Friday, June 27, 2025

Geoff Burton and Kevin Dowling | The Sum of Us / 1994

gay domesticity

by Douglas Messerli

 

David Stevens (screenplay, based on his play), Geoff Burton and Kevin Dowling (directors) The Sum of Us / 1994

 

Australian directors Geoff Burton and Kevin Dowling’s 1994 feature film, The Sum of Us, represents a new wave of LGBTQ films that occurred in the early 1990s, mostly from Canada, Britain, Australia, and continental Europe—although in the year just prior a major studio had released, finally, the first widely distributed film on AIDS—almost a decade after the far superior works by Arthur J. Bressan, Jr., John Erman, and Bill Sherwood—Jonathan Demme’s Philadelphia, and a larger independent studio, Strand Releasing, had introduced US audiences to the new gay wave director Gregroy Araki.

     If several of these new gay and lesbian works also represented fresh and exploratory cinematic procedures—Araki’s films The Living End (1992) and Totally Fucked Up (1993), Todd Haynes’ Poison (1991), Derek Jarman’s Edward II (1991), Julien Isaac’s Young Soul Rebels (1991), Atom Egoyan’s The Adjustor (1991), and Tom Kalin’s Swoon (1992)—while The Sum of Us, like Philadelphia was very much of the old school. Based on the 1990 play by David Stevens, Burton’s work was basically a restaging of the play, opening scenes to the out-of-doors and moving the action between rooms and spaces in a manner that a stage drama could not, but primarily retaining the conceits of theater,  including the theatrically interesting (although not completely original) “breaking of the fourth wall,” permitting the characters to speak directly to the audience, but which on film had been used for more than a half-century or even earlier if you include the audience gestures of several silent films such as Roscoe Arbuckle’s Coney Island. What might have appeared as somewhat post-modern techniques in the basically naturalistic play on stage, simply reiterated the theatricality of the film.


      Yet it is precisely the conventionality, the domesticity, and utter normalcy of The Sum of Us, that is crucial to this work. Steven’s gay story was not at all about gay rebels, perverted murderers, or Genet-like obsessives, but an everyday working Aussie plumber, Jeff Mitchell (Russell Crowe) living with his absolutely “normal” heterosexual father Harry (Jack Thompson) both struggling and stumbling about in their attempts to find love in their lives.

      What is utterly different in this film is that the plumber is gay, the fact of which the father is completely comfortable about, even encouraging his reticent son to go in search of the wonder of love that he had found his wife.

      At the time of this film’s release what might have surprised and even shocked some of its viewers is just how accepting Harry is about his son’s sexuality and how surprisingly chummy he is with the handsome boy, Greg (John Poson) whom Jeffrey brings home. Greg is himself somewhat taken aback by a father who, unlike his own (Bob Baines), does not go into a homophobic rant or, as he later does when he observes his son on the local TV broadcast of a Gay Parade celebration, a mad denunciation and denial of his offspring. The fact that the two of them piss together on Harry’s prize tomatoes, share open conversations about safe sex, peek at the images of a gay magazine Harry has brought home for his son’s wanking pleasures almost “freaks out” Greg on his first visit to Jeffrey, quickly short-ending what might have been enjoyable sexual romp in bed. Greg admits that he finds the whole situation just too “domestic,” and hints that he, like so many gay men have learned to behave in a society that objects to their existence, enjoys the secretive and illicitness of gay sex more than a totally honest and open encounter with another man. For the same reason, perhaps, Greg finds Jeff’s Aussie shower room phrases—Jeff plays “footy” (soccer) with the local straight boys—something that “turns him on.”


       His own son, when he appears to be rejected by Greg, has no energy for imagination, and sits out his funk by drinking and smoking joints.

