Lazy Eye: 'an ex-love story'

The subtitle is slightly misleading: the two men who have Tim Kirkman's gem of a film almost to themselves would seem to be the loves of each other's lives, and that's something that never becomes 'ex'. Graphic designer (Lucas Near-Verbrugghe) is quietly having a mid-life crisis when his lover of 15 years ago, Alex (Aaron Costa Ganis), re-enters the picture. The results could be predictable, the casting of one of the two as the weaker figure tempting to make, but this is far too subtle a script, and the actors way too winning as real human beings complementing one another, to follow the expected course of hundreds of small-scale gay movies. It's also probably in the film's favour that this is just a love-story, period, and could with some tweaks deal with a man-woman relationship, but of course with two such attractive characters I'm glad it is what it is.

A week or so ago we watched a film based on a true story about a gay American activist who went - though of course not convincingly - religiously 'straight', and we didn't give a dam(n) about any of the characters. Here you warm to Dean in the very first scene with his optometrist; his quirky, self-deprecating humour saves him from smugness. And anyone whose favourite film is Harold and Maud has to have something going for him.

The desire that's never gone away is realistically handled, albeit with no cock shots, but it's the tensions between the two lovers that power the film once they meet at Dean's retreat in the Mojave Desert. To reveal the turning-point would be a massive spoiler, but the dynamic is neatly summed up in the scene where Alex says he wants only one thing, and Dean replies that he wants so much more, conflicted in his wishes. I find I can't write much more about the film without dragging in the spoiler, so let's leave it at that. One thing seems obvious to me: the dialogue is so realistic that you can't help feeling it must be autobiographical for Kirkman. And the ring of truth in films both great and small is so elusive that this one should be treasured.

That's all I can think of to salute the 50th anniversary of our gay rights milestone, though I did my bit for The Arts Desk a couple of months ago by reviewing the Queer British Art exhibition at the Tate, and no doubt there will be other events through the rest of the year.

Back on the film front, Bong Joon-ho's fantasy-with-a-message Okja, controversially tied to Netflix, has had the effect of making me forswear pork (only a small push was needed) thanks to its terrifying abattoir scene. I've sat through the cinematic depiction of real ones unmoved, as in for example the one which launches a Fassbinder movie (I think it must have been Fox and his Friends), but this was a trigger.

The CGI for the hippopig of the title is spectacularly good, the chase scene one of the best in any movie, though there are OTT performances from Jake Gyllenhaal (terrible) and Tilda Swinton (good in parts, mostly as the darker of two twin sisters).

We also finally caught up with Alejandro G. Iñárritu's Birdman, an essential companion-piece to Louis Malle's Vanya on 42nd Street - I've just ordered up the Criterion Edition of that - in its atmospheric use of an old Broadway theatre. As with Lazy Eye, much of it could transfer to the stage, but here, too, would you find actors as charismatic as their screen counterparts? Michael Keaton is excellent, the younger ones (Edward Norton and the so-compelling big-eyed Emma Stone*) better still.

And the cinematography is superb. The only false note for me comes at the end, not easy to buy after all the hard truths building up throughout the rest. But a worthy Academy Awards winner, certainly, and way more intelligent than most of its ilk. Finally for something completely different: my Arts Desk review of Fritz Lang's 1921 four-story fantasia Der müde Tod (Weary Death, known outside Germany as Destiny).

*Surprised to see I never wrote up my long-delayed reaction to La La Land. Which, having encountered negative reactions from friends whose opinion I trust, I was surprised to enjoy so much on a flight. It brings us back to the Lazy Eye syndrome - if you're charmed by the lovers, you go with it. And I did. Would happily sit through it again any number of times.

The talented Mr Ripploh

I thought I must have seen Frank Ripploh's Taxi Zum Kloh during my closeted but curious student days in the early 1980s, so talked about was it at the time. But if I had, I would have remembered at least the scenes which made it notorious then and which still had us sometimes squirming and looking away last night*: non-simulated sex which makes the grubby rendezvous of Mark Rylance and Kerry Fox in Patrice Chéreau's  Intimacy - and what a surprise we got stumbling into that one out of the heat of a Paris July - seem tame, a shock through a lavatory glory-hole (I'm too prudish online to show you what happens next below, as our hero sits on the bog casually marking school work),

a golden shower, a graphic clinical inspection for STD and a surprising take on child abuse. That last is thankfully moral: two of the gay characters waspishly comment on what would seem to be a genuine German film-warning to children to beware paedophiles with the same repugnance we feel, while Frank fends off an over-frisky pupil who's there for home tuition in the kitchen.

None of the extremes, the censors decided at the time, could be thought of as pornographic because all support, if sometimes contradict, the tender love story at the heart of the film.

There are no drums and trumpets for any of the things that just happen to the characters, as they do in life (Ripploh, playing himself, claimed that most of the incidents were autobiographical). Still surprising is how natural and funny it remains as an, ahem, warts and all picture of one type of gay life - or maybe two running parallel - lacking the gym-worked bodies and soft centres of later movies as director, writer and protagonist Ripploh tells us how it was for him in 1980s Berlin.

The anti-hero is a good teacher and the classroom scenes delight through the smart responses of the kids. One wonders how much they were told about the film they were in. But then this was West Berlin in the early 1980s, where, we're told, everyone took such things in their remarkably tolerant stride.

