Elsewhere: On Wanting, Grieving, and Learning to Live With It All

Brian Keane’s Elsewhere, written by its lead Michael Raver, honours the enduring nature of grief. The chasm between “It has been three months” and “It has only been three months” presents its lead characters with the possibility of utter acknowledgement and acceptance of inconvenient, inconvertible convulsions of being—inseparable from itself.

Roman (Raver) occupies that latter position—in the grips of an interminable grief—after the last-minute loss of a chance of parenthood. His husband, Ben (Andy English), a man attempting rationality, is doing his best to maintain all appearances of normalcy. Rent is mailed on time, alarms are never disobeyed, work never suffers. He has the tacit approval of the world (represented by a good-natured landlady and a sister, played by Pooya Mohseni and Leah Loftin respectively) on his side. Which is not to say that Ben is in anyway the antagonist. The film takes care to draw him just as sympathetic as Roman, if less open to the audience. This difference between the two leads means that in their current crisis, they must reckon with their fundamental separateness. Not the myth of two bodies-one mind, but two individuals—now faced with the task of loving through that distance.

Because you spend more time with Roman, because you witness him in the pits of despair, you become comfortable with his visible feeling (as opposed to Ben’s stoicism). When Roman cries, he cries for the small and big troubles of his life that is still actively in formulation. Being queer means that formulae, at least the most prominent ones, are out. You live by self determined principles, oral histories, anecdotes, community spirit. You are actively in charge of deciding the contours of your cares, your roles, and especially, your griefs. Roman cares and cries about the baby that will never be, he cares also about getting fat, about his cat, and he cannot bring himself to care about praise enough to ever want to return to teaching. This alone should indicate the depth of his burnout and heartbreak, that despite being generously extolled by the hiring committee for his literary career, Roman does not care about signing up for guest lectureship at NYU.

Time passes instead inside the unused (and ostensibly destined to remain that way) nursery; Roman the picture of a forlorn supplicant abandoned by the gods reigning over his hopes and dreams. His grief is also marked by the choices made for the cinematography. Whereas the rest of the narrative employs available daylight to emphasise ordinariness, the nursery, with its dark browns and warm yellows, is shot to look borderline ethereal. It is the heart of the house, and certainly of Roman. Which goes further to indicate that any chance for Roman and Ben to reconcile must begin with Ben’s return to the heart, the nursery.

Andrea Long Chu wrote that the other name of disappointment is love. Elsewhere builds a story of queerness and difference centred on love, desire, and grief. And because not getting what you want has very little to do with wanting it, the film asks Ben to learn that grief can last forever. Just as it asks Roman to see that Ben, though in ways alien to his own, is grieving, too.