Since that was a movie addressing queer issues from history, and specifically male homosexuality, I decided I'd continue with a modern film featuring primarily gay men, then watch a modern film featuring primarily gay women, and finish with a movie about historical lesbians -- even if that history is fictitious in nature. And part of that structure was dictated by the fact that I already have my eye on a fourth film in the series that will fit into that slot nicely.
Now, I'm aware this does mean that I am basically not considering movies about trans people. That's only an accidental exclusion based on deciding on this system that otherwise equitably distributes the content between men and women, today and yesterday. Then again, there are fewer such movies, especially fewer movies that treat that subject with any sensitivity -- and since those movies would tend to be more recent, there's a good chance I've already seen them if they've reached any level of prominence.
You could argue that the 2015 Australian film Holding the Man is also a bit of history in that it takes place between the 1970s and 1990s. But I think the distinction I'm really making is between films where you really couldn't even talk about being gay in public, and films where at least homosexuality wouldn't get you thrown in prison, like it did for Oscar Wilde. I'm not going to suggest that being gay has ever been easy, even today when it has been allowed entrance into mainstream popular culture and governance of basic human rights.
I also didn't realize until I started watching Holding the Man that it was an AIDS movie, and it certainly seems relevant to have one of those in the four I'm watching this month.
The film was on my radar because it made waves, to the extent that Australian movies make waves, when it was released back in 2015. I remembered it was very fondly received, but once I'd missed it on its initial run, I never found the right circumstance to catch up with it later. I'm by no means an Australian movie completist, and my year-long series viewing Australian films was a year before that in 2014.
The film stars Ryan Corr as Timothy Conigrave (who goes by Tim), the author of a play and memoir about this relationship with John Caleo (Craig Stott). I'm becoming increasingly familiar with Corr's work as he's appeared in two Australian films I've seen in the past year, Russell Crowe's The Water Diviner and Stephen Johnson's High Ground. He's a charismatic leading man, and his Tim is more the stereotype, to the extent that stereotypes had been established back in 1976 when the story starts. He acts and he's known for being gregarious and flamboyant, though Corr really underplays the flamboyance and you're almost surprised when characters accuse him of being effeminate. Stott's John is the "surprise" in terms of the expectations, as he's more quiet and also a football player. (Australian Rules Football, of course.) Footy, as it's called, is primarily popular in Victoria, and indeed, that's where this film is set. I won't say I recognized any locations, but a lot of place names were very familiar.
The story follows the two over the course of the next 15 years from when they meet and fall in love as high school students, both ostracized by their families initially. There's some improvement in that regard over the years, but in some cases it's more a defeated resignation than an actual embrace of their brother/son and his lifestyle. The film jumps around in time just a little bit, kind of shuffling the deck in time periods, but in a logical way that progresses what we know about the characters and what befalls them, not anything experimental in nature. We witness the pre-AIDS free love period and its unfortunate consequences, and overall, their extreme general devotion to each other, despite the occasional failures to live up to that devotion.
I won't say who gets AIDS, but in any AIDS movie, you know it's not likely to end well. And those scenes are pretty devastating in the commitment to documenting the physical consequences of the disease.
I was really surprised by the amount of support from known names in very small roles. Each man has a father played by an Australian acting icon, Anthony LaPaglia in one case and Guy Pearce in the other. They do ultimately each accumulate maybe ten minutes of screen time, but that's still pretty small in a 128-minute movie. It occurs to me that this is a fairly common practice among Australian actors, to support smaller projects even though they could theoretically have competing offers with more prominent roles from Hollywood. (At least in Pearce's case that could be true, probably not so much LaPaglia.) I can't see someone like Russell Crowe doing this -- he'd make it all about him -- nor someone like Chris Hemsworth, though not for reasons of egotism in his case probably. I can see Hemsworth doing it later in his career.
Then there's also Sarah Snook, who has taken off in the years since (Succession) but was still probably relatively unknown at this point. Finally you have a scene of Geoffrey Rush as a homophobic acting coach, which I was surprised not to see featured in the initial burst of closing credits but rather waiting until the full cast was listed. I know Rush has become problematic/cancelled in recent years (I'm not going to look up the particulars right now) so maybe people were already well aware of it by that point.
Overall this is just a very well made movie about life and love in the AIDS era, never didactic or on the nose in any of the issues it discusses, and always guided by strong performances. I might have given it even more than four stars on Letterboxd except that in the end it ultimately hews to fairly standard presentation and a fairly (sadly) familiar story. It's quite good but maybe just shy of exceptional.
Okay, next week we move on to the first of two lesbian stories, though this third movie is the only one I have not yet identified.
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