Seven Movies, part 1

There's something quite magical about the number seven: the seven wonders, the seven deadly sins, the seven heavens, seven days in the week, seven colors of the rainbow, seven seas, seven hills of Rome & of Istanbul, seven sages of Greece, seven notes in music, seven liberal arts - not forgetting The Magnificent Seven or Seven Brides For Seven Brothers. This year, something quite extraordinary happened: in the wake of Moonlight winning last year's Best Picture Oscar, not one or two, but seven gay-themed films with the potential to cross over to mainstream audiences and compete for top awards were released. I don't include any lesbian-themed films in this story, quite simply because I haven't seen any of them, while I've seen all seven films that will be discussed here and in the next story.

What's more incredible is that of these seven movies, each has a different nationality and each covers a different aspect of the gay experience. 120 battements par Minute (otherwise known as BPM) is the child of Moroccan-born French writer/director Robin Campillo - and is about gay activism in the face of AIDS, the story of the French branch of ACT UP in particular.

Call Me By Your Name is based on a novel by André Aciman, an Egyptian-born Sephardi Jewish writer of Italian and American nationality, with a screenplay by James Ivory, an American who has spent much of his long career being mistaken for an Englishman, and directed by Italian Luca Guadagnino. It's about the first love affair of a young man of intellectual family and personal background, in the idyllic countryside of Italy.

God's Own Country is a British film written and directed by Francis Lee and set in Lee's homeland, Yorkshire. It concerns the gay sexual desire among rural working people.

Una Mujer Fantástica (A Fantastic Woman), co-written and directed by Chilean filmmaker Sebastián Lelio concerns the experience of losing one's companion and how LGBT people are powerless when facing such a loss, trans people even more so.

Beach Rats, an American film written and directed by Eliza Hittman, is about a Brooklyn teenager who has his gay awakening while trying to navigate through the homophobic waters of his blue-collar environment.

Inxeba (The Wound), directed by South African John Trengove, is about the circumcision ritual of the Xhosa tribe that takes place in the mountains and is considered as the initiation passage to manhood, and how that passage is complicated when man-love enters the equation.

Finally, Tom of Finland, directed by Dome Karukoski, born in Cyprus of a Finnish mother and an American father, brings to the screen the life and work of artist Touko Valio Laaksonen (aka Tom of Finland), one of the most influential and celebrated figures of twentieth-century gay culture.

Filmmakers of different nationalities, using different film-styles, and highlighting different facets of the gay experience; that's the sort of diversity we like. It helps that all seven films are worth watching and have all made an impression outside the gay festival circuit, as well as within. Today I'll deal with two or three of those; which leads me to something that I want to share with you: I'm not physically able to continue writing stories that each takes more than twelve hours to finish. It just takes too much time - and I have to put the rest of my life on hold to work it out. In order to avoid a burnout, I will divide the big stories into two or three parts. I'm not making any money from GayCultureLand, so I'd rather the writing be a joy and not an ordeal...

I will begin with 120 battements par Minute (BPM). Robin Campillo has been on my radar, since Entre Les Murs (The Class), in which he was the screenwriter and editor. He won the César (the French Oscar) for that - and the film was nominated for a Best Foreign Language Oscar. Then came the Eastern Boys, which he also directed. It was nominated for various major César awards, as well as winning awards in Film Festivals (Venice, Santa Barbara, Kraków.) One of my favorite gay-themed films, I reviewed it here.

120 battements par Minute (BPM) is even better: as the Guardian's Peter Bradshaw says in his 5/5 star interview, "Robin Campillo’s 120 Battements Par Minute is a passionately acted ensemble movie about ACT UP in France in the late 80s, the confrontational direct-action movement which demanded immediate, large-scale research into Aids. The movie compellingly combines elegy, tragedy, urgency and a defiant euphoria." He concludes his interview with "This film has what its title implies: a heartbeat. It is full of cinematic life."

Variety's Guy Lodge is equally enthusiastic: "A rare and invaluable non-American view of the global health crisis that decimated, among others, the gay community in the looming shadow of the 21st century, Campillo's unabashedly untidy film stands as a hot-blooded counter to the more polite strain of political engagement present in such prestige AIDS dramas as Philadelphia and Dallas Buyers Club. Candidly queer in its perspective and unafraid of eroticism in the face of tragedy, this robust Cannes competition entry is nonetheless emotionally immediate enough to break out of the LGBT niche."

