best
mates
by Douglas Messerli
Robert Lambert (screenwriter and director) Follow You Follow Me / 1979
It’s fascinating to think of the British half hour short by Robert Lambert, Follow You Follow Me of 1979 as an unintentional prequel to Roger Tonge’s 1987 BBC educational film Two of Us. Lambert also worked on educational films for Southampton, and both films feature young teenage boys coming of age who, feeling closely bonded, determine to strike out on their own, turning their backs on the restrictions of their families and society. Both also are concerned with larger social issues, Lambert’s film featuring a battle between a factory owner and a strike leader, fathers to the two boys; Tonge’s film was a response to the restrictions on the expression of homosexuality by the Thatcher government (for a fuller explanation of this, see my discussion of Tonge’s significant work).
Yet, Lambert’s work remains somewhat tepid
when compared with Tonge’s simply because the two boys of Follow You Follow
Me, although defining themselves several times as “best mates” have not
even begun to explore their sexuality, while the boys in Tonge’s film, although
at times confused about their sexual identities, are clearly in love with one
another and see their “on the road” journey as a kind of “marriage.”
Lambert’s boys, Joseph (Francis Gibbon)
and Peter (Stephen Bratt) get no further than the next town before they are
forced to give up their journey, and they end up, after a brief train ride, in
the very city, Southampton, where Joseph’s family are moving. The boy’s may
remain friends over time—although even that’s uncertain given their societal
and spatial separations—but it is highly unlikely that they will ever explore
their sexual identities, with the likelihood that Peter, in particular, will
fall in with one of the girls with whom he practices kissing, get married, and lose
contact with the shyer, more innocent, and possibly sexually confused Joseph.
Any speculation, however, is pure fiction
that lies outside of the verisimilitude of Lambert’s drearily mostly brown-, pea-green-,
and rust-hued color film. Perhaps in Southampton Joseph will meet another
young boy and return to the far more exciting and eccentric road trip that
Tonge’s work features.
Yet, there is something almost daring about
Lambert’s attempt to play out the tropes of a gay coming of age movie against
the backdrop of the growing division between worker and management being played
in the small town of Hythe.
Joseph’s father (Gilbert Wynne), the
owner of J. Cook & Co., is having financial difficulties and is in danger
of losing his factory which hires 80 local workers. He’s even put up his family
home as collateral, and is now in danger of losing everything unless he lays
off half of his employees or sells the business. Peter’s father (Kevin Moore),
on the other hand, is the local union leader, heading the picket lines
demanding remuneration for the 40 soon-to-be furloughed employees. It’s no
wonder, accordingly, that neither father approves of their son’s relationship
with the other boy, while their wives beg them to leave their children alone.
But in keeping the boys uninformed, their sons come in danger of being swept up
in the larger local political upheavals.
The two go everywhere together, each
night joining up, sometimes just to hang out in Peter’s room talking while Peter
toys with his childhood soldiers and Joseph pages through a copy of Mayfair magazine
his friend has found while cleaning out his father’s shed. Together the boys
attend a teen dance, where Peter gregariously dances with a girl while Joseph
sits it out like a wallflower. Yet all during his encounters with girls, Peter
looks over at Joseph and smiles with affection. One has the feeling that he is
exploring the opposite sex out of a sense of duty more than any intense desire.
And when he finally encourages another girl to pay attention to Joseph the two
sneak out for kissing practice which Joseph miserably fails, the girl
responding that he is “slow,” both girls moving away in disappointment with
their male companions.
At another point they consider purchasing what we called at their age a “girlie” magazine, but when Peter considers “nicking” it, Joseph disapproves, and they leave the store without the item that brought them in.
Yet again Joseph displays the differences
in their upbringing when, after someone at school has described him as a “wanker,”
he asks Peter what the word means. Obviously, he is a “wanker,” a male who
masturbates instead of having sex with women, another way of suggesting he
might be queer.
And those very differences, Joseph’s
polite and sheltered upbringing as opposed to Joseph’s working class,
streetwise learning, lead to violent expression given the labor issues facing
the community. Joseph is grabbed by several of his classmates while his best
friend punches him in the stomach.
Obviously, such actions inevitably result in a severance of their friendship. Joseph is sent away to a far more posh school in Southampton—as he later tells Peter he must take courses in “Latin and other things”—and the two are no longer able to “hang out” together. Soon after, his father announces that the family, now that he has sold the factory, will be moving to Southampton. Heartbroken,Joseph steals away from school taking the Hythe ferry back to his hometown to wander the streets and finally to encounter his old friend. At first he runs away from him in partial fear that he will mock his new school uniform, but also still unsure of Peter’s feelings toward him. “When you hit me,” he finally asks, “did you really mean it?”
peter: They made me
do. They hit me as well.
joseph: Why?
peter: Because
I’m mates with you.
joseph: We’re
still mates?
peter: Best mates.
And, finally, on the day the family is
scheduled to make the move, we see Joseph lying in bed, a tear running down his
cheek. He suddenly rises, packs his duffel and grabs his skateboard, knocking
at Peter’s bedroom window to say goodbye. As the two briefly talk, he suddenly
comes alive in way we’ve not previously seen this “follower” behave. “Let’s clear
out. We’ll make our own decisions for a change.”
So begins their brief adventure which, as
I state above, ends nowhere. Unlike Phil and Matthew in The Two of Us
Joseph and Peter never make to Sussex—but then they live in the neighboring
county of Hampshire in sea-side cities. What would Seaford mean to them? These
two never truly leave home and probably will never escape their societal
designated identities that thoroughly delimits the definition of “best mates.”
Los Angeles, March 14, 2021
Reprinted from My
Queer Cinema blog and World Cinema Review (March 2021).
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