Posts Tagged ‘Gay interest’

The History of Sound (2025)

Dir: Oliver Hermanus | Drama 2025 127′

Reviewed by Meredith Taylor

The History of Sound is a slow-burning gay love story about two men who make country music with a focus on singing and recording in the early 1920s Kentucky.

With its sober look and drab colour palette this latest drama from Oliver Hermanus (Moffie) feels conventional and often laborious but with its attention to detail and thoughtful performances from two of contemporary cinema’s top stars it will certainly do well at the box office and appeal to a niche audience who appreciate the tentative unfolding of a missed opportunity involving misinterpreted romantic feelings.

Kentucky, Rome, Boston, and eventually Oxford and the Lake District, lend some colour and a additional dimension to this contemplative canvas enabling the South African director to paint a nuanced portrait of gay love in the early 20th century. Paul Mescal plays Lionel, a modest Kentucky country boy who grew up on a farm and has few ambitions and little to offer the world apart from a tuneful singing voice with perfect pitch which will eventually take him to the Boston conservatory with apparent ease.

Despite his humble background Lionel manages to be surprisingly dapper and well-turned out in every immaculately-staged scene. Quiet and deliberate he is certainly no tortured artist striving to succeed. But what he does yearn for is a closer relationship with another, more confident man, a singer called David (Josh O’Connor) who he meets along the way. Of course it takes him time to realise all this and when he eventually does the world has moved on.

Through their shared love of music Lionel and David develop a close bond of friendship that eventually turns sexual. But David remains a sketchy, enigmatic character, even when we discover more about him at the end. All this latent sense of pent up feeling between the two men is never fully developed merely suggested in a brief intimate scene and Lionel’s wanton glances in a railway station but that subtlety is probably the film’s most valuable takeaway, along with the elegantly framed settings – unless of course you have an interest in the development of early 20th century sound recording. @MeredithTaylor

Plainclothes (2025)

Dir: Carmen Emmi | 95′ USA/UK co production

Reviewed by Peter Herbert

Plainclothes is a complex, sensitive indie film bristling with multi-layered energy exploring life’s eternal challenge of sexual repression.

The main focus of the film is an American shopping mall where a public toilet was referred to as a “tearoom” serving rather more than a hot cup of tea. This is slang reference for a ‘toilet’ used by men looking for clandestine sex that could also be dangerous. 

The film is set in 1990’s America when homosexuality was still far from accepted or legal, the use of tearooms created a range of problems for men. Arrested and sentenced in court with public and private lives damaged and destroyed, many were also targeted by attractive police officers acting as decoys wearing off duty plainclothes.

Plainclothes has perceptively captured this social and sexual landscape by debut film director Carmen Emmi. The inspiration of the film is an original tearoom in Ohio which was filmed by law enforcement officers in 1963 using a two-way mirror to conceal cameras. This footage, used in courts as evidence and also for training police officers resulted in the arrest of 60 men. The footage has also been used by William E Jones in 2007 as a gallery installation which erased the derogatory voice-over commentary, turning the footage into a silent study of the ritualistic sexual behaviour between men who entered the tearoom. The footage has also been edited by Emmi into an accurate recreation of the Ohio tearoom. 

Although the film is aware of the sociological value of this footage it is more interested in creating a narrative out of material that also mixes together a multi layered visual texture of analogue, 16 mm, VHS video and other 1990s film formats. This enhances the film’s central focus on Lucas, a young police officer played by Tom Blyth. He is a complex man with dysfunctional family elements involving mother and father issues, troublesome relatives, friendships and a still loving former girlfriend whom he never loved. These scenes are filled with the naturalistic visual detail of the tearoom sequences.

The film creates a further twist when Lucas meets an older man played by Russell Tovey whom he traps but soon becomes drawn into a relationship that acts as a catalyst for the unlocking of his own sexual cover-ups.

