Episode Details

The truth is, if I'd known what Cicada was going to be about, I'm not sure I would have watched the film. I would have read the three sentence synopsis and surmised that it would be too painful, too grueling and that it would break my heart - and it was, and it did. Though, beyond the stomach-knots and frustrated tears, there is so much beauty and love I would have otherwise missed. To me, the cliche of having to know pain to know joy is only sometimes true. There is nothing purposeful or deserving about any of this, which just sort of ends up making me want to go find a few people depicted in this movie and slash their tires, but I digress.

Cicada is a queer love story that follows Ben (Matthew Fifer) who is the co-writer/director of the film. Fifer plays a fictionalized version of himself and allows us to watch the story of his own very personal struggles unfold. It's alluded to early on that something has happened to Fifer as a child, through a series of brief flashbacks. The film opens with a pretty intense montage of Ben's numerous sexual encounters (TMI, but I've dated ~4 people in my life, so after the first 20 minutes, it did take me a bit of time to scrape my jaw off the floor).

For Ben, it's not about who, but more about how much and how often. Beyond this, Ben feels perpetually ill (you're unsure if it's legit or hypochondria, but what matters is that he doesn't feel well) and continuously looks for ways to self-medicate (in ways your Doctor would not recommend). There is reprieve, as we are introduced to some of Ben's family. His Mom, Debbie (Sandra Bauleo) is overtly supportive of Ben's sexuality and his sister, Amber (Jazmin Grace Grimaldi) talks about Ben's conquests with breezy indifference.

In what seems like Ben's next potential sexual encounter, we meet Sam (Sheldon D. Brown), who is the co-writer/director of the film. Sam is a young Black man who is walking a seemingly endless tightrope of shaping his public persona to align himself for corporate success and getting comfortable with his personal identity as a gay black man. We also come to find that Sam has not shared his sexuality with his family. While disheartening, it leads to one of my favorite scenes of the movie, when the couple has dinner with Sam's father (Michael Potts).

The meeting of Ben and Sam is where the film pivots. For a while, the melancholy seems to melt away. Suddenly you're swept up in the swirl of fresh starts and the possibilities that come when you meet a person you really connect with. I would compare what comes next to how I felt watching Before Sunrise. It's breezy and conversational, you know, when you're still figuring each others' favorite foods and colors (before you discover they pre-soak their dishes for 48 hours and they have weird tics about leaving the car keys in a small bowl on your kitchen counter). You are a fly on the wall of a budding connection and if almost feels as if you're intruding on their