       Meanwhile Harry is himself busy with a new woman, Joyce Johnson (Deborah Kennedy) who he’s hooked up through a dating service. Both widowers very much enjoy one another’s company and are looking forward to perhaps making it permanent. For Harry it all depends, given his deep love and devotion to his boy, on how she gets on with Jeff. And it would seem, since Jeff—despite his tendency to take any temporary hesitancy of a potential sexual partner as a statement against about his entire existence—is otherwise a kind soul and a handsome “bloke,” as father describes him.

      Unnecessarily, Stevens has also adds another layer of incredulity to his plot by making Harry’s mother and Jeff’s beloved grandmother (Mitch Mathews) a woman who late in her life established a lesbian relationship with a friend Mary (Julie Herbert) which surely helped to make Harry such an open-minded person when it comes to LGBTQ sex, and provided Jeff with a sense of sexual alternatives as he was growing up to realize his “differences.” 


      Although it is a clever device to embrace a larger part of the gay community within his play, in the film at least it appears to diminish the notion that a very ordinary father who loves his son can so quickly embrace his lifestyle. Harry, evidently, had a few extraordinary opportunities to help him with regard to what to most straight parents of the day might have seemed a Herculean leap of faith. And if Jeff seems to be unphased by being a gay man when, as we soon discover, parents such at Greg’s made life for a young gay man hell, we now have an explanation, something I suggest the work might be better without. This father/son team after all, are not so ordinary as they first have appeared.

      Certainly, they are a complete oddity to the otherwise perfectly nice Joyce, who, when she encounters a copy of a gay porn magazine in the Mitchells’ house and is told by Harry that he bought it for his son. suddenly turns into a flustered Christian rightest, who is shocked that her lovely boyfriend does not stand in opposition to his son’s behavior instead of encouraging it. She storms out of the house even faster than Greg has escaped its “unnatural” naturalness.

      Harry, without even words to describe such irrational behavior reacts, too predictably I argue, by having a stroke, turning him into a wheelchair-bound paraplegic, unable to even talk, a burden for a son still on the prowl for love.


      Actually, it appears to give Jeff a new purpose in life, as he rolls his father down the grocery aisles and through the local parks communicating with the now frustrated father, who feels unfortunately blessed with the ability to still hear and comprehend what people say, responding to his son with a series of bell rings, once for “yes,” two for “no” and numerous rings when he gets excited or confused. That frustration arises mostly from the fact that in caring for him, Jeff is no longer seeking what the father is afraid he will eventually no longer be able to experience, the joy of loving and caring for someone who isn’t a member of the clan.

      On both of the outings we observe, Jeff once again encounters the gentle gardener Greg who we know would be the perfect mate to him if he’d only allow things to go where Greg might now like to take them. Obviously, having lost his family entirely, Greg has now perceived the necessity for the domesticity he once disdained.

       When Jeff encounters Greg in his own territory, so to speak, planting flowers in the public park, he finally gets up the nerve to leave his father alone for few moments in his chair and chat with his would-be lover. The two are so nervous meeting up again that we’re fearful that they’ll simply stutter themselves into another separation, but they do finally manage to make a date for the very next night, Greg promising to bring his toothbrush.

        Harry meets Jeff’s news with such relief and excitement, that like his son, he is almost unable to express his feelings as he rings out too many electronic bells and, his eyes welling up with tears, he begins to weep with joy. Jeff doesn’t know what to make of his father’s reaction to the possibility that their private domesticity might be shared with another. Wiping away his father’s tears, he calms him, asking him to return to the simpler pattern of one for “yes,” two for “no.” The ayes have it, and both push off into a purple sunset with their hearts once more aflutter for the possibilities of love.

      It’s a sentimental film, but its message is so very straight-forward and loving for a community that seldom gets that kind of unadulterated respect and affirmation that one can’t help but be moved. And after having witnessed literally thousands of heterosexual films end similarly I felt a special fondness for the queer Sum of Us.