Performances of the central characters and ensemble cast are remarkable. Tom Blyth captures sensitive nuances of a man trapping others while delving into his own repressed desires. Russell Tovey continues to explore his range as an actor with another fearless portrait of gay life. Here, he is a quiet, decent and good man harbouring a deeply secret “other life”. This is the reversal of his dark troubled beefed up and angry police cop in Ryan Murphy’s American Horror Story: NYC (2022) where he was the rough hunter as opposed to sensitive victim here

The film could be seen as a comment on William Friedkin’s unjustly maligned Cruising (1980) with similar themes in which Al Pacino played a deeply sexually troubled cop. Visually, Plainclothes is remarkable for knowing references to key scenes in the cinema of cruising. The setting of an ornate rococo style cinema is comparable to the cruising scenes in in Rene Clement’s This Angry Age (1956), Tsai Ming-Liang’s Goodbye Dragon Inn 2003) and Ferzan Ozpetek’s Nuovo Olimpo (2023).

Plainclothes has a sense of cinema architecture as a place of dreamy ornate beauty in which cruising in darkness and silence reflects the glow and allure of a fantasy on the screen. In doing so, the film should be recognised in its own right as an important addition to the canon of gay cinema  @Peter Herbert 

IN UK CINEMAS FROM 3 OCTOBER 2025

Hidden Master: The Legacy of George Platt Lynes (2023)

Dir: Sam Shahid |Doc. 2023 96′

Reviewed by Peter Herbert

George Platt Lynes (1907- 1955) and his obscurity is addressed in this stylish documentary by director Sam Shahid and dedicated colleagues. Hidden Master: The Legacy of George Platt Lynes could be described as a form of “detective documentary” as it involves the patience of a sleuth painstakingly uncovering obstacles linked to the neglect of a key figure in the development of male nude photography.

The reasons for the neglect relate to complex social and sexual landscapes that the photographer lived in from the 1920s onwards. Born in America, he spent formative years as a young man in Paris as the favoured portrait photographer of writer Gertude Stein which allowed movement into a circle of creative friends, including the groundbreaking surrealist, Jean Cocteau.

Avant Garde ideas of content and composition were reflected in Platt Lynes strikingly lit, static tableaux portrait photography. Commissions for fashion photography followed, reflecting surrealism influences, although it was his love of masculine beauty that drove another aspect of his inner creative drive. Openly, fearlessly gay and involved in a threesome relationship with the couple Monroe Wheeler and Glenway Westcott, his photography was at its most powerful where it involved the beauty of the naked male body including explicit sexual imagery.

The best of these images is sensuous, intimate and warm using fashion sets containing fabric and panes of glass to provide layers of light and shade.
The problem for Platt Lynes would be in how male nudity and the creative arts were perceived by society with a wide range of laws that prohibited LGBT sexuality.

His brief unhappy tenure on Hollywood during the late 40s has been described as “a gay community turned in on itself with internalised homophobia” and his male nude photography remained unseen. The post WW2 and McCarthy era added more repression with increased lavender marriages and although the naked female body was more acceptable, images of the penis remained problematic. This would not change until the introduction more relaxed censorship from the late 1960’s onwards.

It is here that Hidden Master persuasively argues that Platt Lynes was a radical pioneer. Contemporaries Cecil Beaton, Angus McBean, Horst P Horst and George Heyningen Huene wanted to be remembered less for male nudes, and more for portrait and fashion photography. Platt Lynes saw his legacy differently and destroyed much of his portrait/fashion photography to focus on a body of male nude images. He was aided here by valuable support from the sexologist Alfred Kinsey, University archives and art related institutes.

Apart from early support from a nephew, the Platt Lynes Estate remained less than supportive and his legacy would remain diminished without the focus of a film like Hidden Master which has been stylishly assembled by mixing talking heads with beautiful montages of images. They combine to build the case by Shahid for Platt Lynes as a pathway to later gay photographers including Herb Ritts, Bruce Webber, Pierre et Giles, and in the UK Mike Arlen who also crossed over from the worlds of portrait and fashion into male nude photography.

There is an interesting link with mixed race male photography in Platt Lynes’ work surfacing in the later images of Robert Mapplethorpe. Hidden Master also contains an underlying feeling that these freedoms are still vulnerable and fragile in the art world involving male nude photopraphy.

