DISCREET

US, 2017, 81 minutes, Colour.
Jonny Mars, Atsuko Okatsuka, Joy Cunningham, Jordan Elsass, Bob Swaffer.
Directed by Travis Matthews.

Travis Matthews has been making films, especially experimental films, since 2000. He has a particular interest in male sexuality and themes of homosexuality.

This is a narrative, albeit in a non-continuous style, separate episodes, discrete episodes, which means that the audience have to be particularly attentive all the time and to extract the main thrust of the story.

The film has a reverberating soundtrack, often difficult to interpret, but bearing on the mood and atmosphere of the film.

As a framework, a woman appears who is running a video service helping people with meaning in life. She recurs throughout the film, inviting people to watch her videos – but the protagonist of the film, Alex (Jonny Mars) also wants to make videos and keeps phoning her to make an appointment, almost stalking her verbally, with the result that she cuts him off completely.

His videos seem to be concerned with male sexuality and there are a couple of comparatively explicit scenes again throughout the film.

The main character is called Alex, and we see him with a woman, discussing his life, his separation from her, her background of drinking and her trying to reform. She is very supportive of him.

We also see him going to a farm, and he is challenged by an older man who was accompanying a very, very tall man with a white beard and a shaking hand who cannot speak and is being led in his walk. Alex claims to be his grandson. As the film progresses and Alex moves in with the old man, even hiring a young man to help him look after him, the audience becomes suspicious about the relationship, the antagonism and Alex’s concern and care, for example eating, dressing, washing.

What also emerges is that the man had abused Alex as a child and he is building up to revenge – which eventually happens, leading the old man down to the river, and the audience just hearing gunshots, not seeing them.

Audiences will have to persevere, some relishing all the detail and the episodes about the videos, others mystified as to what was happening and where it was leading – but it all comes together in the end.