"Arthouse patrons who didn't see Campillo’s remarkable 2013 breakout Eastern Boys may recognize him chiefly as the editor and writing partner of French auteur Laurent Cantet. Though Cantet has no direct creative involvement in BPM - he earns a thank-you in the closing credits - the spirit of their collaborations is plainly present in Campillo's lively, literate script, written with AIDS educator and activist Philippe Mangeot. Cantet and Campillo's Palme d'Or-winning The Class, in particular, is evoked through its reliance on contained, formalized group debate as a story propeller. Instead of a high school classroom, however, the four-walled narrative center here is an anonymous college lecture theater in central Paris, where members of AIDS activist group ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) gather on a weekly basis to discuss their campaign strategy."

"As in Eastern Boys, Campillo's predominantly candid, unvarnished shooting style wrongfoots viewers ahead of his gutsiest manipulations of sound and image - in this case, a stark, unsubtle passage of widescreen visual poetry that turns the Seine purple with the blood of the needlessly damned. The oblique title, meanwhile, refers not just to medical heart rates as bleakly tracked on hospital monitors, but to the euphoric rhythm of the electronic music that soundtracks ACT UP's occasional disco breaks, in which matters of love, death, and ideology are briefly lost to the rush of the dancefloor, and strobe-lit faces fade into dust motes and blood cells. In one of BPM's most gently funny scenes, a well-meaning parent is ridiculed for suggesting 'AIDS is me, AIDS is you, AIDS is us' as a campaign slogan. By the end, you see where her critics are coming from: Campillo's sexy, insightful, profoundly humane film is most moving in those ecstatic interludes where, for a blissed-out moment or two, AIDS is no one at all."

I will add that watching the film made me get goosebumps, smile, and tear up in equal measure. All the young actors are amazing and the 80's-90's are perfectly captured. I know - I've been there. Here's a scene soundtracked by the Arnaud Rebotini Remix of Smalltown Boy:

This is the film's trailer:

The film was submitted by France for this year's Oscars. Unfortunately - and unjustly - it wasn't short-listed. It is, however, nominated for an impressive 13 Césars. I hope it wins them all.

The next film, Call Me By Your Name, is even more celebrated. Early on in the Oscar race, it was even considered as a possible favorite: wouldn't it be great if gay-themed films won the Best Picture Oscar two years in a row? It did eventually receive four major Oscar nominations, Best Picture among them, but it's the favorite in only one category: even so, the Best Adapted Screenplay award will be a fitting tribute for 89-year-old gay filmmaker James Ivory, who hasn't yet won an Oscar, even though he made some of the most iconic movies of the 80's and '90s, like Maurice, A Room with a View, Howard's End, and The Remains of the Day.

One of the film's four Oscar nominations is for Best Song, the Sufjan Stevens-penned Mystery Of Love:

The IndieWire's David Ehrlich considers the film as the best of the year. In his words, "It's 1983, 'somewhere in Northern Italy.' The height of summer and all of the neighborhood teenagers are in heat. Elio Perlman (Timothée Chalamet, keeping the promise he showed in Miss Stevens last September) is still a virgin. A 17-year-old American whose father, a local celebrity, is an eminent professor specializing in Greco-Roman culture (Michael Stuhlbarg), Elio has sprouted from the soil like the apricot trees that surround his family's villa, and he's impatiently waiting to bloom. Scrawny enough to be mistaken for a child but sophisticated enough to be mistaken for a man, Elio is a multilingual music prodigy who's more comfortable with Bach and Berlioz than he is in his own body. He knows everything and nothing. But he's about to get one hell of an education."

"Every summer, Elio's father flies out a graduate student to stay at the villa and help him with his research - this year's intern is Oliver (Armie Hammer, as sensational here as he was in The Social Network, but similarly a touch too old for the part). Oliver is 24 and his body is an epic unto itself, as big as any one of the ancient statues that have been dredged up from the local seas. Arrogant, eager, and almost suspiciously handsome for an aspiring historian, the mysterious new visitor often seems as though he got lost on his way to a Patricia Highsmith novel. While much of the film feels stretched between the feverish eros of Bertolucci, the budding warmth of Mia Hansen–Løve, and the affected stoicism of James Ivory (who, at 88, has a co-writing credit on this screenplay), a thin shadow of suspense creeps along the outer edges of each frame, priming viewers for a very different kind of pivot than the one Guadagnino deployed during the third act of A Bigger Splash."

