Steve McLean | Postcards from London / 2018

stepping out of the picture

by Douglas Messerli

 

Steve McLean (screenwriter and director) Postcards from London / 2018

 

Steve McLean’s follow-up film to Postcards from America, about the work of artist-AIDS activist David Wonjarowicz, is a very strange film indeed. And many critics have found the work not only to be highly stylized (which it is), but have seen it as a rather snobbish gay work (Mansel Stimpson, Film Review Daily), “mannered” (Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian), and ultimately boring.

    And in some senses, particularly if you take the film at literal face value, perceiving this tale about a young gay boy from Essex who, bored with small-town life, escapes for the London Soho scene just after it had been stylish center for art, as about a search for and identification of beauty, it is, at best, as Branshaw puts it “Too much of a good thing,” or as others have insisted, a self-conscious panegyric about gay art, literature, and post-coital conversation. After all, at various times the small group of rent boys with whom the central figure, Jim (the sculpted beauty, Harris Dickinson) joins up, call themselves the “raconteurs,” reading up on figures such as Caravaggio (particularly in reference to Derek Jarman), Titian, Lucien Freud, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Constantine P. Cavafy, E. M. Forster, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Joe Dallessandro, and Francis Bacon so that after sex they can provide their elite clientele, made up of mostly of artistically involved older gay men, with informed conversations.

     Accordingly, these expensive rent boys, live in a kind of imagined past, joyfully offering delightful sex and informed discussions to a group of men who often even have direct connections to the halcyon days of Soho history.

    Even beyond the talents of his colleagues David (Jonah Hauer-King), Jesus (Alessandro Cimadmore), Victor (Raphael Desprez), and George (Silas Carson), Jim, given his great beauty becomes muse to an artist Max which mimics the relationship of Bacon and his lover George Dyer, and suffers from Stendhal Syndrome, a real disease wherein the viewer becomes so emotionally involved in art that he actually mentally and physically enters the art work, in Jim’s case fainting as he joins in a tableaux vivant of the artwork conversing with the real artist—often works by his favorite artist Caravaggio.

     A former member of the raconteurs, Paul, who has left the group because of his desire to make even more money, is able to even manipulate Jim’s gift by offering up his services to curators and

gallerists to determine which works of art of real masterworks (which all ultimately floor the young sensitive boy) or fakes, which leave Jim with no reaction.

     Along with the artificially-lit highly colorized scenes, the numerous tableaux vivants, and the intellectualized chatter that at times sounds as if the characters had been educated by reading a mix of encyclopedias and Wikipedia, all presented in a manner that reminds one at times of Jarman’s films and at other moments scenes stolen from out of the films of another gay artist, Sergei Paradjanov, Postcards from London does appear at moments to be centered fully on the issues of beauty and artistic truth, not exactly the most engaging of cinematic topics, especially since McLean has otherwise removed these rent boys’ encounters from all traces of actual bodily sex.

      But then I didn’t read this work the way most of the others seemed to approach it. For me, instead, it shares much in common with another earlier paean to London life, Absolute Beginners (Julien Temple’s 1986 film based on one of writer Colin MacInnes’s London Trilogy). Like that work, I see this film as a joyous satire of the London scene, a kind of gay Pilgrim’s Progress, where in our young gay boy is drawn to the world outside his home only to be robbed (he spends his first night in a rented cardboard box where all of his money is stolen) before hooking up with other young gay men who quickly educate him on how to live and communicate in the new world.   

     For a great part of the film, Jim’s education is a passive experience wherein events happen to him; and his first forays out of that world are simply for greater financial gain; two other boys, moreover, attempt to recruit him for their more contemporary roles as raconteurs, drawing him out of the past into the 21st century. But in the end, “lucky Jim” (with purposeful reference to the novel by British novelist Kingsley Amis) realizes that he needs to stop viewing art and begin to make it; instead of experiencing beauty, by the last frames of the film, he is determined to himself create it, leaving the rent boy and the other manipulative worlds that “use” art to define life behind.

    For so much of the film, Jim is told by artists and friends to keep quiet, to pose in silence, or on occasion, to spout his learned knowledge like an apt student. He himself is seen as a thing, objectified as an object of beauty, his cock (referred to as his “money”) described as a sizable aesthetic prize. But from this new perspective we can comprehend all the palaver about art as a somewhat satiric jab at the old-school gab fests of closeted gay men nightly meeting up to chat about beauty more that actually experiencing it. Indeed, like Jim in some senses, the very sight of “real” art utterly terrifies them, sending them into a spin.

    But Jim, the wise pilgrim, realizes that there is an entirely new world out there that neither sucks at the tit of the art world nor wishes to manipulate it, but like his original friend, simply creates it, even if it consists of nothing more painted cardboard boxes (at the sight of which, incidentally, Jim also swoons, making it clear that it is real art). Art is something alive, not a dead form to build a life upon. Jim is special. Even the great art of the past comes to life in his presence, endangering his own life, not permitting him to simply use it as a subject for conversation or a tool for financial survival.

    By the last “postcard” view of his new world, Jim has found his true god within himself, and we can almost see him strutting down the highly colored world of people engaged in all sorts of sex, music, and conversation come to garish life as in Absolute Beginners.    

 

Los Angeles, March 7, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (March 2026).