As a passion project and labour of love, this is one of the most striking and valuable of recent documentaries and concludes with several surprises worthy of the film’s detective work. One is the discovery of the only surviving live footage of the photographer and the other, a private secret that adds to the mystery that there is still more to unravel with understanding and appreciating the life of a genuine Hidden Masters enjoying the light of day in a new era. PBH / f/2 

NOW IN CINEMAS | CURZON BLOOMSBURY, THE GARDEN CINEMAS

The Astronaut Lovers (2024) Bfi Flare

Dir: Marco Berger | Drama 126′

Marco Berger has made ten films since Plan B in 2009 and is building up a recognisable style involving gay related themes involving cautious tales of uncertain sexuality, brushes with toxic masculinity and a male gaze clearly focused on young adult men.

A number of these films including Hawaii, Taekwondo, The Blonde One, Young Hunter 2020 and Horseplay 2023 introduce dark disturbing undertones into inconclusive situations from which this latest outing will take a warm and softer tone without losing the director’s questioning view of male relationships.

The Astronaut Lovers explores the relationship of two close friends who had first met as boys and again through a chance meeting years later, on a summer vacation with a group of friends. The first sighting of Maxi ( (Lautaro Bettoni) by Pedro (Javier Oran) becomes an almost iris eye image of voyeuristic beauty and the catalyst for a reunion filled with sexual and emotional possibilities.

The problem is that Maxi is straight and has an ex-girlfriend who suspects he is bisexual and has proposed that she will only take him back as long as he has a sexual liaison with his childhood friend. Pedro, who is gay, becomes uncertain as to Maxi’s interest in him which creates the moral compass at the heart of the film.

Berger’s intelligent rapport with actors involves fascinating verbal patterns out of conversations and the way people talk. Although the film may be a trifle over-long and contains unusually explicit and horny dialogue, this builds up the affectionate relationship between the two men. References to astronauts in space venturing into uncharted territory involves more comic sexual innuendo than in Berger’s previous films.

Wide screen camerawork by Mariano De Rosa captures the landscape of a seaside coastline during a summer vacation, and Berger’s eye for masculine beauty adds layers to the central relationship. This gradually builds up a myriad puzzle of possible games being played out by characters as one man learns the hard way as to how honest and genuine another will feel about him.

The Astronaut Lovers recalls the four-season moral tales of Eric Rohmer films and this may be the precedent as to the new road Berger is taking. The film has a finale with a rewarding surprise and as the filmmaker considers this his favourite film, it may well pave the way for new pathways involving the director’s ideas and feelings about life and gay cinema. PeterHerbert

SCREENED DURING BFI FLARE 2025

Cicadas (2025) Berlinale 2025

Dir/Wri: Ina Weisse | Germany Drama 2025

Nina Hoss brings her signature style to another muted middle age crisis drama from German director Ina Weisse following on from The Audition and The Architect.

The German star is always watchable and here she plays Isabell, a browbeaten woman in her late forties, in a thoughtful and visually appealing but underwritten three-hander, elegantly set in the German countryside between Berlin and Brandenburg.

A fraught story about Isabell ‘parenting’ her ageing architect father and artist mother is certainly a worthwhile and relatable theme but what works better here is the flailing love story between Isabell and Philippe (French star Vincent Macaigne) whose relationship is also in troubled waters. The spirited episodes between these two class actors come alive as they work through their backstory – a much misunderstood and childless marriage – but this strand eventually goes on the rails despite a positive outset.

All this feels worlds apart from the torpid narrative strand involving Saskia Rosendahl’s hard-up single mother Anja trying to sell a motorbike to keep her family together. Whether Weisse is merely exploring and contrasting the women’s different social backgrounds, or even suggesting something more intriguing, remains enigmatic. If there  is a spark smouldering between Isabell and Anja it would feel certainly forced and bogus despite its virtue signalling potential: Weisse skates around the issue and there’s clearly attraction but also repulsion on both sides as the film reaches its inconclusive conclusion.

Weisse certainly has a fabulous eye for framing and mise en scene but her first foray into single-handed scriptwriting is less successful here despite the film’s obvious attractions. @MeredithTaylor

BERLINALE 2025

Viet and Nam (2024)

Dir: Truong Minh Quy | Drama 129′ 2024

Truong Minh Quy’s VIET AND NAM closed this year’s Bfi London Film festival as Eight Postcards from Utopia opened with bold challenging conceptual filmmaking. These are contemporary films confronting the sometimes-tortured psyche of respective nations with filmmakers looking for answers from past histories while opening up the possibilities of the future. Viet and Nam is a dark but strangely illuminating film reflecting in part on how the “American war “of 1955/1975 in Vietnam has repercussions decades later with a sense of history underlying the film’s fusion of both written /spoken poetry linked to sensitive visual imagery.

