LGBT+
Tom Birchenough
The title of Swedish director David Färdmar’s feature debut gains a degree of helpful context from one of its opening lines, “But there’s no more we”. One partner, Hampus (Jonathan Andersson), is telling the other, Adrian (Björn Elgerd), that whatever feelings may remain between them, their life as a gay couple, their coexistence and cohabitation of some years – the element that has made them we – is over. That essence is perhaps told more succinctly in the title of Färdmar’s 2018 short film, simply No More We, an impressionistic, work-in-progress abbreviation over 14 minutes of Are We Lost Read more ...
Aleks Sierz
Travis Alabanza is black, trans, queer and proud. And they’ve got a lot to be proud about. In 2016, they were the youngest recipient of the artist in residence post on the Tate workshop programme, and two years later starred in Chris Goode’s wildly overblown adaptation of Derek Jarman’s Jubilee. On Alabanza’s website, they boast that they are “known for increasingly paving much of the UK conversation around trans politics”, and certainly they’ve made an impact. If you want to know about safe spaces and communities for gender non-conforming and transgender people, this is the go-to activist. Read more ...
Joe Muggs
Think hard. How much schmaltz do you think there is in this album? OK, double that. Now double it again. Nope, you’re still nowhere close. This is the world schmaltz lake with the entire EU cheese mountain forming an island in the middle, all decorated with a Willy Wonka factory worth of sugar candy and more camp than the Boy Scouts Of America. It’s like an entire planet done up like that weirdo down your street who lights up their entire house and garden for the whole of December every year. It’s ridiculous. It’s preposterous. It’s absolutely off its not inconsiderable tits. But, well, Read more ...
Matt Wolf
A 35-year-old gay man has to figure out which way to turn in GHBoy, the Paul Harvard play whose connection to the chemsex world is embedded in its title. Will Robert (Jimmy Essex) settle into a relationship with Catalan university student Sergi (Marc Bosch) 15 years his junior, or will he succumb to the frequently unclad presence of Sylvester Akinrolabu, who plays the various tempters he meets along the way? What about the undertow of danger that has seen numerous men in Robert's stimulant-ready East London midst murdered of late? The grim spectre of serial killer Stephen Port has been Read more ...
India Lewis
Zaina Arafat’s debut details the trials and tribulations of its first generation American-Palestinian narrator, desperately seeking love, but unable to stand its stifling reciprocation. Her struggles are all tied up with her inability to admit her bisexuality to her mother, and their complicated relationship. The chapters move between her present-day navigation of her issues with love addiction and the significance of her past, heavily linking the two in a trope that makes the whole book read like one long therapy session.At first, its knowing tone can seem a little too cynical, the narrator’ Read more ...
Matt Wolf
A top-rank cast swims against the tide in Uncle Frank, writer-director Alan Ball's well-intentioned but fatally contrived film that presumably contains more than a trace of the Oscar-winning filmmaker's own past. Telling of a gay southerner called Frank (Paul Bettany) who is called back to his native (and bigoted) roots from the freedom he has found as a university professor in New York, Ball's narrative begins intriguingly before swerving towards implausibility and melodrama that not even the always-terrific Bettany and a distinguished cast can forestall. The film begins as a memory Read more ...
theartsdesk
The infamous border wall. Prolonged detention. Children in cages. Even as Biden's election promises a sea change in Trump's devastatingly hardline immigration policy, immigrants, both first- and second-generation, face a spectrum of prejudice, violence and categorisation in the increasingly divided "land of the free". In the wide-ranging collection The Good Immigrant USA, editors Chimene Suleyman and Nikesh Shukla make it their aim to "finally let immigrants be in charge of their own narrative" as writers and artists from Teju Cole to Jenny Zhang and Chiogizie Obioma to Dani Fernandez Read more ...
Laura de Lisle
Back to Georgian brothels, now – at least, for those of us who don’t have a Hulu subscription. The BBC’s airing of the second series of Harlots over the summer felt strangely timely. Barely an episode in and an angry crowd was hammering at the local judge’s door, demanding justice after the needless death of one of the city’s poorest residents. The third series, showing weekly on Wednesdays on BBC Two and available in its entirety on iPlayer, is less easily related to 2020, but it’s still a rollicking ride. Harlots, created by Moira Buffini and Alison Newman, is billed as a bodice- Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Call him Ishmael, and the Zimbabwe-born, UK-based writer Zodwa Nyoni has done just that. That's the name of the solo character in Nyoni's slight but undeniably affecting 50-minute solo play Nine Lives, which caps a season of monologues at the Bridge Theatre that has functioned as so much cultural balm in these parched times. First seen in Glasgow in 2014 and later at London's Arcola, Alex Chisholm's production serves as a de facto companion to the Bridge season's similarly themed An Evening with an Immigrant, since that is precisely what Nine Lives offers, as well. "It is traumatic to be Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Intriguingly, Summer of 85 could have been François Ozon’s very first film. Back in the mid-Eighties the French director was much taken by Dance on My Grave, the YA novel by Aidan Chambers on which it’s based, its youth-romance, coming-of-age story – one centered on a teenage gay relationship that, unusually for its time, came with no extra complexes for that sexual orientation – obviously attractive. Ozon even wrote a treatment at the time, though he actually hoped he would end up watching an adaptation made by someone else, probably coming from America (Gus van Sant was one of his hopefuls Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
This fifth feature from Claire Denis must surely be the director’s most sheerly concentrated film. Scaling back narrative and dialogue alike – story elucidation relies mainly on intermittent retrospective voice-over narration – Beau Travail engages the viewer instead with its sensual elements (“A Cinema of Sensation” is the title of the essay by critic Girish Shambu that comes with this new Criterion edition). It’s absorbing in every sense – from the choreographically stylised gestures of its military protagonists to the parched desert surroundings of Djibouti, a striking presence in itself, Read more ...
Laura de Lisle
The first words of Sunnymead Court, a new play at the Tristan Bates Theatre, are ominous. “We are transitioning from human experiences to digital experiences.” Oof. Thankfully, this isn’t another gloomy lockdown drama about the evils of Zoom quizzes – it’s the story of an unlikely romance between two women who live metres from each other, but have never spoken. We meet Marie (Gemma Lawrence, who also wrote the piece) first – a socially-anxious copywriter with a strict routine, which includes blasting William Onyeabor’s "Fantastic Man" at 11am every day. Stella (Remmie Milner, pictured Read more ...