character. The blurred line of reality is the final scene where the main character’s fantasy/introspection may have revealed prescient information: namely that his fantasized boyfriend, is dead.
This is, of course, largely beside the point.
The mechanics of the movie are fascinating, and add a sense of rhythm throughout the 106 minute runtime, but the star of the show here is the deep emotional realism explained perfectly through fantastical and often surreal scenes. Images suggest a million dynamics, always unresolved.
Take, for instance, the major feeling of discomfort. Where does it come from?
Essentially, our main character is a large adolescent. While the mechanics of the plot dare to ask us what if parents from another time got dropped into the 2020’s? the countering emotional narrative is that the main character is really the one who has been supplanted in time. He is still a child in an adult’s body as a result of his inability to heal from the death of his parents.
We see our main character in his childhood home, dressed in pajamas, putting a star on a tree, but the visual direction isn’t giving us pure wish fulfillmentMaybe in the beginning, when our main character has a purely positive outlook on his newly formed relationship with his remained-young parents (think: their ghosts).
But quickly we are shown the Black Mirror u canniness that results from this imagined, stolen time to recapitulate with his dead parents.
His mom insists that he take his shift off and we sit in the trepidation of the situation: she’s his mother, she’s his age. The Freudian tension is palpable.
But this Freudianism infiltrates his fantasy of his father too, who morphs into the boyfriend at some point.
These moments of discomfort make immediate the need for our main character to move on from his fantasy of the domestic life he lost.
He can’t literally be a child, and he doesn’t want to. He eventually learns that he has to say goodbye.
Tying up the boyfriend theme, our main character learns that his inability to move on has precluded him from living and loving, and killed another with the same loneliness to which he’s subjected himself. (The loneliness of urban life parallels my other recent fav, lost in translation. ) His boyfriend is OD’d in the bathroom apartment, their never having met the implied reason.
And though he has been punished, our main character is stronger for having let go of this boy, too. Just enough.
For a moment in the final confrontation with the ghost of the boyfriend, who has just discovered that he’s dead, the main character seems to falter, and we fear he has not learned his lesson about letting go. The narrative pull towards Romeo and Juliet also convinced me he had not yet learned, and was intending on killing himself. The bathtub being the crypt, the skyscraper builfing elevator the garden walls, over which to oe’r-leap, the ties are strong.
But in the end, we find our main character enjoy the moment, though fleeting it may be. He holds the boyfriend who says he’s scared.
“I know.”
Age is central to the film. The age gap between the main character and his boyfriend and the lack of age gap with his parents.
One sweet reading of the film sees our main character’s actions as part of lineage of gay men who have created their own communities. The film begs for the create of such communities again in a younger generation of gay men growing up During a time when the “okayness” of being gay can disincentive communal meeting as political protest. Outside of club scenes, I exist as a part of a demographic of gay men who has mostly straight friends and coworkers.
I have a wonderful boyfriend, so I’m not interacting with gay men in clubs on the weekends. I have friends. But gay friends are hard to come by. Why? I think that my demographic has decided that it’s not that important to have gay friends because we are just like anyone else, but at the same time need gay friends to share their experiences with.