The spirit of slow cinema filmmakers such as Lav Diaz and Tsai Ming-liang is also evident although these sequences are  edited into shorter segments creating a rich range of texture. The focus rests on two young Vietnamese men who express love for each other most deeply in the darkened spaces of coal mines where both are making a living through low paid work as a way to escape national poverty. At home they try to reconcile difficult relationships with fathers and families, discreetly avoiding drawing attention to the nature of a same sex relationship. With damaged lungs and Cocteau like line drawings burnt into cuts as tattoos, the two naked bodies of the lovers are sometimes barely perceived as intimate sources of lighting that appear to merge both bodies into one. Poetry references include descriptions of beaches as graveyards for the crushed crumbs of seashells. In the film’s final sequence, the two attempt to leave Vietnam in a shipping freight container on an ocean filled with as much beauty and danger as the cold forbidding earth from where they are escaping.

For Minh Quy, the sea becomes another forbidding and dangerous space with the two lovers locked in a floating freight container adrift. The surreal spirit of Jean Cocteau along with the power of Frank Borzage is evident and this is another creative work inspired by the idea of souls made great by adversity.  Although Vietnamese authorities have banned Viet and Nam for “gay content” and negativity, there is nothing negative about this film and its beautiful incandescent mapping of redemption through the power of love.

Peter Herbert

PREMIERED AT CANNES and the BFI LONDON FILM FESTIVAL 2024 | In UK cinemas early next year.

 

Casa Susanna (2022) Venice Film Festival 2022

Dir/Wri: Sebastian Lifshitz | France, Doc 97′

In the open scenes of this well made gay interest film an American broadcaster talks to four dolled up women who turn out to be men. Shock horror probe. But that was back in the Sixties, Nowadays cross-dressing is par for the course thanks to ‘Full Personality Expression’ that allows people to wear whatever they want, wherever they go.

Back in the 1950s and ‘60s this underground network of transgender women and cross-dressing men were forced to find refuge at a modest house in the Catskills region of New York. Known as Casa Susanna, the house provided a safe place to live for a few days as they had always dreamed—dressed as women – without fear of being incarcerated or institutionalised for doing so. Told through the memories of those whose visits to the house would change their lives, the film looks back at a secret world where the persecuted and frightened found freedom, acceptance and, often, the courage to live their lives out of the shadows. 

Award-winning documentarian Sebastian Lipshitz enlivens his expose with wonderful photos of New York in the 1960s along with archive footage of Danish cross-dresser Christine Jorgensen, who became an overnight celebrity, and others who joined in. Another woman remembers her father paying visits to the Casa where he enjoyed wearing women’s clothing and only felt comfortable wearing a female nightie in bed. And although the doc slightly overstays its welcome in driving home the point repetitively, it certainly provides a unique and valuable insight for those interested or affected by the issues concerned. MT

VENICE FILM FESTIVAL | 31 AUGUST – 1 SEPTEMBER 2022

 

Firebird (2021) Bfi Flare 2021

Dir: Peeter Rebane | Cast: Tom Prior, Nicholas Woodeson, Diana Pozharskaya, Oleg Zagorordnii | US Drama 107′

Firebird runs along similar lines to the recent South African services drama Moffie, this version inspired by late Russian actor Sergey Fetisov’s memoir and set in the Soviet Air Force during the Cold War.

Screening as part of the Hearts strand of this year’s Bfi Flare Festival, the lavishly mounted feature debut draws on the director’s own experience of growing up in Soviet occupied Estonia, yet fails to mine the incendiary potential of a dramatic episode in European history.

Tom Prior co-wrote the script and stars as the unsettled soldier Sergey who is drafted into the services but really has dreams of being an actor. He soon gets involved in an illicit love triangle with a dashing fighter pilot Roman (Oleg Zagorodnii) who invites him to see Stravinsky’s Firebird at the opera. But Roman is also kindling a desire for his female comrade Luisa (Diana Pozharskaya) amid the high octane backdrop of a Soviet Air Force Base.