       In a time when the LGBTQ community was searching for more radical solutions to centuries of homophobia and for the general ignorance of their existence, and were testing crueler and perhaps more honest evaluations of what all those years in the closet had meant to the minds and souls of queer folk, along came an Aussie comedy that painted a picture of family life not so very radically different from that depicted by American simpleton mythmakers like Robert Frost, Frank Capra, and Norman Rockwell. Your grandmother could like this movie—even if she wasn’t a dyke.

 

Los Angeles, October 2, 2021

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (October 2021).

 



Mike Hoolboom | Positiv

body and mind

Mike Hoolboom (director) Positiv / 1998

 

Once again in this part of the film, Hoolboom employs a split camera with, in this case, beginning with a single figure, the filmmaker himself, speaking about the body and AIDS, as around him the screen gradually comes to represent some of the many images of film, popular culture, scientific data, and hospital and doctor care of which the filmmaker speaks in his monologue.

     Gary Morris, writing in Bright Lights Film Journal characterizes this first section as a poetic discussion of the “sense of displacement that accompanied his [the filmmaker/narrative voice’s] HIV diagnosis: ‘I felt like a virus that’s come to rest in this body for a while.’” And Morris, moreover, notes that ultimately the narrator comes to find “a curious solace in his betrayer, as if a kind of logic and pathos coexist with the disease.”

     Morris is not incorrect in his statements, but there is so much more going on in this first monologue. The narrator first sets up a kind of dichotomy between two kinds of people: “bodies and minds,” and his dialogue becomes a sort of antiphon or what some might see as a battle of body and mind. Associating himself with the former, as any active sexual gay being in his prime might, he realizes, at first, that the virus has come to rest in his body for a while, but that it doesn’t belong to him anymore, like “I’m trying on a new suit that won’t fit.” Because he is now left simply with his mind, he imagines himself wandering through the streets like Michael Jackson, imagining along the way what parts of other bodies he might replace with his own: “everything here can be replaced or traded in except for the cellulite army which has conquered my thighs, or the small hands which were always too clumsy to play Satie.”

 


     Thinking of practicing Satie reminds him of his family, remembering how his own mother drove him to the edge of town, “saying that’s it, you can’t come back now, good luck. That was the day you left home, crouched in the cab of a Molson’s Brewery truck headed for Kapaskasing.”   

    And it his brother Daivd, whom he first told of his illness, he most seriously calls up, recalling this determination to become a second being (he had three nipples, a so-called supernumerary nipple evidently not being that uncommon, the discussion of which is cut from the final film; but I think it adds to a better comprehension of the work.)

   He notes that given his relationship with his family previously he has always feared “the image of your own infirmity, bedridden and helpless, that you would once again become a child.” Yet through the agency of the disease, he has “managed to return there, to the place where memory comes from, to the history of your failures, in the body of the family.”


“Dave always said that was the beginning of his double that he was growing from the chest out. He always kept a bandage over it so no one would know, one day his double would appear in the world to take his place and he could get on with his real business, or maybe, he’d wink at me,  maybe he was already gone.”

 

     Telling his brother about his illness, he argues, made his sickness real, because it was shared with someone else. A thing of the mind with doctors charting its development again becomes something of the body:

 

“He was the first one who was told you were sick, and you’d never seen him cry before, not since he was six or seven and that was just because he caught his hand in the door. As you held each other and whispered I love you, you knew why it had taken so long to tell him. Your sickness was real now, because it lived independently of you. From now on it would live in your brother as a reminder that we would never be young again, never young enough to change what had already happened. Before you spoke your illness was a professional concern discussed with the doctor, drawn up in charts and tables. If your body had become a danger in your sexual relations, with Dave it had become again a house, a place where blood was thicker than the years we’d grown apart, a place where the certainty of death was no longer disguised by our youth.”


