Garth Maxwell | Beyond Gravity / 1989

the young man all ablaze in the rays from the sun

by Douglas Messerli

 

Garth Adams and Garth Maxwell (screenplay), Garth Maxwell (director) Beyond Gravity / 1989 

 

There’s something about the movies of the late 1980s and early 1990s that still possess my heart, as they travel straight into the most important issues of LGBTQ sexuality and the problems that we were gradually perceiving with regard to AIDS, while also making reference to past then-unidentified gay films. New Zealand director’s Garth Maxwells truly underground masterpiece, Beyond Gravity does all of that while still allowing a sense of style than allied itself with the French New Wave.

     Johnny (Iain Rea), the “possibly” Italian-spirited hero of Maxwell’s transgressive little gem, is everything you might want in gay cinema. A slightly naughty boy, who, like Joe Orton and Kenneth Halliwell before him, toyed with the public library system, spots the desperately conflicted science nerd Richard (Robert Pollack), and goes crazy as he replaces the science-boy’s overdrawn library card with his own, obviously stolen from a female, who without any difficulty—given his readiness to display his fake “transgender” credentials for the entire library to enjoy—gets away with by offering Richard permission to check out the tall stack of books he is escaping with about the end of the universe.

     If Johnny is a wild thing, willing to lie, cheat, and simply trick his way to get the boy into his bed, Richard is terrified by even living, knowing from his studies of astronomy that eventually it will all come to a tragic end, particularly when the sun turns red and blows up, freezing out our favorite 3rd planet from the Sun.

     With the aplomb of a magic Italian-Kiwi, Johnny, tossing up basketballs and bananas with equal force upon Richard’s high-rise window, where he lives with his sexually distracted sister Billie (Lucy Sheehan) and her dumb-thinking lover and regular bed-member Pete (Alex Van Dam), breaks Richard out of his sheltered horror, takes him to the beach where the two boys madly make love, and spins him off into a world Richard might never have imagined, but is only too happy to participate in—reminding anyone who has seen Nicholas Ray’s 1955 film Rebel without a Cause—in its complete transformation of the nerdy Richard into Sal Mineo playing against Johnny’s own James Dean, sans any insipid Nathalie Wood. These boys go full force into gay sex, allowing the gravitational pull of the sun to rein in the dutiful doubter Richard.

    It’s absolutely joyful to watch the resistant cynical scientist Richard fall into the arms and an accompanying leather jacket provided by Johnny, with Pete finally realizing that his girlfriend’s brother is perhaps just a little queer. Billie proclaims that her Peter should have been a detective.

     Of course, Richard has to get punished, this time by the original leather-jacker owner from whom Johnny’s stolen his beloved coat. Much blood and pain has to be suffered; after all he’s a gay man who can’t simply escape his suddenly open love without some punishment.

     Yet, unlike Ray’s fantasy wherein Mineo must suffer the true wrath of death, Richard is visited in Auckland’s Stardrome Observatory and Planetarium, as a symbolic replacement of Los Angeles’ Griffith Observatory, by Johnny, who pulls him once again out of his desperate sun- based infatuation back into the “real” Kiwi world.

     Throughout the entire movie, Johnny has been insisting that he needs to travel to Rome to visit the disapproving and unforgiving father who has left him and his mother behind upon Johnny’s own “coming out.” The reformed Richard is now all in tears, and Beyond Gravity seems to be slipping once more into an out-of-control universe, until, in his lime-green Japanese microcar of the late 1980s, Johnny bumbles back to Richard, having (purposely?) missed his flight to Rome.

     As nearly everyone who has visited Maxwell’s little film now recognize, this is a true gem of LGBTQ cinema of the 1980s, which actually appeared in 1989, despite IMDb’s insistence that didn’t get its outing until 1990.

     I believe the Kiwis, whose several gay films have always made a believer.

 

Los Angeles, January 31, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (January 2025).