A friendship across the ranks soon sparks into an amorous escapade involving all three comrades in arms, once again highlighting the risks of love affairs in the time of war, this one spiced up by its forbidden nature, punishable by five years in a hard labour camp. The men’s interest in photography is brought to life by the vibrant aesthetic of Mait Maekivi’s colour-drenched camerawork.

Firebird certainly looks impressive with its authentic settings and lush production values but the film never quite generates enough heat to make us care for its underwritten characters who remain cartoonish and rather glib throughout, Luisa hardly getting a look in as a staid and sketchy also-ran in this so-called menage a trois.

Clearly Prior – so affective in Kingsman – has been brought in to lend star power but here joins the rest of cast of rather robotic stormtroopers bringing to mind Kraftwerk’s heroes rather than real people who we can empathise with in their tortured love lives. MT

FIREBIRD is premiering at BFi Flare

 

 

Five Films for Freedom | BFI Flare 2021

During the FLARE LGBTIQ+ BFI’s annual celebration of all things gay five festival films have been selected to screen free internationally from 17-28 March

Five Films For Freedom 2021 sees filmmakers exploring emerging sexuality, trans-activism, homophobia and genderless love at a time when people may have been adversely impacted by the pandemic.

In a new twist for 2021, audiences will be invited to nominate their Five Films Favourite via a British Council web poll, the winners will be announced via British Council social media channels prior to 28 March. Voting opens 17 March via the #Five FilmsForFreedom homepage.

The FIVE FILMS FOR FREEDOM campaign has been going since 2015 and over 15 million people from more than 200 countries have engaged with it particularly in places where homosexuality can be prosecuted and, in some cases, punishable by death.

Five Film For Freedom programme 2021:

 

Bodies of Desire (India/Dir. Varsha Panikar & Saad Nawab/3 mins), directed by Varsha Panikar and multi-award-winner Saad Nawab, uses Indian poet Panikar’s work as the basis for a visual, poetic film capturing four sets of lovers in a sensual celebration of genderless love and desire.

Land of the Free (Sweden/Dir. Dawid Ullgren/10 mins) – Ullgren’s tense Swedish drama follows the fictional David and friends as they celebrate his birthday with a nightly swim at the beach. The good mood swiftly changes after two straight couples walk by and laugh – was the laughter directed at them, or something else? Who owns the truth of exactly what happened?

 

Pure (USA/Dir. Natalie Jasmine Harris/12 mins) is the fictional debut from 2020 Directors Guild of America Student Film Award winner Natalie Jasmine Harris, centring on a young Black girl grappling with her queer identity and ideas of ‘purity’. The film is written, produced and directed by Harris – a filmmaker passionate about the intersection between filmmaking and social justice.

Trans Happiness is Real (UK/Dir. Quinton Baker/8 mins) – a moving documentary from first-time filmmaker Quinton Baker – sees transgender activists take to the streets of Oxford, England to fight anti-trans sentiments using the power of graffiti and street art.

Victoria (Spain/Dir. Daniel Toledo/7 mins) follows a bittersweet reunion between a trans woman and her ex, sparking tension and long buried resentment. Directed by award-winning filmmaker, Daniel Toledo, Victoria also features acclaimed trans actress, writer and director Abril Zamora (The Life Ahead, The Mess You Leave Behind).

All films will be available to view from 17 – 28 March 2021 via the British Council Arts YouTube channel as well as being part of the BFI Flare digital programme on BFI Player and associated platforms.

Pain and Glory (2019) **** Cannes Film Festival 2019

Dir: Pedro Almodovar | Penelope Cruz, Antonio Banderas | Drama, Spain 117’

