Boy

A young man reaches out for connection and the human touch, but when faced with the reality of his decisions and his desires, he finds that the truth of the situation is not as easy as the longing for it.

Danny (O’Kelly) is looking for someone to hook up with. Or at least he thinks he is. He’s young and fairly new to the dating game, especially the swiping and fast-talking kind that dominates mobile phone culture and the rest of gen-z society, and he’s taking the first tentative steps into a new world of connection and instant gratification. He’s found someone on an app and has invited them over to his gaff; well, the place that he’s housesitting in for a couple of weeks, anyway.

In amongst the stuffy hallways and the creepy busts littering the windowsills, Danny waits silently until the doorbell rings. At the door is Mark (Kleinman), a thirty-something gentleman in shirt and tie, with a gloriously furry beard on his face. The tension is immediately awkward and Danny almost forgets to invite Mark in, but soon they’re at the dining room table, sipping wine, and getting to know each other. Mark is obviously the more dominant of the two, and every question, look, pause, and picking up of the glass, is charged with electricity as he probes Danny’s need for companionship. The power dynamic only reaches one way as they figure each other out and Danny realises that he’s being sized up like a prize calf, slotted into a very defined box, and gently led to the deflowering of his virginity.

There is a lot of heightened tension in directors/producers, Ben and Ruth Rusnak’s thirteen-minute short, Boy. For the time we are with the two main characters much is said in the spaces between them, and more is revealed about their place in the relationship and dynamic by their body language and subtle gestures than is ever said by their words. The atmosphere is charged with sexuality, and with power, and every inch of it escapes through the screen thanks to the main performances from the two actors. The direction and cinematography keep things cool and distant in the background, while filling the close-up scenes with light, colour and connection, really drawing the viewer into the very confined, homely, but slightly dangerous situation.

The music from Umberto Guadino and Aleksandra Vilcinska also adds to this tension, scraping strings and hitting percussion at off-kilter moments to keep us off-balance as the two men jostle and settle into their positions. There is a strange fear of dread that leaks from the screen, mostly from Danny, and it feeds into the themes and undercurrents of what Boy is communicating to us, as well as the rounding out of the story.

For a film that is so short, Boy expresses everything it sets out to, and does it with style, flair and integrity, with everything feeling real in the situation we are witnessing in front of us. For an uncomfortable thirteen-minutes we are given an insight into the repressed emotions and difficult situations that so many queer and homosexual dating partners find themselves in. There are many statements to be made by writer Ben Rusnak, but they are filed away in the dialogue, the narrative, and the character play, so well that we see them as natural expressions and dynamics on screen. The visual language really describes the emotions at play and the story eschews an exploitative approach for a much subtler, more real sharing to happen.

Boy doesn’t mince its words or its message, and hits right at home to the foundations that underpin a lot of the ways queer relationships develop, sharing its voice with us to help us better understand some things that might never change, nor be spoken about in public truthfully.