The Academy Award for Best Screenplay last year went to The Imitation Game, a modern depiction of a homosexual hero placed in the most heterosexual milieu possible. Instead of showing us the life and secrecy of homosexuals in the 1950s, Graham Moore isolated Turing’s character from all homosexuals, creating a island of secret homosexuality in a vast ocean of heterosexuality.

In 6 minutes, Brian and Karl’s new short film Putting on the Dish, creates a complete environment of the homosexual under Britain’s anti-homosexuality laws. Two men meet on a bench, try to game out whether they’re batting for a similar team, then spill gossip under a law. The finale, in which an understandable yet unforgivable act is revealed, shows the extent that living an illegal life can corrupt even the nicest of gentlemen.

True to their setting, the two gentlemen speak in the slang language of Polari, a modality of words and phrasing whose content is meant to be near indecipherable to all but the uninitiated. Polari is, at once, a signal of being hip, and of secrecy and code. Similar to the Nadsat language of A Clockwork Orange, the novel mentioned at the beginning of the film, Polari is pulled together from a litany of sources to create a rhythm and speed that throws off everybody else.

Though I can’t understand about 1/3 of the conversation (damn you heavy British accents!), the amount of slang in this film that made its way into the modern lexicon is astounding. Or at least among my friends. Anyways, check it out.

PUTTING ON THE DISH – A short film in Polari from Brian and Karl on Vimeo.