First up: Man at Bath (or Homme au bain). I thought this would be a load of pretentious twaddle, but it turned out to be engaging and jolly. The "plot" involves a stay-at-home boyfriend, played by a French porn star, whose lover goes off to New York.
The boyfriend has a series of sexual encounters, as does his lover. It was dreamy and didn't really go anywhere, but the cock count went off the scale: lots and lots of full-frontals and close-ups of assorted genitalia. All very charming (and it includes the only scene of arse shaving I encountered at this year's festival).
Next: Sasha. An intriguing film, set in Cologne among a refugee family from former Yugoslavia, now the owners of a small bar, the elder of their two sons growing up a closet case in a virulently homophobic family.
The boy is a brilliant pianist, probably due to his infatuation with his manly piano teacher, but he hides behind his beard, the daughter of a Chinese family who he does not realise is in love with him. It all heads towards a fairly predictable car-crash of a climax but it does so with some wit and skill.
It felt like a film made in Britain twenty years ago. Cock count: a spectacularly disappointing zero.
And for the climax: Going South (Plein Sud), by director Sebastian Lifshitz whose Presque Rien is one of my favourite-ever gay films.
He's been ploughing the same field ever since, with films featuring gay characters in intensely melancholic situations, and this is no exception. Starring a slew of beautiful boys (and a single beautiful girl), I found Plein Sud utterly gripping. A sort of French road movie, with a driver in his twenties who picks up a teenage couple -- a brother and sister -- and then another beautiful teenager. The kids bicker and fight while he seems oblivious. Like Lifshitz's other films, there's lots of unspoken sadness and yearning and rage, emotions boiling just below the surface.
And sometimes it spills out onto the screen, I'm delighted to say, giving us a cock count that includes all three of the most beautiful actors to appear in this year's LLGFF. Bravo!
1 comment:
Just saw Sasha at the Dublin LGFF. Entertaining.
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