     And there his mind takes him to the realization that there are more dead than people living, and that perhaps the dead define a country, people who have died who are most close to others living nearby. From there his thoughts turn to the notion of friends, a speculation wherein some of his saddest and most profound statements are expressed:

     

You think: it’s hardest for your friends, when they met you for the first time there was no way to know that they would have to bury you one day. You all seemed so young, and while they’ve continued to age at the usual rate, all of a sudden you’ve grown so very old, so close to the time of your ending. Mostly you would like to apologize for asking so much of them. Because your slide into sickness is slow, monitored by the machines at the hospital, you don’t notice at first that you’re any different than you ever were, until they come to visit. And while they are gracious and kind and you love them so much, you read the whole cruel truth on their face. You watch yourself dying there. This look hurts you more than all the fevers and sweats and blind panics because where once there was love, now there is only fear, and this vague, terrible sense that all this could have been avoided if only you’d been a little more careful, that somehow you did this to hurt them, or that they weren’t enough so you had to go out and get more, and after you crossed that line you were never the same.


     Now that I have AIDS I keep tripping over myself, and sometimes when I’m talking with a friend I’ll just nod right out. When I come to they have this terrible expression on their face like, ‘Are you alright?’ and of course I am. I’m fine, I’ve always been fine, only they can’t see that. My body keeps getting in the way.

    Last week Donna came to visit, my best friend. She told me that 6,000 cells die in the body every day and that every seven years we’re completely new people. Donna’s always coming up with crazy shit like that. So I guess I just have to wait it out. I think I’m gonna remake myself as a fat ice cream queen with perfect skin. Donna says that sounds just perfect and then she kisses me because it’s time to go. Visiting hours are over.”


     Here finally, he confronts the vision of the self as body, the “thing” laying on the bed about who friends ask. Because he is not just body, he is also mind, in a condition of being “alright,” a condition they cannot see in the body. His friend Donna visits and entertains him with another possibility of becoming someone else, a new body with new cells.

     Yet finally, since visiting hours are over, our narrator is left alone, no longer primarily a body, but a mind left to imagine its own state, which is almost all one can do, locked up in the small coffin of a hospital bed. In a real sense, our lonely narrator comes to see the truth of “Cognito, ergo sum,” that the body he inhabits is just a container that cannot even hold the emanations and reverberations of the mind. In the struggle between body and mind, it is the mind that wins out over the body, even if the body ultimately can bring that mind to closure. The body, associated with disease, family, and country is a delimited entity, while the mind can even imagine creating a new self.

     And it is, accordingly, a positive single image of the narrator with which this film ends.

     Finally, I must mention, that it is the viewer’s mind that the filmmaker engages in his quickly moving, shifting images, imagines not locked into the so-called real or bodily world, but this narrator’s memories of film, childhood images, and scenes that only the imagination can create. I have attempted to place a few of these fast-moving series of images near to which they occurred in the narrator’s discussion of mind and body.

 

Los Angeles, June 26, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (June 2025).

Douglas Messerli | A Mind Struggles to Know What to Do with the Body: Mike Hoolboom's Panic Bodies / 2025 [Introduction]

a mind struggles to know what to do with the body: mike hoolboom’s panic bodies


by Douglas Messerli

 

Mike Hoolboom (director) Panic Bodies / 1998 [Introduction]

 

In 1989, after donating blood, Canadian experimental director Mike Hoolboom was told that he was HIV-positive. During the six years after his diagnosis, he helmed 27 more films, altering his subject matter in order to focus on HIV/AIDS and the surrounding issues, including, as the Wikipedia entry describes them, “the impermanence of existence and sexuality.”

     In 1993 he directed Frank’s Cock, an eight-minute film on an unidentified man, acted by Callum Keith Rennie, who noted that he considered himself the “Michael Jordan of sex,” while still losing his lover Frank to AIDS. The film, which I review in an earlier volume, represented its ideas and subject matter in the form of a monologue accompanied by a split-screen of four images. It won the Best Canadian Short Film award at the Toronto International Film Festival.


