by Alex Vargas
If there is any double feature designed on purpose for each other, it’s the short film Call Your Father and the feature Weekend, which are two different sides of a similar world, the gay life. Each brilliantly expresses to me something I feel lots of new queer media sometimes forget to shine lights on or don’t seem to be able to show at all, that being the intimacy and chemistry between the leads and showing the pleasures of one another. One thing both Andrew Haigh (director of Weekend) and Jordan Firstman (director of Call your Father) understand as believe it or not– gay directors telling gay stories is that sex and intimacy should not be excluded, nor should it make the actors uncomfortable. Jordan utilizes this by starting as one of the leads and having his co-star be friends with benefits, making the intimate scene much more believable and comfortable for both parties.
For Haigh, the signs of intimacy contrast significantly with what the film focuses on: the loneliness and mundanity of these characters, specifically Russell, the somewhat closeted one in the movie; Haigh forces us to sit through his job life, co-worker buddies and way home to show the subtleties of not just loneliness but isolation from a heteronormative world. On the subway, we hear passengers saying homophobic things to another passenger; his co-worker’s friends openly talk about hetero sex and girlfriends, asking Russell if he has one. There is something darker to the story that isn’t fully spelled for viewers to spot as “homophobia.” It is more in-grained and cynical. A barrier that is put between the two characters’ lives is as deeply heartbreaking as it is lovely.
Haigh, similar to Firtman, also comments on a lot of different gay archetypes in real life and questions them head-on; for Firstman, it is the loud, young, and dumb kid who holds sardonic humor and disregards human empathy and the Daddy archetype who thinks he is wiser and better than the other. Haigh chooses to interrogate the closeted gay man and the open and proud one who is deep in the gay hookup culture.
Both, I feel, give beautiful takes and refreshing insights on a gay culture that I can say not many films I’ve seen done in the past ten years. From frequent amounts of queerbaiting and puritanism, it feels like much cinema recently has forgotten the stories of queer experiences, unless you count Bros (2021) and Saltburn (2023) as part of that discussion… which…..
OH, WAIT, these directors have made works recently, which you should watch!
Rotting in the Sun is co-written, stars Jordan Firstman, and is streaming on Mubi! It is a crazy, fun comedy of errors, and All of Us Strangers, directed by Haigh, is now playing at the Del Mar!
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