There are many points in Benjamin Crotty’s Fort Buchanan at which the thematic guts come piercing through with poignant vividness, and one in particular stands out with a painful mixture of humor and humiliation. Roger Sherwood (Andy Gillet) is a gay man raising his adopted daughter along with a little collection of army wives whiling away their days on the eponymous fort which is located among remote woodlands, whilst their husbands are gone on duty in Djibouti. When he and the wives go to visit their husbands in Djibouti, Roger finds that the spark has gone out of his marriage. Hoping to reignite the flame with his husband Frank (David Baiot) Roger takes certain measures which leave him, when they fail, standing alone in the middle of a party, sloppily drunk with a new haircut and a pair of Daisy Dukes. He no longer really knows who his husband is or what he wants, and this is the matter at the heart of Crotty’s film.

Fort Buchanan presents a scenario in which the two parties of various marriages are split apart and made to live in different worlds. In a marriage of two people, as they live through shared experiences, the hope is that they will grow together through the seasons, like vines intertwined and made stronger.  But when separated into drastically different worlds the two people are likely to grow in opposite directions. In Fort Buchanan this is so to such an extent that not only can the divided people not be together when reunited in one world or the other; they are not even able to live in that other world.

In addition to the complex emotional aspect attending gulfs between lovers, in Fort Buchanan the sexual frustrations fizz over like a bottle of soda shaken up and then slightly opened. Sex drives divert and digress and lead the characters into cross-currents of interaction with one another, most notably in erotic games among the wives who have begun to turn their attentions towards Frank and Roger’s sometimes violent daughter, Roxy (Iliana Zabeth).

Shot on 16-mm, the visual composition of Fort Buchanan has a lingering, grainy intimacy that glides across the tapestry of characters and weaves them all together. Fort Buchanan finds its narrative richness in setting those characters on a filmic microscope slide and examining their behavior which is often funny and sometimes sad.