Christopher Scott Cherot · 1997 Hav Plenty

For years, my post dinner party ritual involved showing Christopher Scott Cherot's Hav Plenty (1997).

Sometimes my friends would wonder if I was joking about loving this film, which follows a struggling grad student writer, Lee Plenty, who for some reason gets invited to spend the New Year's holiday with his crush, Havilland Savage.

But though the film is full of jokes, I seriously love it. The tenderness of the crush, for one.

Lee, played by the film's director, exhibits a beautiful vulnerability. Throughout, there's an expectant kind of tension of having one's crush and eating it too. Then there's the poem Lee reads at the end, after a weekend full of near misses is resolved with his crush seemingly crushing him: "Havilland's eyes, I am thinking."

The beauty of the film is in all the ways one yearns and hopes and then has to play it off. A crush sends you reeling, imagining and hoping for some kind of consummation, or confirmation.

The first time I saw Hav Plenty, I also saw my Havilland and that tension never lifted.