a short film by Daniel Falcone 2005 | 19 mins | US ›› Night Swimming the diverging sexual identities of two best friends In their last summer before college, best friends Otter and Darby head off to New York City to see their favourite band The Lunachicks perform, that is if Darby and girlfriend Amber can be separated from each other, overt displays of love that Otter is not comfortable with - but why? Well in this well-executed work we are about to find out, given a short cut of the disastrous kind sees their car breakdown, forcing the boys to spend the night together in the middle of the woods and along the way, engage in a spot of naked night swimming that soon has Darby questioning how come Otter's been eyeing up his girl. Sensing that it's not Amber his best friend has taken a fancy to, Darby responses by extending the hand of friendship to Otter - in the downward direction! Only as dawn breaks, can the events of the night before, be easily forgotten in the light of the morning after? Yes you're guessed it. For this is yet another outing on the theme of falling in love with your straight best friend. True we have seen this scenario before and here cue the titles Forgive & Forget, Krámpack and the festival favourite that was Summer Storm, to name but three. But that said, this short still manages to push all the right buttons in depicting adolescent sexual awakening and if anything, sexual experimentation. Only like all too many shorts, it suffers the fate of a rushed ending, hereby having to sum up the consequences of homosexual desire within minutes after the act cinematically took place. That said and with a spoiler warning in place, here writer and director Daniel Falcone embeds his Columbia Graduate Film School piece with a series of directorial clues as to the outcome of the pair and put it this way, with the soundtrack featuring The Lunachicks 'Don't Want You,' it doesn't take Hercule Poirot to figure out whether this relationship has a future or not. Then again and with natural performances from leads Bobby Steggert as Otter and Damon Cardasis as Darby, this is, in effect, the tale of diverging sexual identities, one that is all the more meaningful given it is based on the directors' own coming out experience. Delightful in its own way, even if it walks on all too familiar ground. screened as part of the 20th London Lesbian & Gay Film Festival 2006 available on DVD as part of the Wolfe Video catalogue - 'Boy Crush' release starring: Bobby Steggert, Damon Cardasis, Rachel Frances Shaw, Matt Walker Copyright 2008 David Hall - www.gaycelluloid.com. archive reference #080 ›› previous page | back to top | print me ‹‹