Would you be able to handle doing the same job as your partner? On one hand, you would speak the same language or have a shorthand to understand what the other goes through. On the other hand, there might be some unconscious competitiveness buried deep within. In Matthew Puccini’s wonderfully tense new short, Callback, one couple must grapple with what is real and what is performance as hidden truths expose themselves.
Justin H. Min’s Max returns home after an exhausting shift of bussing tables while his partner, Michael Hsu Rosen’s Will, excitedly makes dinner for their evening together. Will’s day was filled with painting someone’s nails, taking a long walk, and discovering a prized plant on Facebook Marketplace, and he tells Max not to fret about the parking ticket that he got–he will take care of it. They lead different lives, but they are both trying to make it as actors.
When Max discovers that Will got a callback for a part that he is familiar with, he seems supportive initially. “Why didn’t you tell me,” he asks before Will tells him, after some prodding, that the casting directors like that Will brought unexpected depth to the character. When they are talking about the project over dinner, Puccini’s script taps into something so beautifully specific in terms of how some people talk about the building of a character that it feels like it was ripped out of a conversation held by theater students around the country. Max sees the character one way and Will sees is slightly differently–a natural thing. Max makes a small dig at the script and says that he is glad his man is there to expand on the character as written since the part of a gay assistant at a fashion magazine is “a little 2002.”
We can become defensive with how we see a character when it comes to our interpretation of it–you see it all the time in modern film and performance criticism. What makes Callback so engaging is how that small bickering gives way to unearthing deeper conflict in the relationship, especially when it comes to how we perform our feelings for one another. When Max and Will end up performing the same material for a stranger (an All About Eve orgasm, if we’ve ever seen one), the film cleverly and pointedly delves into the hiercarchies or privilege within a long-term relationship.
Rosen and Min sink their teeth into this material, and Puccini makes us wonder if they are self-monitoring how they project themselves to one another as the argument blurs the line between performance and what might be real. Are we performing for the ones we love to spare their feelings? Are we sacrificing a bit of ourselves in these tiny interactions? Perhaps these small acts of performance help these two become better performers? The cinematography, from Oscar-nominee Sam Davis, uses shadow and overhead lighting beautifully. When we first see Will from a distance, he is standing underneath a kitchen chandelier that makes it looks like Max is seeing his boyfriend in a spotlight–like the star that he is. Light glints off of Rosen’s gold glasses, and the final shot left my jaw hanging wide open.
With Callback, Puccini further establishes himself as a purveyor of romantic tension (hunt down his 2019 short, Lavender–also starring Rosen). His latest carries a vein of camp and humor but never allows the stakes to drop. If anything, they raise and raise with every carefully chosen word.
Callback is playing as part of Sundance’s virtual programming through February 1.
