monster of love
by Douglas Messerli
Lawrence Johnston (screenwriter and director) Night Out / 1989
Years before gay marriage, Australian director
Lawrence Johnston’s film revealed that monogamous gay couples can live in as
conventionally restrictive and deadening relationships as heterosexuals. In
fact, if Johnston’s Night Out can be believed—a work I’d argue is as
accurate about certain kinds of gay relationships as possible—it can be even
worse.
The
film begins with Steve’s (David Bonney) birthday, a few friends gathered with
his lover Tony (Colin Batrouney) in their house to celebrate. It is apparent
from the first scene in the movie, where Tony intensely kisses Steve in the
kitchen, that the couple are very much in love, even Steve admitting to a
friend as he enters the other room that “I’m loved.”
That same evening, however, Steve is heading off on a business trip for
several days, suggesting that he’ll just get a taxi to the airport, while Tony
insists that he drive him. But even as they say their goodbyes at the drop-off
stand, we sense that Steve is uncomfortable about publicly expressing his love
as he keeps pushing away his lover as he attempts to kiss him goodbye, finally
breaking away so that he doesn’t miss his plane. Although this registers even
on first seeing this work, one chalks it up to the times, when two gay men
kissing in public was still not a common site, and made many of that and
earlier generations somewhat uncomfortable. And with good reason; AIDS had
quickly made gay men over into a new generation of freaks and monsters who some
people feared carried disease that could spread even by sharing the same room,
the same air.
But
there is a sense of dissatisfaction and loneliness about Tony, as, after
returning home, he quickly dresses and goes out to a local bar for a few
drinks. On his way home, however, he stops at what appears to be a series of
semi-closed off spaces, perhaps part of the public bathrooms or just a sea-wall
near the ocean, and there is fucked by a hot young man (John Brumpton). Their
encounter is one of the hottest gay sexual scenes of 1980s filmmaking.
Just as they finish up, however, they are attacked by a group of brutal
gay-bangers, who corner Tony and beat him brutally. They also take him to
automatic bank-teller, threatening him with further mutilation by knifepoint he
doesn’t reveal his code. Tony finally does, but the machine seems to be out of
order. And they throw him out of the car, stomping on his body again before
speeding off. He spends most the of the night passed out on the streets and
wakes up in a hospital,
one of their friends from the night before
visiting him.
Tony is badly hurt, with deep cuts on both sides of his face, and
serious wounds to his chest and neck. But his major concern is that Steve
should not discover what he has done to end up in this situation. And when
Steve returns, worried about his lover’s condition, Tony tells him that he’s
simply been mugged on his way to a local grocer, and they’ve stolen his
billfold and half-beaten him to death.
But
somehow, despite how clearly Tony is still suffering, Steve holds back his disbelief,
continuing to make sense of the event. And when, a day or so, latter, the man
with whom Tony had sex shows up to return his discovered billfold, it’s clear
to Steve that his lover his not telling him the full story.
When finally Tony reveals the truth, their relationship changes
radically as Steve suddenly feels, somewhat rightfully, that he has been
betrayed through Tony’s lies. But there is also a sense, as Tony himself puts
it, as his having deserved the beatings and near-death experience he
encountered. And Tony suddenly realizes that the intense love he has felt for
Steve, the repeated intense kissing sessions have come primarily from him, that
perhaps he has overwhelmed the other in a relationship that Steve has not
totally wanted. It is suddenly as if all this time Tony realizes that he has
been, a least symbolically, raping his friend. Steve even admits that he has
difficultly expressing his feelings, that love as an act is not easy for him.
What this dark drama begins to reveal is that Steve has never been the
sexual being, the sensual gay lover that Tony as tried to make him out to be.
His passiveness, his standoffishness, and even, one might describe, his prudishness
reveals he is perhaps still not totally comfortable as a gay individual.
The film ends with Steve taking off into the night on bicycle, following
the same path his lover must have taken as he found his late-night partner who
offered him what he cannot. There is much brooding and long determination of
whether he can return to Tony or not. But the more terrifying scene is when the
gaunt, almost Frankensteinian individual Tony has become turns his pale face in
a silhouette for the camera: we suddenly know that the relationship is over,
his physical needs having overpowered what his partner has been capable of. He
has become the monster of his lover’s worst fears.
This film, which was screened at the Cannes Film Festival, is perhaps
one of the most significant gay dramas of the period, with also an incredible
score which includes Liza Minelli singing Sondheim’s “Losing My Mind,” and
songs by the Pet Shop Boys.
Los Angeles, September 4, 2023
Reprinted from World Cinema Review (September
2023).
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