"As the film progresses, Elio and Oliver begin to share more tangible things: Bike rides, errant touches, an unknown desire to have sex with one another (that last one is a biggie). Crucially, however, Elio is as conflicted about his own passions as he is those of the boy next door. His tastes are molten and volatile - he performs the same piano piece in a wildly different style every time he plays it, much to Oliver's amused frustration. When he's not busy gawking at his brawny infatuation, he's enthusiastically trying to deflower the French girl down the street (Esther Garrell, of the New Wave Garrells), who wears her wardrobe of summer dresses like she's trying to shame away the other seasons."

"Telling this story with the same characteristically intoxicating capriciousness that has come to define his work, Guadagnino doesn't dwell on looks of questionably requited longing. He's not Todd Haynes and - with the possible exception of a long take mid-movie that follows the two leads around a fountain and endows the space between them with a palpably physical sense of attraction and denial - he doesn't try to be. Instead, he stays attuned to the raw energy of trying to feel someone out without touching them, of what it's like to live through that one magical summer where the weather is the only part of your world that doesn't change every day."

"Rippling with nervously excited piano compositions and shot with immeasurable sensuality by Thai cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom (Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives and Arabian Nights), Call Me By Your Name is a full-bodied film that submits all of its beauties to the service of one simple truth: The more we change, the more we become who we are. Like the Latin prefixes that Oliver and Mr. Perlman trace back to their roots or the antiquated artworks that resonate because of how much the world has changed since their creation, Elio learns that growth - however wild or worrisome it might seem at the time - is the greatest gift that he can give himself."

"Watching him slowly come to that realization is an unforgettable and enormously moving experience because of how the film comes to realize it, too. Guadagnino lives for the climactic portion of this story when feelings are finally transmuted into action and Oliver's true nature breaks through the marble bust of his body (Hammer's warmth in these scenes is extraordinary). The details are best experienced for yourself, but it's safe to say that movie lives up to the book's steamy reputation, and Chalamet and Hammer throw themselves at each other with the clumsy abandon of first love. Growingly increasingly divorced from its source material as it goes along, the final beats of Guadagnino’s adaptation galvanize two hours of simmering uncertainty into a gut-wrenchingly wistful portrait of two people trying to find themselves before it's too late. As Elio's father puts it in a heart-stopping monologue that every parent might want to memorize for future use: 'Don't make yourself feel nothing so as not to feel anything. What a waste.'"

"Leaving us with one of the gorgeous new songs that Sufjan Stevens wrote for the film, this achingly powerful story - a brilliant contribution to the queer cinema canon - breathes vibrant new life into the answer that Marguerite of Navarre gave to her own question. 'I would counsel all such as are my friends to speak and not die,' she said, 'for 'tis a bad speech that cannot be mended, but a life lost cannot be recalled.'"

Mr. Ehrlich is so eloquent that there's nothing more to add, except for that the film precisely evoked moments of my teenage years. And, isn't it funny, how these moments usually happen in the summer? This is the film's trailer:

I hope that the film wins all four of the Oscars that it's nominated for, including Best Picture and Best Leading Actor for the amazingly talented Timothée Chalamet. This is a behind-the-scenes feature with the director and the two young actors:

Finally for today, a gift from the United Kingdom: God's Own Country takes place in rural Yorkshire, in the Spring. Young farmer Johnny Saxby numbs his daily frustrations with binge drinking and casual sex until the arrival of a Romanian migrant worker for lambing season ignites an intense relationship that sets Johnny on a new path.

It is amazing that God's Own Country is director's Francis Lee's feature-film debut. There are wisdom and confidence in his direction. The two leads, unknown till now, give sexy and powerful performances - and the magnetism between them is palpable. They are supported by two excellent character actors, Ian Hart and Gemma Jones.

The film is nominated for Outstanding British Film of the Year in the BAFTA's (the British Oscars) and was nominated for eleven British Independent Film Awards, eventually winning four (Best Film and Best Actor among them). It also won one London Critics Circle Film Award, out of five nominations, as well as scoring wins in the Berlin, Chicago, Edinburgh, and Honolulu Film Festival, among others.