    In 1998 Hoolboom released his feature-length film titled Panic Bodies, like Frank Cock’s concerned with the body, its changes, invasion with AIDS, and ultimate fragmentation. Most of the film’s 6 sections were released separately and are still often shown that way, so here I treat them as separate films, even though their true significance lies in their being show together. Below is a review of all its various parts, along with a discussion of some of their scripts, so that the reader might get a true sense of the full-length masterwork, one of the most important works of what I have described as “the second wave” of films concerning AIDS.

    As Jim Sinclair, writing in Pacific Cinematheque summarizes the full work:

 

“We have come to expect only the dazzling and uncommon from the prolific, prodigiously talented, and frequently transgressive Mike Hoolboom, perhaps the most important Canadian experimental filmmaker of his generation, and the startlingly beautiful Panic Bodies delivers the potent goods. Like much of Hoolboom’s gorgeous, unsettling recent work, Panic Bodies is infused with an AIDS-era horror at the body under siege, with a palpable sense of wonder and revulsion at our flesh-and-blood corporeality, at ‘being a stranger in your own skin.’ The film’s multi-levelled meditation on morality moves from rage to reverie, and unfolds in six often-hallucinatory episodes: Positiv, a multi-screen monologue about AIDS; A Boy’s Life, a masturbatory revel; Eternity, a reflection on Disneyland and death, 1+1+1 a devilish, pixilated black comedy; Moucle’s Island, a nostalgic lesbian idyll; and the concluding, elegiac Passing On.”

Frank Ripploh | Taxi zum Klo (Taxi to the Toilets) / 1981

compulsion

by Douglas Messerli

 

Frank Ripploh (screenwriter and director) Taxi zum Klo (Taxi to the Toilets) / 1981

 

Ripploh’s film is so similar in some respects to Christopher Larkin’s A Very Natural Thing (1974) that it seems almost uncanny. The central figure of Taxi to the Toilets, Frank (Ripploh) like David in Larkin’s film, is by day a schoolteacher. But in this case he is the more promiscuous of the couple, even taking his student’s homework to read with him into his toilet stops waiting for a cock to be shoved into a near-by glory hole. What’s more, as you might expect in a German-made film, Frank is rather strongly into leather and light S&M.


     His domestic partner, who much like David cooks, cleans, and keeps the balcony plants in their apartment, Bernd (Bernd Broaderup) is the manager of a movie theater which shows late-night gay films. Frank met him on one of his many nightly travels throughout Berlin in search of a gay trick. And like the couple in Larkin’s film they enjoy one another in their simple bedroom sex.

     Yet in this film, made only 7 years after A Very Natural Thing, we begin to see ugly diseases on the horizon. Later in the film Frank is hospitalized with hepatitis, told that he will have to remain there for several weeks. Ripploh’s work, however, is more of a comic version of Larkin’s more argumentative piece. So putting on his clothes over his hospital gown, Frank orders up a taxi to take him to various city public toilets to find a pickup; when he finally does discern someone standing outside in the cold of a locked toilet, this would-be sex companion, upon espying Frank’s undergarments, flees the scene.

      Given Bernd’s preference that they move to the country to raise food and perhaps a few animals instead of remaining in the city, Frank does briefly attempt to limit his sexual appetite—but without success. Most nights his lover is left alone, like Larkin’s David, hugging the pillow instead of Frank. One of the most outrageous lines of the film is Frank’s campy statement—once he has laced up into his leather gear and found his prophylactics and cocaine—“Don’t wait up. I’ll be late tonight.”

 


      Another clever moment of this work consists of Frank attempting to tutor at home one of his students not at doing well in the class, while in the other room Bernd and their transgender friend watch a German educational film warning young boys about pervert pedophiles. As Frank attempts to help the boy in arithmetic, the child hands him some of his metal toys, suggesting they play “horsey,” as Frank does everything possible to return his student’s attention to the lesson at hand.

