a world somewhere else
by
Douglas Messerli
Joey
Kuhn and Grainne O'Hara Belluomo (writers), Joey Kuhn (director) Those People / 2015
Unfortunately, what Kuhn replaces the sexual
element with a focus on wealth. The young Charlie (Jonathan Gordon), a
not-very-convincing artist, who mostly paints portraits, pines for his fellow
boarding-school rich-boy friend Sebastian (Jason Ralph), a character who
quickly comes to be perceived as a kind of stand-in for the scandalous Bernie
Madoff, whose son, Mark, committed
suicide 2 years after his father’s arrest for defrauding thousands of
Americans.
Fortunately, or unfortunately—depending
on how one ultimately interprets this movie—Charlie also encounters, on his desultory
travels through New York’s bars with Sebastian, an older piano player, Tim
(Haaz Sleiman), a Lebanese man, who might at first appear simply as a part-time
player, but whom we later discover is also a concert pianist of some note. The
two hit it off immediately, the younger painter quickly bonding with the elder.
When the two finally do couple, if only for a short while, we know immediately
that Tim is the right man to lead Charlie into the new life he deserves.
But, of course, youth never can quite
comprehend what they need to do, and as Kuhn demonstrates, there are always
endless twists and turns as this younger man attempts to sort out his feelings
for Sebastian in relationship for the far more sophisticated and culturally separated
Tim.
I do wish Kuhn’s film had more fully
explored these vast distances between the obviously privileged Charlie, his
friend Sebastian, and the far more talented pianist, but the director seems
locked into his pattern of outsider desire. For Charlie, even if he has found
his way into the world of wealth, is still an outsider; and so too is
Sebastian, now detested by everyone around him for his father’s sins.
Strangely, the true outsider, Tim, seems more at home in his chosen world, having
obviously made his way from a bar-room pianist to a concert-one. The privileged
are, at least in Kuhn’s terms, the truly disadvantaged, without truly realizing
it.
Even if Charlie is somehow, rather
unconvincingly able to talk this version of Madoff’s son out of committing
suicide, we finally realize if the young man is to survive, he must leave his
desires for wealth, beauty, and grandiose comforts for something else,
something foreign even to his life. He does toast goodbye to Sebastian, but we
can’t yet be sure, at film’s end, whether he can reconnoiter with Tim, who has
now moved on to a position as the pianist for the San Francisco Symphony.
Only the film’s title suggests that he
might be able to now join the human race against “those people.” Yet we can
never know certainly who those people are, the ones on the outside or the ones
within, for Tim has now also entered the world of privilege, and if Charlie
rejoins his friend he will also enter that world. It appears that in Kuhn’s
vision the people of whom he speaks are always somewhere else from where he or
we are.
Los Angeles, January
13, 2019
Reprinted
from World Cinema Review (January
2019).
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