Our coverage from BFI Flare 2018 includes Steve McLean’s first feature since his biographical fantasia Postcards from America (1994), Simon Spier’s coming-out journey, an Italian rite of passage and Rupert Everett as an ageing Oscar Wilde.
The Happy Prince
We all reach a moment in life when we know the days ahead are shorter than those behind us. For Oscar Wilde, played here by Rupert Everett, the years where the days grew shorter were spent in disgraced exile in Naples and Paris following his release from prison in London after his conviction for gross indecency. Yet even in exile, the figure of the man who brought him down, Lord Alfred Douglas, played by Colin Morgan, loomed large, haunting Wilde’s every move and thought.
The Happy Prince is a beautiful and brave film by Rupert Everett, following Wilde’s final years as we explore his memories, regrets, and hopes. Everett delivers a masterful performance and stunning direction, alongside a truly fantastic ensemble cast, including Colin Firth, Morgan, Emily Watson, and Benjamin Voisin, in a film that is both tender, sad, and joyous as Wilde faces his mortality with wit, charm, regret, and misplaced loyalty.
Freak Show
The effervescent and hilarious story of Billy Bloom, Trudie Styler’s Freak Show, is a movie I could quite happily play on repeat during Pride Month. Billy is a confident, eccentric and electric teenager who has had just about enough of the daily homophobia at his ultra-conservative high school. Therefore, with every ounce of sparkle at his disposal, he runs for the title of homecoming queen with expected and not-so-expected results. A fabulous exploration of difference, strength, toxic masculine behaviours and queer pride, Freak Show, based on James St. John’s book, is held aloft by the majestic Alex Lawther. Funny, tender, and full of warmth and heart, Freak Show may not tread new ground, but it’s fabulous all the same.
Marilyn
Directed by Martín Rodríguez Redondo, Marylin is based on a true story, exploring the repression of rural life in Argentina and the urgent need to escape and find peace as your hidden identity and needs eat away at you during adolescence. Gutwrenching and powerful, Marilyn asks the audience to explore their feelings about victims and perpetrators of crime and their interconnectedness. Through the outstanding central performance of Walter Rodríguez Pez, we explore emerging gender and sexuality against a backdrop of discrimination, fear and violence with hope spiralling toward a devastating conclusion.
Love Simon
Gregg Berlanti’s Love, Simon is a film adaptation of Albertalli’s book Simon vs the Homo Sapiens Agenda, which has wowed young readers. In bringing Love, Simon to the screen, Berlanti embraces the style and spirit of the late, great John Hughes by dovetailing a wonderfully timed comedy and a banging soundtrack with classic coming-of-age narrative hooks.
Simon (Nick Robinson) is an average student with a lovely house, supportive parents and a cooking-obsessed younger sister. His close friends, Leah (Katherine Langford), Nick (Jorge Lendeborg Jr.), and Abby (Alexandra Shipp), offer him love, companionship, laughter, and support. At the same time, his school and social life are active, creative, and busy, with after-school clubs, coffee dates, study sessions, and fancy dress parties. However, underneath all this, Simon has one big-ass secret: he is gay.
Deep down, Simon knows his friends and family would accept his secret, but he also knows that speaking it aloud may change everything, and he isn’t quite ready for that yet. Plus, Simon can’t help but question why anyone should have to come out or why “straight is the default.” But when a fellow student anonymously posts on the college blog expressing his fear of coming out, Simon responds privately to the email using the alias “Jacques”. Before long, both boys strike up a secret online friendship, as Simon wonders who the mysterious boy named “Blue” really is. Is he one of his friends? A member of his drama group? Or someone he is yet to meet?
Love, Simon will resonate with kids exploring their sexual orientation in an internet age. While many will rightly argue that coming out has become easier for some LGBTQ+ young people during the past twenty years, the internet now poses new challenges that previous generations didn’t have to navigate.
Social media, in particular, has opened the door to bullying and intimidation that can invade your home life, while instant messages, video sharing and photos have led to increased levels of blackmail for many LGBTQ+ kids. Love, Simon doesn’t always navigate these concerns as astutely as it could, but it does open the door to important conversations through Simon’s experiences in a movie that finally embraces LGBTQIA+ storytelling for younger gay teens.
Postcards from London
Steve McLean’s first feature since his biographical fantasia Postcards from America (1994) may echo the title and, to some degree, the style of its underrated predecessor, but its tone is altogether different.
The story within Postcards from London is almost irrelevant, as we are taken on an artistically bold and colourful ride through Soho alongside Jim, played by the fantastic Harris Dickinson, last seen in the exceptional Beach Rats, and four male escort guides and comrades, including the fabulous Jonah Hauer-King.
There is no traditional story arc at play for these young, hot London hustlers, as art, imagination, gay history, and social discussion merge into a colourful cornucopia of desire, longing, and youthful exuberance. This is likely to elicit a love-hate response from audiences given expectations, but no one can deny McLean’s ability to discover some of the best young male talent currently available.
Personally, I found Postcards From London an utter joy to watch, with superb performances and a beautifully imaginative script that pays homage to Derek Jarman. But the real treasure here is Dickinson, Hauer-King and a cracking ensemble of talent who will, trust me, become household names in the coming years.
Call Me By Your Name
Written by André Aciman and set during the summer of 1983 in Northern Italy, Call Me By Your Name revolved around the intense and transformative relationship between seventeen-year-old Elio Perlman and twenty-four-year-old graduate Oliver (Armie Hammer). Love, desire, and self-discovery sit at the heart of Aciman’s story of a fleeting yet urgent connection. Aciman would skillfully navigate the complexities of Elio and Oliver’s relationship, capturing the exhilaration and vulnerability of their clandestine romance by exploring the fluidity of adolescent desire and the emotional heat of first gay love.
Call Me By Your Name was a novel rich in its sense of place, painting a vivid portrait of Italy in the 1980s, surrounding Elio and Oliver with the sensuality and beauty of the Italian countryside, food, and culture. Luca Guadagnino’s adaptation honours Aciman’s novel by transforming his words into a visually stunning and emotionally resonant cinematic masterpiece. Like the novel, Call Me by Your Name explores themes of memory, desire, place, and emerging sexuality as Guadagnino bathes Elio and Oliver’s journey in the colours of nature.
In Guadagnino’s luscious garden of teenage longing, fruits, food, and foliage are combined with growing desire, sexuality and love as we relive our most tender experiences through Elio’s eyes. Here, the powerful but dangerous sparks of sex and passion speak to all of us who kept our sexuality hidden during youth through a veil of doubt, fear, excitement, heat, and internal longing. Combine this with Timothée Chalamet’s captivating performance as Elio, and you have a modern masterpiece.
Young Timothée Chalamet’s performance is wrapped in emerging self-identity, emotion, desire, jealousy and excitement as he brings Elio to life through the innermost feelings of a boy on the verge of manhood. A youthful exuberance sits at the heart of Elio’s self-created Garden of Eden, and here, he attempts to bury his teenage vulnerabilities as he explores Oliver like an ice cube gliding across skin as it melts. Elio and Oliver’s relationship is genuine, loving and profound for both men as it challenges ‘80s societal expectations. But despite its transformative power, like many a summer romance and many gay connections in youth, it is also fluid and fleeting.
It is rare for a film to capture a novel’s essence successfully, but that is precisely what Luca Guadagnino’s Call Me By Your Name achieves. Exquisite performances, stunning cinematography, and an evocative soundtrack capture the complexities of our human emotions and the exciting but tricky journey of sexual discovery all gay young people endure, leaving us with one of the most stunning depictions of sexual exploration and emerging identity ever brought to the screen.
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