Pedro Almodóvar has never won the coveted Palme d’Or but here he gets another chance to prove his impressive talents at portraying with probing insight and humanity a variety of tortured characters both male and female. Pain and Glory is a uniquely piquant and personal portrait that takes us into his own heart through the story of another struggling filmmaker. Once again, as we enjoyed in Julieta, this is a confident and passionate affair resonating with the work of many great auteurs before him, Fellini springs to mind, and the film is seductively set to a score by Alberto Iglesias. But this is one of his most subtle almost sensitive works to date that feels convincingly honest and spontaneous, while quailing away from theatricality it is elegant and self-assured. Maybe the Spanish director has finally let down his guard and bared his soul in this rather delicate drama. It follows one Salvador Mallo (his longtime collaborator Antonio Banderas who plays his alter ego with feeling) a filmmaker who has lost his way and now reflects mournfully on his past in lonely solitude as the present quietly collapses around him. And we feel for his quiet pain in every scene as the narrative unfolds in the context of other minor stories. Finally the fourth wall is broken and we discover the truth, in rather an abrupt finale. Mallo opines “a great actor is not the one who cries, but the one who knows how to contain his tears”. Pedro Almodovar has finally come home, but ironically Banderas wins the award. MT

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL | 14-25 MAY 2019 |Winner Best Actor for Antonio Banderas

 

 

 

5B (2018) **** Cannes Film Festival 2019

Dir: Dan Krauss, Paul Haggis | US, Doc 95′

A new documentary from Oscar nominee Dan Krauss (The Kill Team) and Paul Haggis delves into the history of the first ward in the world for people with AIDS, at San Francisco General Hospital. The film focuses on the unsung heroes, a small collection of nurses and caregivers who banded together to provide courage, compassion and, crucially, touch to those devastated by the HIV/AIDS epidemic of the early 1980s. Even pets were allowed to visit their afflicted owners and partners were invited to make the ward their home. 

Spiking their film with moments of sharp humour, the result is a poignant tribute to this tragic time in American history, and a celebration of the quiet heroes worthy of renewed recognition, although the directors do demonise those medical professionals who exercised prudence in their treatment of the patients. Particularly, top orthopaedic surgeon and head of the San Francisco surgical team, Dr Day, who decided to wear protective garments because she wanted, quite understandably, to avoid being infected from the spurting blood of infected patients. Also unpopular was President Reagan who introduced a raft of measures to protect those working in AIDS care. Reagan even considered exiling the sick to their own private island – as the Venetians did to stamp out the plague – and one AIDS sufferer jokes: “we’d be happy to go if it was Santa Catalina island”. Yet it was an era were America was just not ready for people coming out, let along dying at the same time, so these draconian measures were hardly surprising.

Combining archive footage and interviews with those involved and affected, Krauss and Haggis explain that those people first infected with the virus in the late 1970s went downhill rapidly, often dying within months, even weeks. As fear spread throughout the community of San Francisco and beyond, AIDS sufferers lost their jobs and were kicked out of their apartments. One dying caretaker’s desk was even burnt in the parking lot of his building. In contrast, those pioneering individuals, who offered loving support, talk of their own memories: Rita Rockett even staged parties once a week in the ward, offering musical entertainment and food. Grateful patients were allowed to say: “they loved her to bits, but not to death!”

With the arrival of protease inhibitors – antiviral drugs that block the disease – fatalities eventually went into decline in the late 1990s. And many of the talking heads featured in the documentary have lived to tell their tearful tales. Well-paced and informative, 5B is a fascinating film that could have even added a positive twist in the fight for AIDS. These point towards immunity and even the possible eradication of the disease in the not too distant future. MT

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL 2019 | GOLDEN EYE DOCUMENTARY COMPETITION

 

Sebastiane (1976) ** Home Ent release

Dir: Derek Jarman, Paul Humfress | Score: Brian Eno | UK Drama 86′

Derek Jarman aimed to dignify his voyeuristic gay romp on the beach by basing it on the legend of a martyred Catholic saint 17,000 years ago. His Sebastiane is a lowly Roman soldier exiled due to his religious beliefs to a remote Sardinian outpost along with a small platoon of buff but bored fellow combatants, and he falls foul of his gay commander’s advances, and eventually the rest of the men. Jarman tries elevate Sebastiane to almost Christ-like proportions yet there is nothing in the story, as he tells it, that is remotely worthy of such. Religious beliefs aside, Sebastiane rejects his suitor simple because he doesn’t find him appealing.

