Three Highlights of Modern Gay Cinema

In 2005 Crash defeated Brokeback Mountain for the Best Picture Oscar in what is considered one of the greatest errors, if not the greatest in the Academy’s history. With its gay subject matter, Ang Lee’s homosexual cowboy love story starring Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhal was too risquee for Hollywood. Being from small town Nebraska, a deeply conservative state in the center of the United States, I remember a furious uproar when our independent cinema decided to release the film. People wrote into the newspaper saying they would never step foot in the theater again. A little more than 15 years later it is hard to imagine the same scandal at the release of an LGBT film. The world of cinema has thankfully opened its arms to telling more diverse stories, including those of the gay community, and I would like to think that my hometown has even becoming accepting, at least to the idea that these films exist. Since the Crash fiasco, Moonlight, an independent coming of age film about a poor black gay boy directed by Barry Jenkins, a gay black director, took home the top prize at the Oscars, audiences fell in love with Arnie Hammer and Timothée Chamalet in Luca Guadagnino’s devastatingly beautiful Call me by your Name, and Marvel is now planning to include it's first gay superhero in Chloe Zhao’s ensemble film The Eternals. Brokeback Mountain may not have won the Oscar, but it helped open the floodgates to the possibility of more international, mainstream, and independent gay stories.

There has been no shortage of excellent gay films in the past couple years, including Dolor y Gloria, Mathias and Maxime, Portrait of a Woman on Fire, Ammonite, and Supernova, some of which have already been written about on this blog. Here we are going to look at three of my favorites:

End of the Century - Lucio Castro - Argentina / Catalonia

End of the Century by Argentinian director Lucio Castro is gorgeously shot in Barcelona, and is a story of discovery, sex, and possibly love between two men, the Argentinian Ocho (Juan Berberini) and the Catalan Javi (Ramón Pujol) that takes place over two time periods and one alternative reality. The film begins with a series of looks of hungry desire between the two as Ocho spots an attractive man in a Kiss rock band shirt from his balcony, and then again at the beach. He then looks for him on Grindr (the film displays the modern gay hook up app fuck and forget ‘dating’ culture in a no nonsense realistic way), and finally invites him up after seeing him on the balcony again. They have sex, and meet again that night and once together the men realize that this is not the first time they met. Coincidentally they had both had their first gay experience together at a friends house twenty years before at the beginning of the 21st Century.

The film then travels back in time to show us this encounter. At first we do not realize the fact that we have changed time periods because the actors look exactly the same. No makeup or digital technology is used to make them look younger, and no younger actors were hired to interpret their younger selves either. It is a cinematic stroke of genius that we saw more recently in Spike Lee’s Da Five Bloods where our middle aged veterans are suddenly thrust back into war torn Vietnam in flashbacks. Like in Lee’s film, Castro gives us the impression that we are seeing our protagonists as they see themselves in their memories. It also makes their first romantic experience so much more effective than it would be coming from other actors or from their own digitally altered faces (We’ve already seen that this does not have a very positive effect from Scorsese’s The Irishman, at least in this writer’s opinion). In the flashback we see the blossoms of a physical attraction and the irresistible repressed desires of these men for other men finally come forward. However, it was a different time 20 years ago, and Ocho, afraid of his sudden realization, possibly even ashamed, leaves Javi with nothing more than a note the next day, and disappears for what would be forever, until their fateful meeting 20 years later. 

In the new century their lifestyle is more accepted, Grindr makes casually meeting other men easier than ever, Ocho just got out of a long term relationship, and Javi is in an open relationship, married with a daughter. The third part of the film imagines an alternative reality where the two men stayed together after their first encounter. It is a crushingly realistic fantasy sequence that many of us have certainly explored in our own day dreams. The question, what if?, what would have happened if I would have acted differently? Did I miss out on my happy ending? The film flawlessly links together the past, the present, and the impossibly lost yet poignant possibility of an alternative life. It explores the trajectory of gay men coming of age right when their sexuality was beginning to become acceptable. It is about the choices we make and the opportunities we take advantage of or do not. After seeing it I will never look at a Kiss shirt again. It falls as if from heaven, as if some unseen God was sending a direct message. It is not a brand, or a band. It is an order. Don’t be afraid, just Kiss. You know you want to.

And then We Danced - Levan Akin - Georgia

And then We Danced takes place in modern Georgia, a far different world from sexually liberated Catalonia. It tells the story of love between two young dancers, Merab (Levan Gelbakhiani) and Irakli (Bachi Valishvili) who dance in a traditional group. Our protagonist is Merab, a young, attractive young man with big brown eyes, a thin face, a large nose, and curly brown/blond hair. Director Levan Akin leads us through the film by focusing fixedly on Gelbakhiani’s fascinating face. Through the use of extreme close ups we wordlessing watch Merab’s expressive face, Gelbakhiani’s features are so subtly emotive that we feel like we can read his mind. He silently portrays a range of emotions including jealousy as Irakli takes his place in a dance, nervousness as he begins to feel something else for him, contagious lovestruck excitement when they begin to explore their feelings, fear when people begin to doubt his sexuality, anger when he injures his ankle, and devastating, irrepressible heartbreak when it becomes clear that any relationship with Irakli, or any openly gay life in general is nearly impossible given the reality of Georgian society.

