Drifting

Robbie is a young gay man who lives with his grandmother and works in her grocery store. His mother left for Germany to run a restaurant, and his contact with his father is minimal.

He has two obsessions: to make a movie that will be the first cheerful film to win an Oscar, and to pursue men. He feels like a foreign immigrant in his own country, not only because of his name but also because he is a second-generation Holocaust survivor. Robbie lives like a tiger in a cage.

By day, he handles the shop, takes walks in the park, catches up with friends, and by night he ventures into Independence Park to seek sexual encounters, including visits to club bathrooms, and even brings two Palestinian terrorists to his home, with whom he has sex.

Robbie’s grandmother fills her days with German women’s magazines, and she plays Rummy to the wail of Strauss. Her stance in the family’s life is to label Arabs as terrorists, and she is ashamed of Robbie yet tolerates his homosexuality, preferring to ignore the men he brings home and avoiding questions about his frequent park visits. To her, his sexual orientation feels like a stain on him and the entire family. When upset, she yells and asks when he will find a nice woman, marry, and start a family.

His ex-girlfriend would like to reconcile, but Robbie has fallen for a man named Han, who succumbed to social pressure and married a woman.

Robbie’s father, a Holocaust survivor with a heavy foreign accent, tries to explain that the norm is a family with a wife and children, and that gay men grow old alone. In one of the film’s boldest scenes, Robbie confronts a high school friend and pours out his anger about past bullying and how his friend feared being laughed at for staying friends with the “degenerate.”

The story concludes with Robbie failing to attract investors for his own film, and he begins to come to terms with his identity as a gay man.

Last Updated: October 09, 2025 at 14:49