A Thousand and One and the evolving depiction of masculinity on-screen

You may not have noticed, but there's a weirdly pervasive movie trope out there that's both pretty much invisible, and also nearly as old as film.

You can go all the way to Charlie Chaplin's silent film The Kid, about a homeless man forced to care for an orphan (and even that same year's My Boy, which stars the same childin a pretty much identical plot) to 1967's The Two of Us, about a Jewish boy in 1940s France sent to live with an antisemitic uncle.

More recently, You can look at The Sixth Sense, Sling Blade, A Perfect World, About a Boy, Kolya or The Client. Closer still, Hunt for the Wilderpeople, St. Vincent, Palmer, Up, C'mon C'mon and dozens of others.

They all follow roughly the same formula, with the occasional deviations : a disaffected adult (either a relative or a stranger, and usually a man) figuratively, or literally, on the run with a child they're either unprepared, or legally barred from caring for. Both characters will have been traumatized by separate events, and both will end up somewhat healed by the other: the older's harsh outlook softened by the kid's naive vulnerability, and the kid given their first tentative steps into adulthood.

As coming-of-age stories aimed at grown-ups, these films hold a mirror up to ourperception of masculinity. Though there are exceptions,a large number look at the specific trials, challenges and lessons a boy needs to go through to reach manhood. And as the onslaught of these movies continues, it's apparent those touchstones have started to change.

The newest and most obvious example is A Thousand and One, the knockout debut feature from American director A.V. Rockwell.

WATCH | CBC's Eli Glasner on A.V. Rockwell's A Thousand and One:

Gritty drama A Thousand and One will break you and inspire you

1 year ago

Duration 5:53

Indie sensation A Thousand and One, written and directed by A.V. Rockwell, portrays the life of a formerly incarcerated woman struggling to make ends meet in Harlem who kidnaps her son from foster care. The film earned the Grand Jury Prize at this year's Sundance Film Festival.

'What kind of man am I going to be?'

A Thousand and One has been called everything from a "family drama" to "the most terrifying movie of the year." Rockwell said in an interview with CBC News the movie came from a desire to examine motherhood.

The movie follows 22-year-old Inez De La Paz (Teyana Taylor) as she leaves prison, to immediately try to be a better mother to Terry, whom she last saw on a street corner years ago.

Because six-year-old Terry is in foster care and wondering why he's been constantly abandoned Inez makes the decision to kidnap him and figure out the details later. As the film slowly moves over a decade into their future, Terry grows up with a void he scrambles to fill with outside validation:friends, girls and a father figure who hurts Inez almost as much as he does himself.

That, and especially his failed attempts to follow in the often harmful footsteps of male mentors, was an intentional point that Rockwell says she folded in.

"There is a struggle between trying to learn from them, 'What kind of man am I going to be?'" she said. "But then, who am I going to be to all these women that in different ways have lifted him up as well, even though they're minimized by the masculine energy that surrounds them."

Black fatherhood's on-screen depiction

Also out this year, Bruiser takes a different tack. That film (also a feature debut, from director Miles Warren) takes on the somewhat classic formula. Fourteen-year-old Darious (played by Jalyn Hall, who previously portrayed Emmett Till in 2022's Till) struggles to live up to the impossibly-high expectations of his father Malcolm (Canadian Shamier Anderson) who struggles to wring all the money he can from a failing car dealership to pay for Darious's high school.

But after Darious is beat up by another boy and after he's bullied by classmates with a similarly immature idea of manhood he stumbles on Porter (Trevante Rhodes), a homeless man living on a houseboat nearby. Not trusting his tightly-wound father to do so, Darious asks Porter to teach him how to defend himself essentially, how to be a man.

That setup sets all three on a collision course as, due to some complicated family history, Porter ends up demanding more of a say in Darious's life.

The entire film is a direct examination of masculinity, as Porter and Malcolm represent different interpretations of manhood, and the inscrutable entry points for boys to reach it. But where A Thousand and One looks at motherhood, Bruiser looks at fathers.

"Fatherhood in cinema is something that's an interesting topic when it comes to Black men," Anderson said in an interview with CBC. "Usually we're absent in most of the narratives that we've seen: absent, incarcerated or dead."

He pointed to Bruiser's two father figures, fighting over the chance to raise Darious, as what drew him to being in the movie. Most depictions of Black men on screen, he said, are about Black men who desert their children. This has helped update how we see that situation.

"We get to unravel what it's like to see Black men wanting to love their child, he said, "which was really, really important for me, and something that I have not seen in this capacity."

Brutality and fragility

But maybe the most blatant test of masculinity this year was Belgian filmmaker Lukas Dhont's Close, the Oscar-nominated film about friendship between two young boys.

Dhont told CBC he came up with the story of his two leads, Lo (Eden Dambrine) and Rmi (Gustav De Waele) after reading Deep Secrets: Boys' Friendships and the Crisis of Connection. That book drew from hundreds of interviews with boys about why they tend to eschew close, intimate friendships as they enter adolescence for fear of being assumed to be gay.

And while Dhont's film shows exactly that Lo pushing away the friend he was physically and emotionally close with as a child, to disastrous consequences he said he never intended the boys themselves to be interpreted as gay.

"I think one of the points that I tried to make when I talk about this film is I don't know what the sexuality of these boys is," Dhont said. "It's about love that doesn't have a boundary, that doesn't have a name."

Despite that, the movie has been largely labelled a queer film. As reads one review from Gary Kramer: "Close never explicitly addresses the teens' sexuality, but reading the film, both boys are gay, and only one is comfortable with his sexuality."

Dhont, who is gay himself, says there is nothing wrong with that reading though it is surprising. And given the story he was writing, that blanket interpretation hints at the problem his film was pointing to.

"For me it was a true desire to showcase love that doesn't have a name, is as free as it can be," he said, "is platonic in a way but also showcases what happens when we as a society inject brutality in that masculine universe, much more than we inject fragility."