Eliza Hittman (2017)
The teenage protagonist Frankie (Harris Dickinson) lives in Brooklyn with his mother Donna (Kate Hodge), terminally ill father Joe (Neal Huff) and younger sister Carla (Nicole Flyus). It’s summertime and Frankie spends his days on the Coney Island boardwalk, doing nothing much with other ‘beach rats’ – lads of his own age. He spends his nights in internet gay chat rooms, a part of his life that he hides from his family and friends and, in some ways, even from himself. Frankie wants men he meets online to bare all physically, while keeping himself literally in the shadows: more than one of his chat-room interlocutors asks to get a better look of Frankie’s face. Even when he starts having actual sex, he’s equivocal about it. ‘I don’t think of myself as gay’, he tells Jeremy (Harrison Sheehan), a young man whom he meets first on his computer screen then in the real world. ‘But you have sex with men’, is Jeremy’s pleasant, puzzled reply.
Beach Rats is the writer-director Eliza Hittman’s second feature (following It Felt Like Love (2013)). I gathered from the little I read about the film before deciding to see it that Frankie had a working-class background and a homophobic family and social environment – both of which suggested a potentially interesting contrast with Call Me by Your Name. Frankie’s struggle with his sexuality – a struggle that remains unresolved at the end of the film – is absorbing but its context is maddeningly unclear. The beach rats are presumably jobless and expect to remain so – but if anything is said or shown to clarify this, I missed it. Frankie tries, very uncertainly, to develop a relationship with Simone (Madeline Weinstein): does he know from experience this is bound to founder or is Simone (who does have a job, in a boardwalk shop) his first girlfriend? Although Frankie is anxious not to give himself away to his macho pals Alexei (David Ivanov), Jesse (Anton Selyaninov) and Nick (Frank Hakaj), their lives, unlike his, appear to be entirely homosocial. The closest any of them gets to girls is ogling them during a Coney Island fireworks display. I wasn’t sure if a couple of meaningful looks that the runtish Jesse gives Frankie later on were meant to imply that this boy too was secretly gay – they could equally have been saying that Jesse has sussed Frankie out.
Eliza Hittman’s lack of explanation can be intriguing. Frankie’s chat room preference is for older men rather than contemporaries. It’s after his father’s death that he translates that preference into sex in the outside world. There’s obviously a self-protective rationale for choosing older partners (Jeremy is younger than the others) because they’re unlikely to intersect with Frankie’s social life. (Or so he thinks: one of the film’s strongest moments is when, having had sex at a motel with a fortyish-looking man (Erik Potempa), Frankie meets him again – serving behind a bar where he and the other beach rats are drinking.) Even so, it’s hard to ignore hints that Frankie’s feelings about his father are particularly complicated. Carla delivers a eulogy at Joe’s funeral and Donna encourages Frankie to do likewise – to ‘speak from the heart’ – but he can’t. The reticence obviously chimes with his repressed sexuality. Does it mean something more?
Early on, Frankie gets hold of extra supplies of Joe’s pain medication to alleviate his own tensions and to feed his friends’ drug habit. He later lets them know that he has online gay sex – pretending to be gay – to get weed for himself, Alexei, Jesse and Nick. Hittman dramatises effectively Frankie’s increasingly precarious situation with his buddies and the homophobic measures he feels forced into so as to avoid being found out by them. There’s occasionally a sharply surprising insight: Frankie tests the water with Simone by asking what she feels about same-sex relationships and she replies that ‘Two girls can make out and it’s hot; when two guys make out, it’s just gay’. Hittman does well to suggest that Frankie is not just in denial about his sexual orientation but screwed up enough to be averse to any kind of close personal connection. When he brings Simone home and his mother asks questions, he tells her, ‘She’s not my girlfriend’. Later, Donna tells him to get ‘your friends’ – the rat pack, that is – out of the house. ‘They’re not my friends’, grumbles Frankie.
The main strength of Beach Rats is also its main problem. As Frankie, Harris Dickinson (who’s English) holds the camera – and the movie together. Hannah McGill, in her characteristically perceptive and balanced review in Sight & Sound (December 2017), describes the performance well:
‘Through Dickinson’s subtle flickers of expression, we observe the struggle between conformism and integrity that rages under Frankie’s surface cool: his joy at being accepted, either by a fly-by-night cruising companion or by his thuggish heterosexual friend group; and his raw fear of having his secret exposed.’
Yet Dickinson’s looks make Frankie incongruous in the company of Alexei, Jesse and Nick. These other three have a roughness – the appearance of kids without funds or prospects – that Dickinson lacks. He’s not only good-looking, he’s sensitive-looking. (He wouldn’t be out of place in Call Me by Your Name!) It’s all too believable that Simone fancies Frankie, harder to believe that he’s managed (if this is what Eliza Hittman means to suggest) to steer clear of girls up to now without questions being asked about his sexuality. The short haircut that he gets halfway through Beach Rats reduces only slightly the mismatch between him and the other title characters. Harris Dickinson dominates the film but making Frankie outwardly distinctive contradicts what is surely one of the main points of this drama: that his predicament is all the more difficult because everyone thinks he’s just one of the lads.
5 December 2017