Frank is unapologetically promiscuous, and frankly the kind of shit who wouldn't have hesitated to pass on a deadlier virus in the AIDS era then to come (hospitalised for six weeks, he's off to the nearest Herren Klo, which of course is men's toilet, at the first opportunity). His lover Bernd is sweet, homeloving, dreams of a retreat to a farm; it ain't going to work. Or is it? I said to J halfway through, 'I'm going to love this film if no-one has to die at the end'**. So I love this film.

It was a huge hit in the astonishingly direct-speaking Germany of the period. Heterosexuals went in droves to see what the gay life might be like. Sympathetic as the UK censor seems to have been in 1981, there was no way he could give any kind of certificate to the more outlandish scenes. The director of London's ICA at the time agreed with him that cutting would deprive the film of its balance, and ran it under film-club conditions with black pen scrawled over one sequence which could have been against the law.

Police and councillors up in Edinburgh threatened to seize the reels and destroy them. As the print happened to be the only one with English subtitles, done at the cost of thousands, each reel was bagged the minute it finished, plonked into a car at the back door of the cinema and driven off to a secret Morningside address. The threatened impounding, in any case, failed to happen, though a wild party to celebrate resulted in several arrests.

Success seems to have gone to Ripploh's head. That made his mentor Rosa von Praunheim, pictured above in 2008, very sad. Von Praunheim and other friends who remember Ripploh in an accompanying documentary on the DVD testify to a man who was funny, spontaneous and enthusiastic, but fundamentally as unreliable as his screen self. The next couple of films were by all accounts (and to judge from the handful of clips shown) absolutely terrible. But as von Praunheim records without rancour, Taxi Zum Klo remains infinitely more popular than any of his own more earnest this-is-what-it's-like-to-be-gay-in-today's-society homilies.

Ripploh died of cancer in 2002 at the age of 52 , but his masterpiece lives on with a vitality missing in all gay-themed movies I've seen of late (anything by Ferzan Özpetek before the recent disappointment of Magnifica presenza, in which the gay element is in any case a given, honorourably excepted). On Pride Day, when it turns out that there's still more to fight for than we thought ten years ago and much of the bigotry which had gone underground has now popped up, especially in France, to try and beat up the marriage issue, we need a film as insouciant and in-your-face as this more than ever. And who's making them now? German trailer follows.

*The evening had begun with an attempt to watch Written on Skin again, this time as televised on BBC Four, and maybe write about it for The Arts Desk. But only minutes in, I confirmed my existing opinion by finding it every bit as frigid and pointless, magnificent performances notwithstanding, as I had when I went to see it at the Royal Opera. So there was nothing more to say, and I switched off after 20 minutes. All the human interest missing therein was to be found abundantly in Taxi Zum Klo.

**At least in Behind the Candelabra it isn't the victim who dies. I enjoyed its quiet coda as well, of course, as impeccable performances by Matt Damon, Michael Douglas and Rob Lowe.

Plus ça change

It was admirably bloody-minded of gay filmmakers Olivier Ducastel and Jacques Martineau to forge an epic in which the subject closest to their hearts doesn't rear its head until half way through. Born in 68 is, for its first hour or so, the tale of a beautiful woman (played by the luminous Laetitia Casta) torn between two men when she goes to live in a country commune following the student uprisings in Paris.


She has two children by one of them; the other continues to lead a fraught resistance against authority; the parents part; the children grow up. Which would all be the stuff of pure soap were it not for the fact that, like Heimat if without quite the same ambition, Born in 68 draws telling parallels and symmetries in history, in this case between the freedom-fighters of '68 and the son's Act-Up activities nearly twenty years later (this is where one of the filmmakers' direct experience kicks in).


I can't really imagine what the extended telly version must be like, but the very long film certainly has its fascination once you get used to the pace and the two wings of the action. It's especially rich when the children diverge, the daughter choosing a relatively conventional marriage to go against everything her wild-child mother stood for. Casta ages well, her grief-ravaged face speaking volumes about the hopeless love that's wearing her down, and most of the conversations have the ring of truth. I thought it was done, by and large, with lightness of touch; J found the signifiers of time passing - oh look, a big mobile phone, and is that the first laptop? - a bit overdone. But its heart and its performances are all in the right place. And how could one not wish to see everything made by the directors of the exquisite, and at times very sexy, Drole de Felix?

In the meantime, we've finally been swept up by even finer ensemble work in the first series - at least five more to go, I understand - of The West Wing, since I picked up a box worth of 44 episodes for a fiver from the local charity shop.


I know that to the converted I'm probably going to sound like someone who announces that e-mail is a wonderful thing, you should try it, but anyway: here's slick, witty characterisation, people you can care about, a bit of eye candy (Rob Lowe) and a performance of screwball-comedy grace from Allison Janney, as well as perfect set pieces, from monologues to septets, all giddyingly well stitched together. The only thing that jars for me is the saccharine score, which is so much more conventional than the script and makes the sentimental moments seem gluier than they are; but even that couldn't too much disfigure the episode we've just reached, about the state dinner for the visiting Indonesian dignitary, which is absolutely consummate in its changing tones from ironic start to emotional quiet curtain.

All this was balm to the spirit last night when I returned home prematurely from my first and last brush with a residents' committee - believe everything you're told about the backbiting, the defensive hostility towards newcomers, the pettiness - to watch more congenial White House round tables and to wish I belonged to them.