The Hollywood Reporter's David Rooney rated the film with a 9/10 and said: "The hardscrabble lives of traditional farming families and the harsh splendor of the isolated West Yorkshire landscape provide the evocative backdrop to a poignant story of love and self-discovery in British writer-director Francis Lee's accomplished first feature, God's Own Country. Graced by its refreshingly frank treatment of gay sexuality, its casually expressive use of nudity and its eloquent depiction of animal husbandry as a contrasting metaphor for the absence of human tenderness, this is a rigorously naturalistic drama that yields stirring performances from the collision between taciturn demeanors and roiling emotional undercurrents."

"While it's too easy to predict Lee's film being simplistically dubbed Brokeback Moors, that comparison to Ang Lee's modern classic of gay drama isn't entirely facile, even if the social context, the contemporary setting and the highly specific sense of place make this heartfelt yet unsentimental film quite distinct. For one thing, God's Own Country ends not with the lingering music of tragedy but on a note of hopeful wholeness. It deserves to find a receptive audience, even beyond the core gay constituency."

"At the story's center is Johnny Saxby (Josh O'Connor), a repressed gay man in his early twenties who anesthetizes his loneliness with nightly drinking binges and the occasional cold bout of casual sex. He lives a joyless existence with his grandmother Deirdre (Gemma Jones) and father Martin (Ian Hart), who has suffered a debilitating stroke that leaves Johnny responsible for the considerable workload on their sheep farm. It's suggested that, along with his physical condition, Martin's bitterness is as much the result of being abandoned by his wife, who couldn't take the rigors of rural life. Nan isn't exactly a fount of great warmth either, and their disapproval of Johnny's boozing adds to the general mood of dourness."

"With subtle strokes and subdued revelations, Lee's screenplay lays out the development of an unexpected relationship that changes Johnny in ways that are painful, profound and ultimately freeing. At first, he's resistant to his father's insistence on hiring a temporary worker to help during lambing season. And he makes no effort to be friendly when Gheorghe (Alec Secareanu) arrives, taunting the handsome Romanian migrant by calling him a gypsy. But when the two young men are sent off to work a paddock up on the remote moors, requiring them to camp out overnight in a stone shelter, hostility gives way to physical attraction."

"Lee and cinematographer Joshua James Richards make skillful atmospheric use of the rugged hill country, which looks gloomy even in spring, creating a melancholy mood and a somber canvas for the spontaneous eruption of desire between the two strangers. Their first sexual tussle is combative, angry, their naked bodies smeared in grass and mud, like animals. But while they revert to a circumspect mutual distance during the long daylight working hours, their nights together gradually give way to gentler sexual exploration."

"O'Connor is terrific at conveying Johnny's guardedness and bruised solitude; the lingering stares he shoots at Gheorghe reveal not just attraction but also an intuitive emotional response to the Romanian's soulful way with the animals, the land, even the stone fencing. Secareanu is equally effective. Without a lot of over-explanatory dialogue, a beautiful, almost silent exchange happens, in which Gheorghe reveals his deep-rooted ties to rural life while Johnny starts reevaluating his own inheritance in a less resentful light."

"When Martin has a second, near-fatal stroke, Deirdre remains at the hospital with him while sending Johnny and Gheorghe back to the farm to 'see to the beasts.' That spell alone in the house becomes an interlude of easy domesticity and affection that further expands Johnny's understanding of himself. But when his Nan makes it clear that Martin will not sufficiently recover to resume farm labor, the pressure causes Johnny to act out in damaging ways, putting everything he's gained at risk."

"In addition to the very fine work from O'Connor and Secareanu that anchors the drama, stage and screen veteran Jones brings quiet complexity to a role in which silences count as much as words, while an almost unrecognizable Hart gives a moving performance as a hardened man who shows surprising reserves of sensitivity when it most counts. Scenes late in the film in which Johnny takes a more active role in his father's care are among the most affecting moments, albeit while never surrendering director Lee's defining restraint."

"That characteristic extends to the sparing use of music, from ambient duo Dustin O'Halloran and Adam Wiltzie, who record as A Winged Victory for the Sullen; and to the muted color palette and elegant framing of Richards' cinematography. God's Own Country announces Lee as an assured new voice, his own personal ties to the setting reinforced in gorgeous colorized vintage farm footage over the end credits."

This is a montage of scenes from the film:

This is a fanmade video, set to The Days by Patrick Wolf:

Three movies that are so different from each other, which are however connected by their brilliance and by the honest way in which they depict various aspects of the gay experience. All three are must-see cinema. In our next story, we'll continue with the other four movies. Until then, keep yourselves happy and safe!