Catch the Buzz About The Young Housefly
James Scott
Dwelling in the mysteries of life, The Young Housefly is more than just an unusual romance film; it's a meditation on emotional depth working within fresh story-telling.
The concept of romance is one we think of as inherently human. Yet, for many, romance can be applied to species outside of our own. We see two dogs have puppies and we say, "They're in love." We see two penguins raise a child together and we say, "They must love each other." But perhaps we have limited our view of romance too much. In director Laurence Vannicelli and writer Sonya Goddy's film The Young Housefly, the concept of interspecies love is broached with careful expansion. Not only are we limited in our view of love but, as The Young Housefly implies, also with our idea of life and what it means.
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He is neither independent nor an individual; this housefly is one of many. This marks the first introduction of a larger theme in The Young Housefly— specialness. What creates a difference in who we are? Like the housefly says, he was born to live a short life and live one filled with feces and constant swatting. He's nothing out of the ordinary.
And yet, this housefly is singular, for he's fallen in love with the young woman (played by Ashley Traivinski) whose house he haunts. He moons over her with great abandon and, with Karpovsky's line delivery, sounds every bit as hopeless as he does when describing his life as a fly. She, to him, represents everything that he cannot have: kindness, strangeness and a full life. But he loves her just the same and she, on her part, is gentle with him. She lets him go where she could kill him. Life spared, the fly yearns to go back. His love remains inside where he's not welcome and so their romance is a forbidden