The film was met with protests in Georgia when it debuted due to the gay subject matter, shwing just how unlikely it is for our protagonists love to succeed. There is a fantastic one shot scene near the end of the film where the camera follows Merab walk through a party in an apartment looking for Irakli. Merab’s slow pace is juxtaposed by happy, dancing bodies bobbing and flowing around the flat. When Merab finally finds his lover, Irakli tells him that he is moving back to his village and is to be married. They will likely not meet again. Merab keeps his composure and leaves the flat. The camera stops to look at a window and a few moments later we see Merab walk out below and burst into tears in the arms of a friend. In another tear inducing scene Merab’s brother, with whom he is constantly at odds, accepts him and offers him the most loving advice he can: Leave Georgia.

The subject of traditional dance is used as an analogy throughout the film. It is something that many countries and cultures are deconstructing and reimagining, dance being so often thought of as being between a man and a woman, and Merab’s dance troupe is traditional in every sense of the word. Dance and any type of art that preserves the identity of a society should be celebrated, yet it should also be analyzed, and, perhaps, in some cases, adapted to serve the modern population if it can still play a social role in their lives. Dance is Merab’s passion, yet he is told that he does not have the manly physique necessary to play the part of the man on stage in a performance. Dance, like Georgian society itself, is too conservative and rigid, too steeped in prejudices of the past to let its people live in the present. There are two instances when Merab deserts the structured, rigorous dance he is taught, and it is in these instances where dance is more than just a historical artifact, but something living and breathing. Dance is serving it's true purpose in these sudden outbursts, to bring people together, to celebrate, to flirt, or to make a statement. Merab strives so hard to fit into this world, to fit the profile of the traditional masculine dancer, but doing this means abandoning his own identity. The traditional Georgian dance performed as it was in the past may be impressive and beautiful, but it does not serve today’s generation the way it served past generations. The only way to keep it alive is to change it.

Moffie - Oliver Hermanus - South Africa

Moffie, like And then We Danced, is set in a time and place where being gay is unacceptable, in this case South Africa in the 1980s. The films title is a derogatory insult in Afrikaans translated into English as ‘fag.’ In Moffie, director Oliver Hermanus depicts a world not only out of touch with sexual politics, but also with race and gender. Most of the film is set in a Full Metal Jacket style boot camp documenting the military service that was required in South Africa until 1993, where men were brutally molded into racist soldiers to fight against blacks on the borders. The life for blacks, gays, and men in general is depicted as a hellish experience. While the soldiers often appear to be beasts, one asks oneself how can they be anything else when they are put through this type of brainwashing, exhausting military training. 

The film is excelenty shot, and features a Hans Zimmer-esque booming soundtrack by composer Braam du Toit. The overhead shots of the train carrying the soldiers through the barren landscape with the disturbing sounds of Toit’s horns sets the tone for a film that is going to be violent and difficult to watch. The harsh sun and the orange dirt burn the soldiers as they are sculpted into soldiers. The landscape is just as hostile as the commanding officers are. 

We are guided through all this pain and suffering by Nicholas, a shy, beautiful young man who survives boot camp trying his best to go unnoticed. Before heading out, his father gives him a porn magazine to ‘help’ him through the womenless months ahead. Yet his father should know better as we are shown in a harrowing flashback, again, shot in one single take, of Nicholas at the swimming pool as a boy. An attractive man catches his eye and he decides to follow him to the locker rooms to look at him as he changes. Another man catches him and brutally drags him to the administration to accuse him of being a pervert, and all of this is captured in one long harrowing nightmarish take, a memory that irreparably scarred Nicholas for life, and foreshadowed the world of toxic masculinity that he was to enter into.

Yet Nicholas is to experience a sexual awakening at the boot camp. One night, left cold and abandoned in the desert by their drill sergeant, another soldier takes him and gently kisses him before falling asleep. Nicholas is immediately taken with him, though they must hide their desires as two other soldiers are soon ridiculed and expelled for getting caught having sexual relations. The entire troupe is called out to mortifyingly humiliate them by screaming Moffie in unison.

The film takes a hard look not only at gay issues, but at masculine issues in general, something that today’s men are still trying to overcome. The idea that they have to be strong, emotionless, and fierce in order to protect themselves, their family, and country, and the way they were forced into this role either literally as seen on Moffie, or subliminally as happens even today, is deeply psychologically damaging. When Nicholas goes to find his crush at the end of the film and takes him to a paradiscal beach to go swimming we have hope that though both men have been through hell and back, that they will be able to overcome it, but it soon becomes clear that what they were forced to experience will be hard, if not impossible to completely tame.