This morning, I attended the official commercial opening of
the Angelika Mosaic Cinema and Café in Merrifield VA (near Gallows Road and Lee
Highway, behind the Target) and saw a small gay Danish-American film by Ira
Sachs, “Keep the Lights On”.
A gay Danish filmmaker, Erik (Thurle Lindhardt) has been
working forever on a documentary about the work of filmmaker Avery Willard. There actually is a short film “In Search of
Avery Willard” which I have not seen (descriptive link, as part of "Queerer than Fiction") for Outfest here.)
Already in his early 30s, he plays the hustler scene but has
a girl friend Claire (Julianne
Nicholson) who wants to have a child by him before her biological clock runs
out (a taste of “demographic winter”?)
Living in New York now but traveling a lot, he faces
criticism from those who struggle with “real jobs” (it’s not clear what he
lives on -- although he says that for documentary film you don't write a script, you just start raising money at the outset). He meets an attractive,
smooth-skinned young lawyer Paul (Zachary Booth – when you want Zac Efron!),
falls in love, but soon finds himself dealing with Paul’s drug and alcohol
problem.
The film then traces their relationship for eight years (it
starts in 1998), and actually tries to show the subtle progression of age with
facial lines. Erik finds his capacity to
love really challenged by Paul’s mindless exploitation – yet by convention it
is Paul who should have been the more stable.
Erik and Claire arrange
interventions, at least twice, with Paul going through Twelve Steps at Hazelden
in Minneapolis.
Yet, Erik keeps his organic, earthy intensity all the time. He is not just a head (even though we see him
editing his movie in Final Cut Pro on a Mac). But when Paul is away, he does
meet other people. One of the best
people is Igor (a handsome Miguel del Toro), who I wished would lose his
cigarette. There’s a passionate scene in
a bar (is the bar “Therapy” in Hell’s Kitchen?)
where the mutual unbuttoning is about to occur, when suddenly Erik
throws up. I’ve never seen this happen
in a "real" dirty dancing disco scene. Yet Erik’s intensity
continues.
The film seems episodic, with the introduction of intimacy
often telescoped. It's curious that, even with the sideplot about the girl friend, the gay world in this film seems closed, like it was on another planet: personal growth is for its own sake, regardless of how it could depend on the outside world. On the other hand, the relationship between Erik and Paul sounds like it came right out of Rosenfels (book reviews, April 12, 2006); it would have been easy to imagine a well-polarized pair like this in one of the talk groups at the Ninth Street Center back in the 70s or 80s.
The film was an official selection at Berlin and Sundance
(even though the scenery invokes Tribeca). The official site from Music Box
Films is here.
Will Music Box put the short film about Avery Willard on the
eventual DVD? It has apparently been funded through Kickstarter/
No comments:
Post a Comment