      Despite the film’s jocularity, however, Ripploh’s work points in the opposite direction of Larkin’s optimism. As Frank’s adventures accelerate, for example, he meets up with a gas station attendant whose number he had scribbled down in one of his student’s lesson books earlier in the film. The attendant (Peter Fahrni, also listed as an assistant director, perhaps a relative given that 

my Swiss great-grandfather shared the same name) plays out the humiliating acts of beating Frank across his back before pissing over his entire body.


      More significantly, attending an annual drag ball for which this year Frank dresses somewhat like Scheherazade and Bernd as a sailor, the story-teller missing his midnight departure only to arrive the next morning at his school still in costume, Bernd having left him in anger for all their missed opportunities to live a more regularized life.

      Obviously, Frank has committed a kind of symbolic suicide by now having lost his mode of employment on top of his increasing ill health. Giving up on all sense of order, he hands each of his students a single die (the singular of dice), encouraging her or him to roll for the chance of performing the worst acts she or he might imagine committing, including beating up one another, destroying the classroom, and tearing off one another’s clothing, which the camera catches them accomplishing before cutting, for the film’s last scene, to show Bernd at a nearby petting zoo, holding a lamb in his arms.


     It is doubtful that Bernd will continue to sacrifice his own life to a man who cannot put an end to his sexual escapades; besides, we have already seen Bernd at a travel agent discussing various possible tourist destinations. The sacrificial beast, most likely, is Frank who has somewhere lost his life in his many voyages between the taxi and the toilets.

 

Los Angeles, September 25, 2020

Reprinted from World Cinema Review and My Queer Cinema blog (September 2020).

Christopher Larkin | A Very Natural Thing / 1974

where is love?

by Douglas Messerli

 

Christopher Larkin and Joseph Coencas (screenplay), Christopher Larkin (director) A Very Natural Thing / 1974

 

    Even from the beginning of A Very Natural Thing we quickly perceive that the two gay men, David (Robert Joel) and Mark (Curt Gareth), who meet one night at a gay bar, are basically incompatible, and we wince a bit as David soon pushes their night of good sex into a more serious relationship.

      In the first scene of the film, we have seen David being released from his vows as a monk from a Schenectady, New York, monastery. The night he meets Mark he has driven down to New York City to visit his long-time gay friend Alan (Jay Pierce). He is, in short, a man attracted to if not still committed to spiritual beliefs, a man who has lived an ordered life of commitment, if only to the church. And he soon becomes a public-school teacher, which obviously requires a new dedication to some of the most important of normative cultural values, the education of the product of those heterosexual unions. As a teacher, just as we suspect of Mark, he has of necessity closeted off his sexual life from his daily job.

      Mark, a businessman, it is clear, picks up tricks mainly as an exciting alternative from his overly regularized schedule which, we suspect, he uses as a kind of relief valve from the highly formalized world into which he is locked. To David he even admits that at times he does also have sex with women, suggesting that his very societal role demands some restrictions to his central gay attractions.

     Clearly, however, the sex with David has been highly enjoyable, and surprisingly, perhaps even to himself, he asks if he can see him again after returning from a two-week trip to Cleveland to see his parents.


     David, it is apparent, is already quite hooked, yelling out a greeting to a stranger on the street who just happens to be wearing the same kind of suit coat Mark has worn.

     They do get together upon Mark’s return and before long are enjoying weekly outings together at Coney Island, the zoo, museums and elsewhere, even rather openly sentimentally rolling down hills. And David has begun asking the kinds of questions which Mark dismisses by dubbing David as his “fucking romantic friend.” Playing with the popular culture of the day, the writers call up the Erich Segal film Love Story from 1970, Mark responding to his friend’s predictable question “Do you love me?” with the comeback, “Love means never having to say you’re in love.”

