User Reviews

The know how demonstrates that liberation is a construct, it is polemical, it is poetic, amateurish and cheesy and shines through with its peculiar accents. I give the film a perfect ten, despite its various flaws, despite its, perhaps, now alien sensibility - as if it is deported from another solar system -, not because it needs a score, or it's in the film's design a purpose to score, but because it simply "sutures" a historical and aesthetic space with its aura and determination from "before the trauma", and I consider this commanding.

When the film begun I was nagged by the quality of the copy I saw: as if on a par with a careless Jack Wrangler copy - but as soon as, in the first ten seconds or so, the liturgical scene was cut with a slice of a 'Pride' interviewee, I was bemused; I sensed what was to follow: a very sensible mix of fictional and polemical film-making, with an artistic signature of its own.

The film's flaw comes with what we would call character development, though to call it that is to miss or mistake the film's polemical tone. At least for me, born after the film was made, that reads like a certain numbness of evaluating the new, emergent gay identity, that's why we have on the one hand lines that show the individuals talking together are exactly that, and on the other hand a certain lack in spontaneously expressing feelings, or lack thereof, as if being polemical and political (liberation and the psychologizing jargon of the period) was more important, and was an alibi for the usual cardboard smugness.

Well, this is something that still exists, stupidly. Instead of letting of some steam, as they say in the film (well, not in the same way), or converting the other humorously to our whim, this behavior is one of the permanent misunderstandings of the human condition, even if the weight seems to be on groups that have suffered oppression for too long and hence have questions of pride to resolve. For I would certainly prefer tensions to be resolved with humor, and why not a certain touch of french seduction, but that would be to ask for another film, and would be a misfire. At least after Stonewall, they certainly settle things differently in the States.

But the ambiguity in the end, in David's words "I know there are not many people, but there are people," which sounds directed towards matters of social acceptance, erotic camaraderie and a delineation of the way things are, is charmingly answered by Jason's "Say, I love you" to the lens, once more. With that phrase, David seems to have learned something, more importantly and manly to recognize his failures and gaps and so give space to his desire, not as a ready-made space for the other, which was his mistake with Mark, but something that involves patience - and also that the film finds its balance, through its representatives, between personal pathos and an uncompromising, emerging political awareness.

That's why the slow motion version of Paradise Regained in the end (watch how marvelously and plentifully the sea's blue enters and relieves the screen) is all the more painful: we are now witnessing the film from the wrong end of the 80's, at least. Be it twenty, or thirty years, the trauma of AIDS is still here. Even if medication will eradicate it, the sense of innocence the film purveys is something unrepeatable, for its combination of sexual and political liberation.

It may be that sexual liberation and political liberation are clumsy and cheesy and darkened by death, and that the true crux of things lies elsewhere (to put it simply, coming from Greece I have heard various stories from elderly homosexuals that during the period of the junta things where flourishing, because of the army, and because repression meant men sought out men for sex, since women were untouchable or unaffordable - but this is another digression), but the film's transport to Liberation-as-Chariot-of-Fire(-Island), makes it a must see for a renegotiation of an informing sense of loss, citizenship, and beauty.