All of Us Strangers – a moving meditation on relationships

Adam is a middle-aged screenwriter living on his own in an almost-deserted new tower block in London, from where he can gaze down and across the city, a reflection of his lifelong loneliness.

Struggling with his latest project, he becomes aware of another resident on a lower floor. When Harry turns up at his door, drunk, with a bottle of Japanese whisky, and propositions him, Adam is quick to rebuff.

The next day, he takes a train and visits the home where he lived until he was 12, when his parents died in a car crash. There he finds it completely unchanged – and his parents are living there, frozen at the ages they were when they died.

Between increasingly frequent visits, as his parents get to know their adult son, Adam begins a relationship with Harry, where they share not only sex, but a tentative exploration of their emotions and fears.

Director and screenwriter Andrew Haigh’s feted film is based on the 1987 novel Strangers by Taichi Yamada and is a quiet and very still meditation not only on grief, but also isolation and the fear of rejection within all our relationships.

Inevitably, given that Adam and Harry are gay – as is Haigh himself – the issue of coming out and acceptance (or lack) of being LGBT is a central part of this meditation and the script allows for an exploration of changing attitudes toward sexuality, from the time when Adam’s parents were alive to the present day (including generational differences of using gay’ or ‘queer’ to self-describe).

Weighing in with the look back to the 1980s is the use of pop hits from Adam’s childhood – Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s The Power of Love is an absolute needle drop here – but the likes of Alison Moyet and The Pet Shop Boys are further musical pleasures that also work as a musical counterpoint to the bitterness of an era of Section 28 and the Aids panic.

Jamie D Ramsey’s cinematography adds a sense of unreality to this unconventional ghost story with his use of soft focus in places throughout.

Beautifully paced, this is a four-hander, with Andrew Scott in superb form as Adam, his silences every bit as effective as his words.

Paul Mescal as Harry is in fine form, revealing the character’s vulnerability and tenderness.

Jamie Bell and Claire Foy are wonderful as Adam’s parents, in tricky roles that could have been clunky stereotypes reflecting those ’80s attitudes.

The central pairing raises some interesting questions about current conversations on casting: should only actors who understand the ‘lived reality’ be cast as, say, LGBT, disabled or some ethnic characters?

Here, Scott is gay, but Pascal is not. If you go down that route, would it logically follow that, for example, Dev Patel should not have played David Copperfield? I’ll leave that with you.

In the meantime, All of Us Strangers is a very moving and thought-provoking film that never descends into sentimentality or simplistic tropes. And perfect for LGBT+ History Month.

A glorious celebration of gay life

Victor/Victoria (Blake Edwards UK/US 1982)

On the way out to Paris at the beginning of this month, I whiled away the train journey watching a film on my iPod. On the last two occasions we've travelled to that city, I've been quietly humming a song from it to myself as the taxi took us from the railway station to the hotel.

The film in question was Victor/Victoria, and it struck me that I’ve now owned more copies of it than any other film.

First there was the video. Then that was upgraded to DVD and now I’ve added this digital copy.

It was 1982 when Blake Edwards’s picture – based the film on Reinhold Schüzel 1933 German picture, Viktor und Viktoria – was released. I first saw it on a rented video – and fell instantly in love with it. My mother bought me a copy – although when she saw it, she sniggered, but commented that it was “very naughty”. My father couldn’t watch more than the opening 20 minutes or so and left the room.

So what on Earth was the fuss?

A quick précis for any of you who haven’t seen it.

Victoria Grant is a singer with the Bath Light Opera Company, touring in Paris in the early 1930s. Stranded in the city and broke after the company collapses, she hasn’t eaten for days.

Desperately trying to put a cockroach from her dismal hotel room into a salad at a restaurant, in order not to pay for her much-needed meal, she runs into Carole ‘Toddy’ Todd, who had heard her earlier in the day, auditioning at a nightclub.

After eating their fill and escaping into the pouring rain, they return to Toddy’s flat, since Victoria can’t go back to her hotel unless she has some money for the overdue rent.

But a series of circumstances convince the gay Toddy – a nightclub entertainer himself – of a daring scheme: to pass Victoria off as Count Victor Grezinski, his gay Polish lover, who is a top-notch female impersonator.

Within six weeks, Victor is a smash hit. But then a new problem occurs, with the arrival of King Marchand, a Chicago gangster and nightclub owner, and his brassy moll Norma Cassady. Marchand is interested in booking Victor to play his own club, but he’s also shocked to find that he’s ‘strangely’ attracted to the gay performer.

Marchand’s bodyguard Squash feels safe enough to come out, Norma hits the roof and things get really complicated.

1981. It was the start of the HIV/Aids pandemic. In the UK, James Anderton, the Chief Constable of Greater Manchester – known as ‘God’s Copper’ – had declared that homosexuality should be illegal and said that homosexuals and those with AIDS were "swirling in a cesspit of their own making.”

