Ira Sachs (2012)
This is a movie by a gay film-maker about a gay film-maker who is making a movie about a gay film-maker. (In describing Ira Sachs as a gay film-maker, I mean that he’s an openly gay man whose films not infrequently feature gay protagonists and lifestyles.) Erik Rothman, the main character in Keep the Lights On, is a young Dane living and working in New York City. In the early part of the movie, he’s making a documentary about Avery Willard. The latter was a real person: in 2012, In Search of Avery Willard, a documentary short by Cary Kehayan, screened at several provincial American film festivals a few months after Keep the Lights On premiered at Sundance. The IMDB summary of Kehayan’s piece calls Willard ‘one of queer art’s most elusive innovators. Broadway photographer, physique artist, gay activist, experimental filmmaker, drag historian, leatherman, pornographer’. He was, according to IMDB, the creator of ‘a lifetime of historically significant work that has remained widely unseen for decades’. In Keep the Lights On, Willard’s work is described as ‘a visual anthropology of the gay scene in New York from the 1940s to the 1990s’ (although one of the contributors to Erik’s film also expresses the view that Willard’s work, while unique in its time, wasn’t of high quality). The interaction of three creative sensibilities – Sachs, Rothman and Willard – is potentially interesting but Keep the Lights On doesn’t exploit this imaginatively. The Avery Willard aspect of the story isn’t much more than queer culture decoration. The film-within-the-film on Willard wins a Teddy award (as Keep the Lights On also went on to do) but Erik Rothman, as written by Sachs and Mauricio Zacharias, might as well be an accountant as a documentarian.
Sachs’s focus is on the relationship, over nearly a decade, between Erik (Thure Lindhardt) and Paul Lucy (Zachary Booth), whom Erik meets through a phone sex hotline. Their story comprises four chapters – set in 1998, when Erik and Paul’s affair begins, 2000, 2003 and 2006, when they part company for what appears to be the last time. We learn that Erik had, and ended, at least one long-term relationship prior to Paul. This was with a man called Paolo, who was diagnosed as HIV-positive. Since Paolo, it appears that Erik has preferred casual sex with different partners. The new relationship with Paul changes all that but, while it’s different for Erik, it is, for the viewer, a familiar movie relationship. Erik, who shifts quickly from promiscuity into possessiveness, is repeatedly frustrated by the inconstancy of his lover. It’s never easy to understand what Erik finds so compelling about Paul, a lawyer with a serious drugs habit. As played by Zachary Booth, he’s little more than a pretty boy: Booth’s Paul blows not so much hot and cold as bland and chilly. Thure Lindhardt as Erik is a very different matter (and the only good reason for staying with Keep the Lights On). Lindhardt is rather odd-looking – wide-hipped, gap-toothed and goggle-eyed – but he is charismatic, and he’s some actor. (He was superb in the third series of the Danish-Swedish television police thriller The Bridge, screened on BBC4 in late 2015.) We’re told that Erik had his first sexual experience when he was thirteen years old: Lindhardt gives the character a boylike quality that somehow keeps reminding you of this. His Erik is credibly different in his interactions with people in different parts of his life – his phone sex interlocutors, his trusted friend Claire (Julianne Nicholson), his elder sister (Paprika Steen). One of the better moments in the film comes late on, in a conversation between Erik and Igor (Miguel del Toro), a painter whom Erik met at a gay club earlier in the story. Erik is startled when Igor says that he always gets tired of a partner after a few months. Lindhardt registers the sense of shock so convincingly that he makes you believe, in this moment, how much Erik has changed in the course of his and Paul’s on-off-on relationship.
It’s probably neither a coincidence nor Thure Lindhardt’s fault that he is least convincing in the crucial scenes with Paul. This may be partly because Zachary Booth gives Lindhardt little to play off but I think the blame attaches principally to Ira Sachs. It came as no surprise to read on Wikipedia that Keep the Lights On ‘is based on Sachs’ own past relationship with Bill Clegg, a literary agent who published his own memoir about his struggles with addiction’. Here is another example of an autobiographical, or partly autobiographical, movie in which the material is inherently and powerfully meaningful to the film-maker – who, as a result, is blinded to the need to work that material into something with dramatic energy. Sachs’s co-writer Mauricio Zacharias doesn’t seem to have been able to help with this. There are several sequences that go on for some time and in which very little appears to be happening: these scenes probably say plenty to Ira Sachs but they’re inert on screen. The paintings of nude male figures over the opening titles (by Boris Torres, to whom Sachs is now married) and the repeated bouts of ‘strong sex’ (to quote the content warning for the film) give Keep the Lights On the look of bold gay movie-making but, below that surface, this listless film isn’t any more challenging than its 2014 successor, Love is Strange.
2 January 2016
