By Susan Gilson
Fire – 2hrs 7mins/ Bob’s Funeral – 1hr 29 mins
There were 3.38 minutes of cinema at the end of last year that will be forever etched on my mind’s eye, reducing me to tears at the mere thought.
It was just a face staring into a fire, the camera holding its close-up gaze on the moist eyes, tear-streaked cheek and lip bitten to hold back the grief for the entirety of Sufjan Stevens’ beautiful song Visions of Gideon.
Timothee Chalamet has deservedly won an Oscar nomination for his portrayal of sensitive Italian adolescent Elio discovering the joys and ultimate heart-break of first love in the sensual and transcendent coming-of-age romance Call Me By Your Name by director Luca Guadagnino.
And in this final scene he manages to somehow convey every emotion of his intense summer-long relationship with alluringly-confident American Oliver. Oliver has just told him in a strained phone call from back home he is to be married, and it is too much for Elio to bear.
His vulnerability, after laying bare his sexuality for Oliver, very much put me in mind of another lost soul searching for answers in the crackling logs of a fire – and set me on something of a fragments of film trail.
In a pivotal scene, powerful in its simplicity, in Gus Van Sant’s cult 1990’s road movie My Own Private Idaho – loosely based on Shakespeare’s Henry IV - River Phoenix’s Mike Waters very touchingly declares his love for, and desire to kiss, his fireside friend Scott Favor, played by Keanu Reeves.
Both have been gay hustlers in the underbelly of Portland, Oregon, for a couple of years, under the wing with other waifs and strays of the Falstaff-like Bob Pigeon who has been like a father to them both.
Scott, rebellious upper middle class son of the mayor, has been slumming it, while it has provided fragile, narcoleptic Mike, who dreams of his lost mother, with a make-shift family.
Mike musters up all his courage to tell Scott: “I really want to kiss you, man,” before being gently rebuffed by his buddy who says “two men can’t love each other.” Gay sex is just a way of making easy money for Scott, and so it is for Mike, but the latter also yearns for that elusive relationship to give meaning and an anchor to his life.
What gets you everytime is the seering honesty of both Mike in Idaho and Elio in Call Me By Your Name to stay true to themselves and their sexuality, however vulnerable and rejected that makes them.
And so onto the twin funerals at the end of Idaho which is where the fragment trail ends in my chosen scene which is in turn exuberant, arresting, surprising, upsetting and uplifting, and contrasts the authenticity and the destiny of Mike and Scott, echoing that of Elio and Oliver too.
Scott has now rejoined the ranks of his well-off family, embraced respectability with a beautiful girlfriend, and sits with a sense of entitlement in expensive, sober clothes at the very formal and traditional funeral of his father.
Over the hill comes Mike and his ragamuffin crew who are making music and chanting to mourn Bob, in a boisterous, riotous, pagan gathering just metres away.
Mike, in a dreamy reverie and with a becalmed smile on his face, plucks at a yellow flower at his side, then falls off his chair as the chanting gets louder and louder, drowning out the religious readings of Scott’s ceremony.
Seemingly impassive, Scott keeps glancing over to where the tribe he used to call his own become more and more effusive, eventually dissolving into out and out disarray and raw emotion with chairs smashed and Bob’s name spat into yelling faces.
It all ends in a huge bundle of bodies piled on top of each of other in an exhausted, jubilant, emotive heap.
Moments before this though Mike makes an extraordinary gesture to the stiffly-seated Scott that seems to convey so much.
In an impish movement, reminiscent of Puck in Midsummer Night’s Dream, or other dwellers of Shakespeare’s topsy turvy worlds, he beckons theatrically to his former partner in crime, which whom he has shared so much.
It is as though he is at once putting a spell on him to push him away, or reaching out to him, to draw him close as they once were.
What is clear though that Mike, in that moment, is in control, is happy to be who he is, whatever the consequences, and however hard that may be in the future, because he is not living a lie.
And that can’t be said for Scott, who is bound now for the buttoned-up existence he was always destined for.
Or for Oliver, who may never again experience the pleasure, and pain, shown him by a brave young man, a much braver man than he will ever be.
As Bob’s funeral dies down, the camera, seemingly snatched by one of the revellers, pans jerkily upwards to a sky that promises if not heaven, the possibility of freedom, limitless potential – and hope.
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