First impressions are important, especially in the arts, entertainment, and film business, and Director Evelina Engberg Norgren, has created a simple story and built it into an impressionable debut with her short film, The Boy. The first impressionable trait of this fine short piece of cinema is the fact that it is freshly delivered by someone coming straight out of the London TVU film school in England on, apparently, their first project. The second trait is that the script and the story were so streamlined that it necessitated only the right kind of eye to hem the intricate silence inherent in every shot.
The Boy is a short film about, obviously, a boy, but he doesn’t exist in the humdrum world we all may thrive in. He is a teenage prostitute at the mercy of profits his landlady/Madame receives from his employment/compensation plan with her. The boy lives alone in a tiny room in a brothel of sorts, a semi-fancy but adequate housing for your typical teenage male prostitute, with only a small window with which to see the lives going on outside of his. The boy is quietly sequestered with only distant and painful memories of his own broken family to keep him company. Through a series of intermittent visitations from his Madame foreshadowing the “John” encounters along with the use of extreme close ups, we get the sense of emotional ambiguity in the actions he performs.
As if through the lens he sees through, the graininess of the film adds to the disconnection the boy has with the real world and lends itself to the semblance of confusion and separation. My favorite moments are the low close up shots of shoes walking to and fro… it conjures up colloquialisms like: the shoes we choose to walk in, or not, or may have been forced to walk in. Also, the footsteps… the quick fades to black… announce terror, it simply has great cinematography.
Anything graphic in the story was kept tasteful yet chilling with images of older hands on younger fists. In attempts to redefine a sense of family and role models, he takes Polaroid’s of the men he encounters, sadly though, they only show the back of their heads as they walk out the door. Aside from the light invading the tiny room, the world outside seems to only send in horny older gay men. The entire set of family flashback sequences make good use of metaphor with the boy and his plants as in the end with the petals when he is abandoned by his pimp and landlady.
From beginning to end the film gives you the feeling that there may still be a chance for the boy to escape but just doesn’t know that there is something more than what his life has offered him up until then. It ends abruptly with an open door.
