BEAUTIFUL, GAY, ADDICTED TO CRACK

[xchrom]

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/culture/2012/09/ira-sachs-keep-the-lights-on.html



Although Ira Sachs didn’t set out to make a film about the differences between white gay men and gay men of color in New York—worlds that are less integrated than one imagines—it’s precisely those differences that are part of what he covers so beautifully and unobtrusively in his film “Keep the Lights On.”

In it, we meet Erik Rothman (the unbelievably great Thure Lindhardt), a Danish-born documentary filmmaker who is nearly fatally in love with Paul Lucy (Zachary Booth), who works in publishing. But Paul also has another lover: crack. Erik and Paul are not an especially rare breed: they are a white, gay couple with a two-income household, a nice flat, and a country place. It’s a life they rarely question—because why should they? They’re no different than the primarily straight couples that they hang out with.
But Sachs, a knowing dramatist, understands that he has to introduce something other than real-estate contentment and co-dependence into his story to make it a story, and it happens by degrees. We watch Paul’s trip down the rabbit hole of addiction while we ache over Erik’s very real concerns about his H.I.V. status. By introducing these elements into a picture that’s about, in part, surfaces—Paul and Erik look good together, they live in nice places, their New York is the kind of New York that always makes room for attractive, upwardly mobile couples—Sachs is adding political fracture: to be a drug addict or sexually compulsive is to enter a world that don’t bear any resemblance to what one knows, or where sociologists might say one belongs.

Paul and Erik have the ability to pass in the underworld because of money, or because of Erik’s artistic cache, and to pass in the larger world because they’re white and cute. It’s a measure of Sachs’s intelligence and sensitivity as a filmmaker that we only see the couple’s shared degradation once; to have painted a portrait of New York’s dark and heavy drug and sex culture would have been to draw easy comparisons between “us” (Erik and Paul) and “them” (a society populated by men of color who sell drugs and sex to survive). That the male prostitute whom Paul entertains, after a fashion, is white, is a smart choice, too—had he been Black or Latino, our stereotypical fantasies would have inevitably kicked in, distracting us from the pathos on Erik’s face as his lover subjects himself to the alienating forces of crack and being intimate with a body he does not know.


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[Panasonic]

1. I want to see this movie.

so looking forward to the DVD release....