I remember a time when pretty much every film with gay subject matter was about a self-hating homosexual. That apparently was the only way to be gay until about the early 80s (or so we were told), so I'm not sure what this monotonous bag of retro-clichés is supposed to contribute in 2013. I found it impossible to have much sympathy or interest in a lead character, who in a major city of a liberal Western country remains unaware or at the very least deluded about his sexuality, until one day some same-sex hottie walks into his life and he has to acknowledge, although with a lot of tortured macho bluster, that he likes cock after all.
The characters never develop much beyond the most basic: closeted, hand wringing gay dude, his non- closeted object of desire (he smokes grass, he's so free spirited!) and the suspicious wife who is so one-note, it made me feel sorry for the actress who had to play her.
It is the type of gay narrative straight film-makers seem attracted to. Maybe that is because they have little awareness of how tired this subject matter is and they can just about imagine themselves in the predicament: What if one day I woke up and realised I was attracted to men, a little bit like Gregor Samsa wakes up one day in Kafka's Metamorphosis and realises he is a large beetle. It's with the same sort of detachment from any sort of psychological development that homosexuality is dealt with here. It doesn't help that the film-makers are clueless as to how gay sex works in the unrealistic "look ma, no lube" butt sex and limp dicked fondling depicted.
It's not that I don't believe that this narrative doesn't still occasionally play out in liberal Western countries, but what relevance does it have for gay or straight audiences and what are we to take way from it ? I'd advice the film-makers to take a look at Andrew Haigh's Weekend or Stranger by the Lake by Alain Guiraudie to see where gay cinema is at in the 21st century, because this feels like a film that would have have been considered relevant in 1975 and even then Germany had the unapologetic gay characters of Fassbinder's films.
This gets one extra star for the cinematography, which I thought was beautiful. Otherwise don't bother.
The characters never develop much beyond the most basic: closeted, hand wringing gay dude, his non- closeted object of desire (he smokes grass, he's so free spirited!) and the suspicious wife who is so one-note, it made me feel sorry for the actress who had to play her.
It is the type of gay narrative straight film-makers seem attracted to. Maybe that is because they have little awareness of how tired this subject matter is and they can just about imagine themselves in the predicament: What if one day I woke up and realised I was attracted to men, a little bit like Gregor Samsa wakes up one day in Kafka's Metamorphosis and realises he is a large beetle. It's with the same sort of detachment from any sort of psychological development that homosexuality is dealt with here. It doesn't help that the film-makers are clueless as to how gay sex works in the unrealistic "look ma, no lube" butt sex and limp dicked fondling depicted.
It's not that I don't believe that this narrative doesn't still occasionally play out in liberal Western countries, but what relevance does it have for gay or straight audiences and what are we to take way from it ? I'd advice the film-makers to take a look at Andrew Haigh's Weekend or Stranger by the Lake by Alain Guiraudie to see where gay cinema is at in the 21st century, because this feels like a film that would have have been considered relevant in 1975 and even then Germany had the unapologetic gay characters of Fassbinder's films.
This gets one extra star for the cinematography, which I thought was beautiful. Otherwise don't bother.