Nancy Meckler | Indian Summer (aka Alive and Kicking) / 1996

the prince of the apocalypse

by Douglas Messerli

 

Martin Sherman (screenplay), Nancy Meckler (director) Indian Summer (aka Alive and Kicking) / 1996

 

At first Nancy Meckler’s Indian Summer, known in the US as Alive and Kicking (because of the Mike Binder Indian Summer from 1993), seems like another early-to-mid 90s AIDS film that compares nicely with Philadelphia and The Band Played On, both from 1993 as what I describe as the “second wave” of AIDS movies. The major figure of this film, Tonio (Jason Flemyng), a lead dancer of a modern dance company, is HIV-positive and has lost his lover and numerous friends to AIDS and now is about to lose his closet friend Ramon (Anthony Higgins)— who most believe is also his lover but as he describes it has gone beyond that to a deep brotherly love.

     At one point he and his female buddy Millie (Diane Parish) gossip about all of the company members in a manner that you might imagine and are, in fact, encouraged to believe are all having affairs and relationships with one another, homosexual and heterosexual. Millie is herself lesbian and has apparently just broken up with her lover.

     In the first episodes of this film, accordingly, we are presented scenes about dance, including a meeting with the dance company’s founder and major choreographer, Luna (Dorothy Tutin) who is now suffering from severe Alzheimer’s and is herself unable to lead the company into the future that Ramon might been able to. In these scenes we get to know the company members quite intimately, even following them into the showers.

     When the performances at night are over, Tonio, Millie, and the company manager Tristan (Bill Nighy) rush to the hospital to cheer up the Karposi-suffering Ramon. As they have to admit, what with Ramon’s illness and Luna’s condition the future of their world does not look positive. The only positive sign is attached to the terrible HIV that has begun to show up in Tonio’s legs and his stormy pessimistic view of his life ahead. Sex for him seems to now be an impossibility, and even the new drugs which have become available that are helping to extend lives, he chooses to refuse because of the effects they may have on his bodily coordination.

     Almost as soon as we come to know this group of dancers, they receive a call from the hospital reporting that Ramon is dying, and rushing en masse to his side they perform the rituals they have gone through for so many of their friends, talking them into death, and simply being there to help one another bear the pain of losing yet another friend with whom they have daily worked and deeply loved. A nurse scolds them for trying to communicate with a man who can no longer hear them, they responding that at this point they are highly experienced pros when it comes to death and know the territory surely as well as she does, quieting her up.

     Yet all of them have committed their entire lives to Luna’s group, living dance morning, afternoon, and evening; and even later, as their only method of release from the various pains of body and soul, they go “dancing” in the gay bars.

      So likeable and truly beautiful are all these dancers and their dying friend that we can hardly imagine how the film will suddenly take a turn into a more mundane relationship involving far less beautiful bodies and irrepressible energy beginning with their night at the club.

     The beautiful Tonio is obviously a club favorite with several men attempting to make a date with him, all of whom he off-handedly refuses. Indeed one might interpret his behavior as  representing his self-centeredness were it not clear that Tonio is so obviously conceited that such an analysis would be meaningless. He is beautiful and he knows it; but since he is also dying probably sooner than all the others, he commands a central sense of affection and admiration, which strangely some of those who are still healthy resent. His attitude is obviously one of seizing the day.

    After turning down and away from several handsome boys Tonio comes face to face with Jack (Antony Sher), a short and stocky, bald and bearded man who seems to have known Tonio’s beloved Ramon, the fact of which immediately arouses his interest and suspicions—at the funeral a couple have obviously crashed the event claiming to have been in Paris with Ramon, frauds since Ramon had never been to Paris. And he has also quite literally run into Jack at the funeral, no one recognizing who he might be, with Tonio commenting “He’s certainly not a dancer,” and Millie wondering whether he might not be a trick. Tonio comments, “Not his type.”

   In a sense he is intrigued also by the clever responses he receives by someone who seems not as enchanted with him as are all the others, yet still has a connection to his world. At one point. In fact, one might describe Tonio, as Jack almost does, as almost being the self-centered Prince of the Apocalypse. What he actually says, when the two find themselves alone together in a side room, is, “On closer look you do not strike me as that sexy.” When Tonio later leaps on his lap and gives him a kiss, asking “how was that?” Jack responds “You’re too conceited.”

     The two again oddly end up alone, apart from all the others, when finally Tonio demands to know how he knew Ramon, Jack admitting that he is a therapist and Ramon had come to see him for counseling. Tonio can hardly believe the “joker” works by day as a therapist.

      Yet they wind up together at a nearby coffee shop to sober up, Tonio from his spent energy and Jack from the gin he has slugged down throughout the evening. Jack finally explains that he is an AIDS therapist and daily deals intimately with people who have AIDS, revealing why he is hardly taken aback when Tonio tells him, as if to get rid of him, that he is HIV-positive, Jack arguing that every sexual partner should be thought as being just that. But the possibility of a hook-up appears to go no further, with Tonio suddenly admitting that he has been flirting, but he’s now tired of it, as he walks away.

