"I imagined him holding me in his arms. I imagined being with him in all sorts of glamorous circumstances. It was one of those absurd fantasies, just like one has when one is a girl being wooed and married by the idea of ones dreams." -- Laura Jesson (Celia Johnson), Brief Encounter (1945)

I've been thinking a lot about loneliness and longing lately. Okay, maybe not just lately. 2020 definitely brought it to the forefront of consciousness, as opposed to the dull static of background noise. Loneliness and longing are supposed to be universal experiences, and to some degree they are, but prolonged loneliness and prolonged longing are a different animal. It's hard to describe to people who don't already understand. There's serious resistance to the mere idea of it, even now, even under pandemic conditions, with loneliness making headlines. I've been writing about loneliness for years. In many ways, it's my sole subject.

I thought of all of these things as I watched Fuck Me Richard, a beautiful and provocative short film which just premiered at SXSW. Co-directed by Charlie Polinger and Lucy McKendrick (McKendrick wrote the script and also stars), Fuck Me Richard shows a woman swept away in a flurry of phone calls with a guy she met on a Tinder-style platform, a dude named Richard. The two experience almost instant emotional intimacy. The internet makes such things possible. It's amazing how quickly things develop. Time dissolves, days blend together. What we see in Fuck Me Richard is new relationship as Fugue State. I was going to say this kind of thing - intimacy existing without meeting in person - is a 21st century phenomenon - but I'm not sure that's true. I think it might actually be a throwback to the epistolary love affairs in eras past.

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Housebound due to a cast on her leg, Sally (McKendrick) is first seen lying on the couch in her dark apartment. Her face looks ravaged by pain, emptiness. She's surrounded by pill bottles, take-out, and she stares at the television, watching Brief Encounter. The voices of Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard, saying all that heartbreaking dialogue, all those love declarations, fill the room, but it seems more like the dialogue is coming from inside Sally's head. This is a painful film if you're lonely. Loneliness is baked into Brief Encounter, the unfairness at the brevity, the loneliness of renunciation. In an extreme closeup of Sally's red-rimmed eye, we see reflected there a series of men, being swiped left and right. They are all named Richard. She lands on one. Of all the Richards, he's a fateful choice.

Richard (Nathan Wallace) is never seen. We just hear his voice (Wallace gives a very effective performance). The two create an instant bond. Instant intimacy like this, I have come to learn, is a red flag, but it's nearly impossible to recognize it as such in real time. It feels so real. It IS real. They talk, laugh, drink wine, have phone sex, talk more, Sally drinks wine, puts on a glittery silver dress, wandering (limping) through her apartment, and she's so present when she's talking with him it's like the woman in the opening scene has been completely obliterated by the spark of life and fun and potential. These sequences are filmed in an impressionistic way, images dissolving, fragmented, with music, and city noises, and their constant conversation all blending together like it's one thing. (Steve Brackon's cinematography and Johnny Marshall's sound design/mix are crucial contributions in establishing the floating intense mood.)

Then things take a turn.

When Richard first asks for money, you feel a sinking queasy sensation. Oh no. And now she's in too deep to get out. She's having a full-blown relationship with this man. They've already said the L-word. He needs the money. She writes him a check. The joy is draining out of her. You can practically see it leave her body. But then - in a blink-and-you-might-miss-it moment - it becomes clear that Sally has not been 100% on the level with Richard. If he's scamming her, then she's been ... what? Running another kind of game. Desperate? Yeah, maybe.

There's a moment where they decide finally to meet. Sally, who hasn't been out in weeks, sits in a restaurant, wearing bright red lipstick, and her body language is nervy, sparking, almost anxious. She's so ready. She can't believe it. They're about to meet. She's about to have him in her arms. For real. After all this time. (Two, three weeks.) He's a no-show. Sally can't "take" this with anything even approaching a philosophical attitude. She's crushed, deflated, all of that silver-dress-chatter, glass of wine, music playing, all of that vanishes in a puff of smoke, leaving her up against it again, up against herself. On a second watch, I noticed that no friends were stopping by to keep her company, even though she tells Richard her pals have been making sure she has food and supplies. She gives him an impression of a densely-populated full life, when the reality is take-out containers and old movies.

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The internet is a charged and potent landscape for falling in love with the idea of someone. The shadows on the cave wall are all we get, and we make them mean what we want them to mean. We can project onto them what we need. Plausible deniability. The purpose is to keep the intense flame of intimacy alight. It's enough to stave off the darkness, the abyss. Finally: he's here. She's here. I don't have to feel that OTHER way anymore.

Fuck Me Richard captures this in really intense ways, the dialogue almost incidental to the mood. The way the long sheer white curtains billow at the windows, the sounds of thunder rumbles, car horns, the sexual fantasies that float in and out of the timeline, always in operation, a projection forward into a future together, or ... just a way to spend the time, to stave off the sense of isolation.

In February, I watched Lili Horvát's second film, Preparations to Be Together for an Unknown Period of Time. I was captivated, haunted by it for days. I went back and watched it again. And then a third time. I finally wrote about it. The film, without coming out and saying it explicitly, shows what loneliness is, and what prolonged loneliness can do. That which does not kill you makes you stronger is a lie. Some wounds actually weaken you, lower your resiliency. You can be broken by a crush. It’s so embarrassing. A mere five years earlier, you would have moved on, with sense of humor/self intact. But now, you can't recover. In Preparations, Márta (Natasa Stork) tracks down a man with whom she had a passionate one-night-stand. Something is awakened in her. She is convinced "he's right for me." Although she does find him on the streets of Budapest, it's immediately apparent he doesn't remember her. Or is he lying? Does she just want love so badly she made him up? Is her loneliness messing with her perception of reality?

It feels like other people get to live in the real world, the world where you meet a guy online, meet for cocktails, and before you know it you're taking road trips, throwing comfortable grins at each other, meeting each others' friends, and boom, you've found your person. Other people get to do that. Not Sally.

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Her deterioration is painful to witness. Richard is an asshole. Maybe he was from the jump. But Wallace's on-the-phone performance is so convincing it’s hard to clock the red flags.

What a bore it is, trying to navigate the world, wanting love, hell, just wanting a connection, and having to spend half your time alert for red flags. Sally doesn't realize yet how much she's been altered. How she's been undone by so little. McKendrick is so gifted: her emotions shiver on the outside of her skin.

Contemporary cinema is so afraid of sex, so afraid of adult complexity, mixed motives, ambivalence. Fuck Me Richard lives in that forbidden space, a space where so many of us live. People are hungry for this kind of story.

Maybe the changes Sally goes through will be ultimately positive. Maybe she's learned something, even if it's just a cautionary tale.

Fuck Me Richard is bold enough to leave the question open.

The Sheila Variations 2.0

SXSW: A short film about loneliness, longing…