Stranger Changer

Hello again! This is a busy week, I know. And while I don't foresee putting out three posts per week that often, I am going to try to build out this newsletter and standardize it. I'm looking to complement the Monday morning new release review with one the Friday before, covering an older movie that gives the new one context. This weekend Andrew Haigh's gay romance All Of Us Strangers comes to my local cinema, which was the perfect opportunity to finally see his breakthrough feature.

"The normcore of gay narrative." That's how someone I know referred to Looking, Andrew Haigh's HBO series about gay life in San Francisco. It seemed an apt, if savage descriptor. In the context of Ryan Murphy's burgeoning trash TV empire and Taylor Mac's whirlwind absurdist play Hir, the middle-class white cis male milieu and lack of dramatic fireworks in Looking made it seem inexplicably unremarkable. I bounced off it at the time, as did most others, which led to the show's cancelation after only two seasons. I only later 'got' Haigh and his specialty of quiet, unassuming, keenly observed character dramas with 2017's criminally under-seen Lean on Pete, a boy and his horse film about trying to survive the rural poverty of eastern Oregon. It turns out, though, that Haigh's delicate touch was already fully-formed all the way back in 2011 with his second film (but first to the world) Weekend, concerning the chance encounter of two gay men one fateful Friday night in Nottingham.

We meet the first of them, our protagonist Russell (Tom Cullen) as he attends a Friday night house party hosted by his friend Jamie (Jonathan Race). He gets along well enough, but he's visibly distant and soon says he has to work in the morning and begs off, assuring Jamie he will be there Sunday for his daughter (Russell's goddaughter')s birthday. Instead of going home Russell heads to a local gay club, where he espies a fetching lad and takes him home. The next morning the man, Glen (Chris New), asks Russell to describe their hookup and how it felt so he can record it for inclusion in an art project. Russell stumbles his way through a recounting of the night's events, and after exchanging phone numbers they part ways. Later that day Russell is bored at his lifeguard job and put off by his co-workers excitedly talking about a woman one of them had sex with, and so he texts Glen to meet him after work. They begin to bond, but Glen reveals that he will be leaving on Sunday for the U.S., putting the future of their burgeoning relationship in question.

That relationship is built on a sturdy opposites-attract pairing, Glenn the brash and outgoing one, Russell sweet but buttoned-down and withdrawn. Russell grew up in foster care with Jamie, who is practically a brother to him. He did not any suffer any foster system horrors, but his background has made him something of a stranger even to his friends, not exactly closeted to Jamie but discrete. Glen grew up with the stability of a two-parent household, which gave him the comfort with himself to not care what anybody thinks about who he has sex with and how. Yet he is restless, refusing to settle with friends or family, much less a lover.

Weekend often gets compared to Richard Linklater's Before Sunrise, a movie about a young man and woman who spend one magical night in Paris together before parting ways. Yet Weekend's outlook and the ages of its characters are more akin to that movie's nine-years-later sequel Before Sunset, which unfolds more or less in real time over less than two hours. As with that movie, this is much less dreamily romantic, with an emphasis on the ticking clock--in the time the characters have left together, and the time they have left in life more generally--and the deliberateness that imposes.

For all their differences, Russell and Glen are united by a hard-nosed pragmatism. In their own ways, they both have dealt with the lack of tradition or security in gay relationships and their own troubled histories (Glen bears the scars of a betrayal by a previous boyfriend) by committing to a path, of self-effacement and brash flippancy, and refusing to deviate from it. The great pleasure of the movie is seeing the early friction of the shells they've built up around themselves gradually eroding one another, and so daring them to feel the possibility of connection.

Like the characters themselves, the movie is unromantic, not to be confused with being harsh. Russell and Glen's world isn't cruel--although Glen's former lover ran afoul of antigay violence, nothing so dramatic befalls them, even as Glen pridefully gets in an argument in a pub about whether he should not so loudly broadcast his sex life. The world is, rather, indifferent. The locations are either crowded and cramped--a conversation in Russell's kitchen was filmed from literally the only possible angle in such a small space--or they are inhuman spaces large enough to maroon the characters, a bike path next to a crowded overpass, a depopulated indoor swimming pool. It is in this rough-hewn world, shot on location throughout Nottingham, that sex and love eventually grow.

The sex, too, is unromantic, but that is not at all to say it is unsexy. It eschews gauzy missionary position mutual stares in favor of tactfully shot love scenes that make no effort to hide the mechanics of gay sex, right down to the necessities of cleanup. There's some ideological provocation in this, as it illustrates a point frequently made by Glen, that the world is awash with straight romance and sex, while gay couples often cannot even hold hands in public, so fuck them if they can't handle it. But beyond this, the explicit depictions also serve a critical role in developing Russell and Glen's relationship.

There's no better example of this than the sex scene that is conspicuous for its absence, the initial hookup. The action cuts from Russell macking on a different man to the next morning as he prepares coffee for Glen, and it's only through Russell's halting recollections into the voice recorder that we get any idea of what happened. And even then it's just embarassed descriptions of the acts, who put whose hand where. What happened on that first night is unimportant because it was unimportant to its participants, who both approached it as a one-night stand. Only when they have formed an emotional connection does their physical connection become relevant. The emphasis on the practicalities of the act draw attention to the pleasure that it gives the two characters, that they give each other.

That kind of presence is in every scene. It has to be. The movie's dialogues are filmed in long, unbroken takes, with only a minimum of camera movement between the two actors, who are essentially performing without a safety net. They have nowhere to hide, and writer-director-editor Haigh has nothing to cut to, as they inhabit their characters, whose relationship develops minute-by-minute. There's a late scene, a discussion between the two about the politics of gay marriage, are the gays just seeking validation from the straight world, or is it an honest expression of love made both to one another and the world at large, and the scene becomes more heated, the two men dig into their positions and become more vehement, and it becomes clear that they would not be so intense if they didn't care about each other, and then the audience realizes at the same time they do that the political is personal and this whole time they've been arguing over whether two people can really commit to a life together, they've really been talking about themselves. It's not a perfect one-er, there is a very clear jump cut, but emotional continuity is more important than strict chronology, and the emotions here build to a quiet crescendo.

There are no histrionics or bold declarations, not even up to the end. There's an 11th-hour reunion at a departing train, which Russell and Glen both know is so conventional. But even then the moment is played small and quiet, to the point the sound is dropped out and only the characters know what they're saying. The outcome remains, as ever, unconventional; it should not be much of a spoiler that the relationship lasts the duration of the film's title. This has not been a fairy tale romance, and there is no happily ever after. But that doesn't mean it need be unhappy, any more than the end of any relationship need be so. Russell and Glen come out not completed by one another, but bettered, which is the best any of us can hope for.

In light of Weekend, I'm tempted to give Andrew Haigh's TV work another try. It may well be that his modest minimalism doesn't translate well to the world of television, which depends much more on forward narrative momentum than the one-and-done of film. But after seeing how richly he realizes his two leads here, I'd like to see what he does with a wider canvas. It's deceptively simple, finding the meaningful in the mundane, but it's there for those who are looking.