      Meanwhile, back at the dance studio Tristan has decided, after the summer break, to stage an older but renowned piece, “Indian Summer,” which Luna choreographed from Ramon years before, Tristan desiring for the company to go out of business in style. He plans to feature Tonio and another dancer Vincent (Aiden Waters) in the major roles of two male lovers (Luna, having lost memory of the dance itself, describes the work: “It’s about queers, and queers have made my dance company great. Queers have the gift of laughter, as one of the dancers attempts to control his guffaws). Arguing against Tonio’s outright rejection of the idea, Tristan explains that they will recruit an older dancer Duncan, who performed the other role in the original production, to explain the details of the movements.

   We soon begin to perceive, moreover, that the real joys of this film are in precisely such details along with the kind particulars of their behavior I have begun to mention above. For Meckler’s film has suddenly morphed from a story about AIDS to a work centered on a love relationship that outwardly makes no sense, as Jack shows up after the last of Tonio’s performances for the current season, and almost inexplicably the two find solace in one another, having sex, sharing a bed, and finally an apartment as a couple, even while that designation itself becomes a bone of contention between them.

      I will spare the reader the specific details which make this movie so very rich in the viewing of the work, but  in summary, I’ll reveal that Jack finally convinces Tonio to vacation in Greece with him, and the two begin to realize, in the glorious white light of a Greek summer sun and surrounded by cultural monuments to a great world that no longer exists, that aside from their clever jests and significant verbal parries, they are both terribly selfish men, Tonio having chosen Jack, a man who he can safely describe as not “his type” because he does not represent the world of beautiful bodies which have constantly betrayed him through their deaths, and can depend on the down-to-earth hard-working AIDS therapist to be there as his illness begins to progress.

      Jack, on the other hand, has been awarded a beautiful and sexy lover he might never have imagined as well as a real person with whom he can apply his true expertise as opposed to the empty world of evaporating finances and paperwork which is what the AIDS-related job has become.

    Tonio cannot at all comprehend the deep thirst for alcohol that doctors, nurses, and therapists have acquired in their frustrating encounters with the death of their AIDS patients on a daily basis, realizing that things could be different if only authorities might take the disease more seriously and provide financial support. It was at this moment when doctors and therapists began to perceive that there were finally restorative if not curative medicines on the horizon but that governments had put the “gay” disease at a low priority, dooming people just like Tonio and Ramon to death.

      Jack cannot, on the other hand, comprehend why Tonio is not as angry as he is, that he has focused any political anger instead on his attempts to mold and shape his body into movements that represent the great stories of love and death.

      Their clash by night, so to speak, is the age-old struggle between politics and art, an irresolvable battle played out in despair by both sides.

       The most moving moments of this film are when they finally sit down in an attempt to thrash out their differences, the nearly always clever protector Jack finally breaking down into convulsive sobs of a despair which now only the artist can help to qualm.

       When on the very day before the premiere of “Indian Summer” Jack wakes up unable to move his body, suffering from a brain nerve condition that is curable and not directly related to AIDS, but which nonetheless will prevent him from dancing, we almost want to shout that an injustice has been served, surely the script might have suggested another route to our comprehension of the frailty of arts to heal.  Strangely, it is the lost Luna, facing the strange lunar eclipse of forgetfulness, who offers an odd solution: “Why does he have to move his legs?"

      And suddenly this film becomes also a powerful tale of physical impairment, as Tristan selects other members of the company to carry Tonio about space as he, having somewhat recovered the movement of his limbs, makes the important physical gestures of the love and longing which the dance portrays. The dance of the two male lovers, in fact, becomes far more homoerotic and sensuous as we observe Tonio being borne aloft by two other male dancers and he encounters and makes love with his male partner.

       The film ends with a now limping hero, newly released from the hospital, insisting that he and Jack walk home instead of taking the taxi, as he finally speaks of a future in which he will have to teach dance rather than perform it. And Jack, in turn, promises him that he will be there, no matter what happens. At least, although the movie doesn’t say as much, Tonio can begin on a regiment of drugs which will give him a longer life, and, as the Julian Hernández movie I watched the other day argues now provides individuals with a life every bit as long as those who are not HIV-positive. As they walk evidently past the point when they should have made a turn toward their apartment, Jack asks where they are going, Tonio replying that he has no idea, but hopes Jack will join him.

     Of course, it’s a sentimental metaphor, but also an important one for a generation finally beginning to perceive that some relief for AIDS was in the near future if only…. After decades of darkness for that generation, it seems almost criminal, but may still be useful for a younger generation to suggest that such a moment as something like coming out of quarantine after two years of COVID-19. The fears and terrors are still present but renewal seems possible through our commitment and love of our fellow beings.

 

Los Angeles, August 24, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (August 2022).