Nurses were terrified that even touching someone with HIV/Aids would infect them (hence the importance of Princess Diana being seen to touch an Aids patient).

In 1999, a paper published by American Behavioural Scientist, AIDS Stigma and Sexual Prejudice by Gregory M Herek and John P Captianio, both of the University of California, showed that, while people of all sexualities could contract the virus, the perception was of it as a ‘gay disease.’ Blame was always firmly levied at the door of one group.

The Aids epidemic is said to have begun in June 1981 – a boon to homophobes everywhere.

And then a year later Edwards’s film emerged, challenging ideas of sexuality, gender and morality.

What better time than to hear Toddy’s comment to Victoria: “Shame is an unhappy emotion invented by pietists in order to exploit the human race.”

But the film is never po-faced. It’s a celebration, and possibly the first really joyous mainstream screen representation of gay life. Absolutely unapologetic, as the following quotes illustrate.

Norma: I think the right woman could reform you.
Toddy: You know, I think that the right woman could reform you too.
Norma: Me? Give up men? Forget it!
Toddy: You took the words right out of my mouth.

And it’s humane as well as hilariously funny, while it treats the musical format in a different way from many other film musicals; the songs by Leslie Bricusee (lyrics) and Henry Mancini (music) sitting in a remarkably naturalistic way, as songs that are being performed in performance settings (a little like Chicago).

The cast is uniformally excellent, from Lesley Anne Warren as Norma Cassady, Graham Stark as a put-upon waiter and Alex Karras as Squash.

But the leading trio all turned in absolute gems of performances. James Garner was a great King Marchand and Julie Andrews a wonderful Victoria. But for me at least, the real star has always been the late, great Robert Preston as Toddy.

Preston, who was himself straight, took on the role and brought it to wonderful life. He was thrilled, after the film’s release, when he received huge amounts of mail from gay viewers who thanked him for his portrayal. It’s difficult to know how his nomination for a best supporting actor Oscar at the following year’s Academy Awards wasn’t turned into the statuette itself (The award went to Lou Gossett Jnr for An Officer and a Gentleman). Perhaps rewarding such an openly – and celebratory – gay role would have been a step too far at that time.

But when we think that the next big Hollywood gay movie was Aids epic Philadelphia, the difference is clear. One celebratory, one seeing gays as victims.

In the introduction to his 2002 book, Love in a Dark Time: Gay Lives From Wilde to Almodovar, Colm Tóibín discusses the fascination of some gay men for the tragic, the victim. From the point of view of the more liberal elements of society in the dark days of the 1980s, it was also tempting to see gay men as victims.

Victor/Victoria refused to bow down to such a limiting idea and it remains, 17 years on, a rousing, ribald, glorious hymn to life and love and sex.

How to live or how not to live – that is the question

Buenas Noches Buenos Aries by Gilbert Adair

When Gideon leaves England to start work at the Berlitz language school in Paris, he’s a shy and introverted young man with little experience, who has only just managed to come out to himself.

So the male staff room at the school, where he finds himself surrounded by largely gay colleagues, provides an intoxicating atmosphere.

But while everyone around him seems to be having fabulous sex lives, Gideon’s – despite his perpetual horniness – is one disaster after another.

And then, into their carefree lives, comes word of a new “gay cancer” and so the Aids era begins.

Gilbert Adair has created an extraordinary novel here. It’s short, but it packs an enormous punch.

And he pulls off a remarkable feat – of making you comprehend why someone would continue to deliberately and quite consciously put themselves at risk of contracting HIV/Aids – a situation that has occurred in real life. Indeed, some gay men have deliberately sought sexual partners with HIV in order to contract the virus themselves.

That seems completely absurd – insane, even – so it makes Adair’s achievement all the more praiseworthy.

Yet the book is not about death. Rather, the story – a memoir by Gideon himself – is a song to life and to learning to live. Perhaps a pre-condition of learning to live is an understanding – an acceptance – of one’s own mortality?

But this is also about community and the need to belong. For Gideon, even his immediate family had been distant and rather cool. His first sense of belonging is in the staff room.

We all need to feel that we belong somewhere. For some of us, this is obvious and we probably never even have to think about it. For others, it’s a question of choosing our tribe, of having to find our place in the world.

Gideon’s tribe is that of homosexual men. And when the tribe is threatened, as it is by Aids and by the homophobia that that brings to the surface, he faces a decision: whether to turn inward again or to walk into the storm, with his community, and with his head held high. Whether to hide away or whether to live as fully as possible, on his own terms.

And that choice, of courses, gives this a sense of romantic authority.

Adair’s prose is very good – light as a feather and full of wit. And as the plot unfolds, he has created some passages of real power, moving from fear to celebration.

It’s not a book for the faint-hearted, for the judgmental or for prudes – there are some graphic descriptions of gay sex, plus innumerable penises, some tumescent, some not.

But if you fall outside those categories, then Adair has written a very, very good book indeed. And arguably a very brave one.