Back in the 1970s this was ground-breaking stuff, as gay porn – or any other kind of porn – was almost not-existent: the opening scene at Emperor Diocletian’s Christmas party sees the all male revellers rocking massive phalluses and festive masks; then beachside in Sardinia with full erections, lots of slow-mo snogging and close-ups of naked bottoms and rippling muscles. They certainly must have had fun on that shoot which was filmed naturalistically in three and a half weeks by a professional crew and largely non-pro cast. Brian Eno’s minimalist sound design now feels rather dated, as does the gay subject matter, but it’s easy to criticise in hindsight because the world has obviously moved on, and Peter Middleton’s photography and Jarman’s mise en scene still remain spectacular and evocative. Shame then, about the slim narrative. Sebastiane flopped at the box office all over Europe, and lost the Stones’ their money.

Yet there are important themes at play in this remarkable piece of independent filmmaking: religious intolerance is of course the most important one; but there is also submissiveness versus domination; the role of the outsider and the underdog. And Jarman sees Sebastiane as the eternal victim of society. Quite why the dialogue is in Latin is an anomaly. Ordinary soldiers would speak Italian, as Latin was spoken only by scholars and dignitaries at that time. Is this another attempt to elevate the characters, or simply to make them sound more exotic and alluring?

Nowadays Sebastiane might be criticised for animal cruelty: at one point the soldiers chase down a small piglet, taunting and butchering it savagely with sticks. There are also racist taunts mocking Jews and Christians alike. But it is the storyline that is the least adventurous aspect of the feature, with Jarman overplaying the voyeurism at the expense of telling us a fascinating and little known tale about another man who suffered for his religious conviction. A missed opportunity despite its artistic merit. MT

SEBASTIANE IS ON BLURAY AND ITUNES FROM 18 MARCH 2019

 

 

 

Sauvage (2018) ***

Dir.: Camille Vidal-Naquet; Cast: Felix Maritaud, Eric Bernard, Marie Seux, Philippe Ohrel; France 2018, 99 min.

Felix Maritaud blazes through this stunning sortie into the life of young rent boys in Strasbourg, focusing on their aimless, dangerous and lonely lives. The harsh psychological realism is complimented by explicit sexual encounters, which often border on the abusive.

He plays Leo a rent boy in his early twenty who lives purely for the moment, using drugs, clients, petty crime and lots of day-dreaming to get through each day. That changes when he meets Ahd (Reinard), a fellow male prostitute and falls in love with him. Leo is not worried that Ahd is actually looking for a ‘sugar-daddy’ long term, and asks Leo to do the same: “That’s the best that can happen to us”. But Leo is stubborn, chasing Ahd down and endangering his relationship with an older man. After being sexually assaulted by two others who cheat him out of his money to boot, Ahd does Leo a last favour, beating up one of them and stealing his money, which he shares with Leo. But all the stress has taken its toll on Leo’s health, and a female physician (Seux), one of the few women in the feature, consoles him with maternal affection. This scene stands out in contrast to the film’s opener, when Leo is examined by a ‘doctor’, who turns out to be a client working for the IRS, who enjoys the role play. After Ahd has left for Benidorm with his lover, Leo finally follows his advice- after a particularly brutal (off-screen) encounter with a client known for his sadistic tendencies. His middle-class ‘protector’ Claude (Ohrel) wants to take him to Montreal for a new start in life – but does Leo really wants to be saved?

Leo shows all the symptoms of emotional regression due to neglect: he is a doleful child looking for love in all the wrong places, because society has marginalised him. Sauvage is not just about sex: it also shows the tenderness in a gay relationship, particularly when Leo goes with a man old enough to be his father: Leo cuddles him, both men getting more out of the encounter than penetration alone would have provided. But Leo is already a very fragmented character: he spends hours alone in the woods near the male gang’s pick-up place, and then over-compensates with hectic behaviour at parties and in dance clubs. His day dreams of emotional security are shattered in reality – and he has himself to blame. Solitude is his way back into childhood, while his waking hours are a nightmare of humiliation and deception. Leo doesn’t know how to connect these two selves, and the lack of concurrent identity makes him alien to himself.

SAUVAGE is an impressive first feature for writer and director Camille Vidal-Naquet. DoP Jacques Girault contrasts Leo’s dual existence with nightmarish images of the time spent with his clients, the aimless wandering in the streets, and the haven of tranquillity in the sunny woods. Vidal-Naquet is always non-judgemental, avoiding sentimentality at all costs. The result is a rather melancholic walk on the wild side. AS

ON RELEASE FROM 1 MARCH 2019 NATIONWIDE

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