beta_vulgaris (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
beta_vulgaris) wrote2014-12-02 10:37 am
beta_vulgaris) wrote2014-12-02 10:37 am
Movie Review: Interior. Leather Bar. by James Franco
I was browsing Netflix for something to watch the other night and stumbled across this film. It's an hour long experimental documentary-ish type film that is, on its surface, an attempt by Franco and his co-director Travis Mathews to recreate the 40-minute footage that was cut by the ratings board from the 1980 Al Pacino film "Cruising". In the cut footage, Pacino's character, a detective, reportedly went undercover in a gay S/M bar. Nobody involved in the making of this new film has seen that footage, so their goal was to imagine what it could have been.
The movie opens with several of the actors and the directors assembling in a living room to outline the project. It's repeated frequently through the film that the lead actor and a few of the secondary characters don't have full or detailed scripts, don't know what they're getting into entirely, and in general don't really get what the point of the film is about. It's a movie that questions its purpose explicitly onscreen in every moment. This gets a bit tiresome at first but I ultimately found it fascinating.
The lead actor is Val, a guy who has known Franco for 15 years and who is ready to trust his artistic vision. He's a happily married straight guy who, at least at the beginning of the film, is very open to playing gay roles. He has a best friend who tells him not to be associated with the project because it's pornography, but he goes head anyhow despite his reservations about the content of the film.
Various actors, many straight but not all, get some screentime interviewing before and after about what they think the project is. Most of the film takes place on the set of the project, as the makeup artists and the director move the project forward and, ultimately, explicit BDSM sex acts happen onscreen.
There's a really good moment where Val, the lead actor, flips out after watching a man get spanked while he's licking another man's boots. He and Franco leave the room and have a somewhat heated conversation about the place of pornography, the role it's playing in the project, and whether Franco's vision is worth it to Val to risk his future as a respectable actor. Franco has some interesting lines here about how angry he is that he's been programmed into a certain kind of story/hetero romance narrative and he's tired of it, he thinks other stories--including gay S/M pickups--should be part of the fabric of our cultural expression instead of the graphic violence to which we are all inured.
This film wasn't comfortable and it wasn't at all what I expected. There were almost no moments about LS'a actual leather scene or the history of leather or leather bars or even gay people. A lot of the movie is about hetero people who consider themselves openminded actor-types willing to play gay roles being confronted with their own internalized homophobia and lack of understanding of what confronting a very different kind of sexual freedom from what they're used to might be like. I actually found this very interesting and worthwhile once I let go of the expectation that this was going to be a story that focused on or explored leather or gay sex on its own terms in some way.
My discomfort about the unprofessionalism of the directors tossing their actors into the deep end of basically being on a porno setpiece without really telling them that was somewhat mitigated by a moment at the end of the film where Val is shuffling some pages of a script while sitting against a wall. He pauses and reads aloud an instruction that describes the thing he's doing/the emotion he's portraying. It flips the focus of the film to show that it's been scripted all along, that the story is a metafiction of some kind and that his experiences on this set were part of the film from the start. This also explained several of the close camera moments that felt like they would be too private for an actor to have in front of a camera--it was all staged.
Anyhow, I think it's worth watching but don't go in expecting true BDSM. Go in expecting a reasonably decent attempt by somewhat mainstream indie creators to force a reckoning with largely het and vanilla audiences to address their internalized homophobic discomfort around the kinds of sex that we have. I also actually do appreciate that they did it in the context of making a film. Everyone present--including the actual leather people--was getting paid and knew what was going on. This wasn't a documentary where a mainstream group intruded with cameras on an active S/M space. The focus was not on 'ew why do these people do this violent thing', but rather 'ew--wait, why am I having an ew reaction', and for that I think it's pretty valuable.
The movie opens with several of the actors and the directors assembling in a living room to outline the project. It's repeated frequently through the film that the lead actor and a few of the secondary characters don't have full or detailed scripts, don't know what they're getting into entirely, and in general don't really get what the point of the film is about. It's a movie that questions its purpose explicitly onscreen in every moment. This gets a bit tiresome at first but I ultimately found it fascinating.
The lead actor is Val, a guy who has known Franco for 15 years and who is ready to trust his artistic vision. He's a happily married straight guy who, at least at the beginning of the film, is very open to playing gay roles. He has a best friend who tells him not to be associated with the project because it's pornography, but he goes head anyhow despite his reservations about the content of the film.
Various actors, many straight but not all, get some screentime interviewing before and after about what they think the project is. Most of the film takes place on the set of the project, as the makeup artists and the director move the project forward and, ultimately, explicit BDSM sex acts happen onscreen.
There's a really good moment where Val, the lead actor, flips out after watching a man get spanked while he's licking another man's boots. He and Franco leave the room and have a somewhat heated conversation about the place of pornography, the role it's playing in the project, and whether Franco's vision is worth it to Val to risk his future as a respectable actor. Franco has some interesting lines here about how angry he is that he's been programmed into a certain kind of story/hetero romance narrative and he's tired of it, he thinks other stories--including gay S/M pickups--should be part of the fabric of our cultural expression instead of the graphic violence to which we are all inured.
This film wasn't comfortable and it wasn't at all what I expected. There were almost no moments about LS'a actual leather scene or the history of leather or leather bars or even gay people. A lot of the movie is about hetero people who consider themselves openminded actor-types willing to play gay roles being confronted with their own internalized homophobia and lack of understanding of what confronting a very different kind of sexual freedom from what they're used to might be like. I actually found this very interesting and worthwhile once I let go of the expectation that this was going to be a story that focused on or explored leather or gay sex on its own terms in some way.
My discomfort about the unprofessionalism of the directors tossing their actors into the deep end of basically being on a porno setpiece without really telling them that was somewhat mitigated by a moment at the end of the film where Val is shuffling some pages of a script while sitting against a wall. He pauses and reads aloud an instruction that describes the thing he's doing/the emotion he's portraying. It flips the focus of the film to show that it's been scripted all along, that the story is a metafiction of some kind and that his experiences on this set were part of the film from the start. This also explained several of the close camera moments that felt like they would be too private for an actor to have in front of a camera--it was all staged.
Anyhow, I think it's worth watching but don't go in expecting true BDSM. Go in expecting a reasonably decent attempt by somewhat mainstream indie creators to force a reckoning with largely het and vanilla audiences to address their internalized homophobic discomfort around the kinds of sex that we have. I also actually do appreciate that they did it in the context of making a film. Everyone present--including the actual leather people--was getting paid and knew what was going on. This wasn't a documentary where a mainstream group intruded with cameras on an active S/M space. The focus was not on 'ew why do these people do this violent thing', but rather 'ew--wait, why am I having an ew reaction', and for that I think it's pretty valuable.