Producers: Bijan Kazerooni, Will Youmans, Waylon Sall and Adam Kersh Director: Elliot Tuttle Screenplay: Elliot Tuttle Cast: Reed Birney and Kieron Moore Distributor: Obscured Releasing
Grade: B+
Designed to scrutinize rather than shock, writer-director Elliot Tuttle’s feature debut is an unsettling night-long conversation between two men who gradually bare their souls as well as their bodies. “Blue Film” is also a two-hander marked by writing that’s perhaps a bit too literary but also by remarkable performances.
The title proclaims its aspirations. “Blue Movie” was once the ordinary term for a pornographic picture, the sort of thing that “decent” people would avoid and disparage. By replacing the second word with a more distinguished one, Tuttle is indicating not just what his intent is not—to titillate—but what it is—to explore if not explain.
Newcomer Kieron Moore plays a Los Angeles cam boy who calls himself Aaron Eagle and makes a living berating his online followers with gay slurs while demanding that they send him money for his exhibitionist poses and promises. When one of the watchers offers $25,000 if he’ll agree to come to his place for the night, Aaron says yes
When Aaron arrives at what turns out to be a rental house, the watcher proves a soft-spoken guy wearing a black ski mask (Reed Birney), interested in interviewing Aaron on video. Surly but confident, Aaron admits to having been born in Maine and realizing after coming to California how lucrative sexual work could be. But he’s discomfited when asked about a tattoo on his forehead and threatens to leave until the masked man calls him by his real name, Alex McConnell, and reveals himself to be Hank Grant, Alex’s English teacher from middle school.
Grant, Alex remembers, was fired after being arrested for accosting a boy named James in a school restroom. He went to prison for seven years, and, he says, now lives back in their old hometown, working in a grocery store. When he learned of Alex’s alter ego (how goes unexplored), he decided to come across country to reconnect and, perhaps, finally fulfill the longing he’d had for the boy years ago but had never acted upon, merely watching the solitary, brooding youth with lust in his heart.
What follows is a chamber piece that unfolds like a two-character play, with each man probing and being probed, both compelled gradually to reveal their secrets and confront their insecurities even as they try to maintain the defenses they’ve built around themselves. There are discussions of sexual perversity in the broadest sense—whether it arises from loneliness or something deeper, whether religion can control urges or merely cloak them. And there’s a shifting power dynamic at work, with questions about who’s in charge at any moment persistently present.
Gradually both Alex and Hank shed the protective poses they’ve assumed—the younger man’s macho swagger is deflated, and the older one’s control slips away until both stand drained of their illusions. Part of the process is a series of intimate sexual moments that, in their explicitness, take the film closer to the “movie” moniker it’s rejected, and involve an unusual kind of grooming that Hank hopes, in his Humbertian way, will, in effect, turn back the clock; and, to an extent, it does. But whether the brief encounter changes either man much is left for the viewer to decide.
While “Blue Film” feels, as a narrative, like it might be at home on the boards, it mostly avoids an overly stagey feel through Tuttle’s sensitive writing and direction, Ryan Jackson-Healy’s supple cinematography and Zach Clark’s canny editing. It also reminds us periodically of the fundamental issue it’s confronting by periodically inserting gritty clips of happy young boys at play, and, toward the close, one of an adolescent kid (Turner Beckett) walking down a street (without specifying whether it’s Alex or James). Anna McGrath’s costume design and Isaac Eiger’s score resist calling attention to themselves.
But the film couldn’t work as well as it does without Birney and Moore. Both embody with extraordinary skill men who, each in his own way, have constructed personas that they know are false, or at least fatally incomplete. Together with Tuttle, the actors brilliantly show them gradually deconstructing what they have so desperately contrived as a means of defense and, in Hank’s instance at least, hoped-for redemption.
The result is hardly an easy film to watch, but it joins others—like Stanley Kubrick’s “Lolita,” Todd Solondz’s “Happiness,” Michael Cuesta’s “L.I.E.,” and Gregg Araki’s “Mysterious Skin”—that have dared to tackle this difficult subject directly, and with a welcome measure of empathy. It’s a quietly shattering experience.