    Yet despite Mark’s obvious resistance, David pushes the issue until we observe him moving in with his new lover shortly before he begins cooking, house cleaning, and gardening. Mark is neither a deep thinker nor a natural talker, and the tensions within him build up, despite David’s attempts to bring the problems into the open. It begins with him picking up a boy waiting outside the subway stop, and soon after expands into late-night walks in Central Park and other inexplicable absences, not so vastly different from the life of any heterosexual married partner.

     The causes for his cheating, if you want to call it that, are something quite different, however, from simply tiring of one’s wife. On the contrary Mark is still sexually very attracted to the man waiting at home. For the reasons I’ve outlined above and simply because of living outside of the constraints of normative values, queer life almost demands alternatives, what Mark and others of his kind describe as a “perfect relationship that still permits a couple to live separate lives.”

      David’s friend speaks of this in similar terms, a slightly older man explaining that he has grown used to his lover demanding outside sex and permits it, except if he were to see a beautiful young face more than once in his lover’s bed, whereupon he would quickly join him to break up any false romantic attachments. There is almost a kind of cynicism in this kind of “give and take” concept which instead of entailing compromises consists of a “commitment with limitations.”

     Yet even David comprehends those pulls in his companion, agreeing to explore new possibilities with him on Fire Island, where, however, the moment David wanders off with another man, Mark becomes jealous, and when Mark suggests group sex, David breaks away unable to continue with the anonymous groping of strangers.

     Their differences demand they reluctantly break up, with Mark, at first, half-heartedly attempting to lure David back through sex, David perceiving all along it is still a kind of test, a trap that puts him at a distant embrace without the deeper emotional attachment he seeks.


     Of course, heterosexuals also feel these pushes and pulls. It is no accident that nowadays gay marriages sometimes last longer than heterosexual ones, in part because we have been forced to be more honest, as Larkin’s film makes clear, about these various issues. It is hard to imagine that one night or even several in someone else’s arms would end in immediate divorce as it appears almost always to end in the cinema romances of husbands and wives, male and female.

     And ultimately, in this very optimistic work, David finds someone with whom he is sexually in love and to whom he can also talk in Jason (Bo White), a photographer who was formerly in a heterosexual marriage with a child, and who has had to struggle with these very issues in order to come out. Accordingly, he remains close friends with his wife, is committed to participating in the Gay Pride March, and puts the very words that one might imagine David wanting to hear in his mouth “Do you love me? “Why not move in together?” etc. by requesting them instead the standard smile alert: “cheese.”

      Only it is now David who has become skeptical, determined this time not to force commitment upon himself or someone else, but base their future not on their needs but their wants. The wait-and-see attitude this time around, bodes well for what the audience which cannot help but to perceive as a necessary coupling as the two skip naked through the Cape Cod surf.


   Not surprisingly, particularly given David’s own discomfort about the true meaning of what an annual march might mean and the film’s seeming argument for a marriage-like commitment in a time of new liberations, A Very Natural Thing was not so “naturally” well-received. Yet its positive message was something totally unavailable previously—when the vast majority of LGBTQ films ended either in suicide or with the heroes (and studios) hiding or transforming their sexuality into something else—or a few years later with AIDS looming over the horizon.

     In later films, moreover, these questions were often simply shuffled under the table because of AIDS, with more traditional marriages not only able to protect the LGBTQ figures from disease but finally being embraced by the society at large. Only a handful of films between the 1970s and early 1980s could substantially take up these issues.

     Sadly, the director of this work committed suicide in 1988. One only hopes the cause was not because he had not found a lifetime commitment or was suffering from AIDS, both of which seem possible given the time and the issues his film raises.

 

Los Angeles, September 25, 2020

Reprinted from World Cinema Review and My Queer Cinema blog (September 2020).

My Queer Cinema Index [with former World Cinema Review titles]

https://myqueercinema.blogspot.com/2023/12/former-index-to-world-cinema-review.html Films discussed (listed alphabetically by director) [For...