Parting Glances

First Run Features, 1986

Director/Screenplay:
Bill Sherwood

Starring: Richard Ganoung, John Bolger, Steve Buscemi, Adam Nathan, Kathy Kinney

Rated R, 90 minutes

Apartment Zero

Anchor Bay
Entertainment, 1989

Director: Martin Donovan

Screenplay:
Martin Donovan, David Koepp

Starring: Colin Firth, Hart Bochner, Dora Bryan, Liz Smith, Fabrizio Bentivoglio, James Telfer, Mirella D'Angelo, Juan Vitali

Rated R, 124 minutes

Two Classics Revisted
by Michael D. Klemm

First reviewed in Outcome, April, 1998
Revised in Outcome, November, 2000

The number of gay-themed films that are released commercially have multiplied over the years. Because of their easier availability, it is often easy to forget the trailblazers that came before. This month I would like to revisit two of my personal favorites. Each is a classic in its own right.

Parting Glances (1986), written and directed by the late Bill Sherwood, is still one of the best gay-themed independent films ever released. Parting Glances details 24 hours in the lives of Michael and Robert, (Richard Ganoung and John Bolger), a longtime couple who are about to temporarily separate while Robert's job with a world health organization forces his relocation oversees.

Complicating their lives is Michael's first lover, a punk rock performer named Nick (Steve Buscemi, before he made a career out of playing psychos in action movies). Nick has been diagnosed with AIDS, and Robert is jealous of the amount of time that Michael spends taking care of him. It is mostly because of Nick that Robert chose the job transfer. Not only does he wish to be absent when Nick dies, he also knows, deep down, that Nick was always the great love of Michael's life. Their emotions are finely tuned without hitting any false notes.

The film's centerpiece is Robert's farewell party, which takes place at an artist¹s loft. Sherwood's ability to sketch realistic and colorful characters is especially evident here as he presents realistic people from all varied walks of gay life. The overweight author of an S&M Sci-fi novel stalks all the young men at the party, finally hitting on a priest who recently left the seminary. A lone straight man vainly cruises the party in search of available women. Robert reminisces with a high school girl friend who states that she always knew that he was gay because he was "just too cute" to be straight, while Nick is asked to appear in a play by an Ingmar Bergman wannabe performance artist who wishes to stage a show in which all the actors are terminally ill, ("Imagine the intensity!").

Sherwood's uncanny ability to write great truths into a simple dialogue exchange reaches its zenith during a party scene between two generations of gay men. A drunk young man, in lust with Michael, recognizes Nick from his videos and engages him in conversation. To him, Nick personifies a world of pre-AIDS sexual liberation while he represents a gay future Nick will never know. In perhaps one of the most telling explanations of gay awakening ever put on screen, he remembers telling his parents that he didn't choose this lifestyle, this lifestyle chose him. All he had to do to know that he was gay was ask his penis because it doesn't lie.

In its depiction of everyday Manhattan life, Parting Glances is similar to a Woody Allen film in tone. The humor is both witty and biting. Sherwood's screenplay is filled with rich characterizations and attention to detail. Unlike many scripts, this one actually improves on subsequent viewings.

The two male leads are attractive, and their brief love scenes are sexually charged. Richard Ganoung (Michael) would go on to play a similar role a decade later opposite Sean Hayes in Billy's Hollywood Screen Kiss. Steve Buscemi, however, steals the show as Nick. He is both angry and sarcastic about his illness, and picks on Michael for being a mother hen and for marrying Robert who "looks like a fuckin' Ken Doll." Music plays an important role as he lays in his bed listening to Don Giovanni as a prelude to a surreal moment when a deceased friend appears in a suit of armor as Mozart's Commendatore to tell him that heaven is boring and to cling onto life as long as he can. The soundtrack is also peppered with many known tunes of the day, making effective use of Jimmy Sommerville and The Bronski Beat's "Smalltown Boy" and "Why."

Parting Glances is a wonderful film in which all of the gay characters are presented naturally, and not defined simply by their sexuality. The human issues raised throughout make Parting Glances universal and timeless. It is a shame that this was director Sherwood¹s only film. He died from AIDS complications in 1990.

Beunos Aires is the setting for Apartment Zero (1989), a psychological thriller with gay undercurrents. Don't be deceived by the videotape box which simply remarks that two men share an apartment and that "one of them is a cold-blooded serial killer."

Colin Firth stars as Adrian LeDuc, an introverted, paranoid, and sexually repressed young man who runs an old movie theater that shows only classic films. His apartment is filled with framed photographs of movie icons like James Dean, Montgomery Clift and Elizabeth Taylor. He's a kindred soul to Felix Unger, and his mother is currently confined to a mental hospital. His neighbors in the apartment building think him odd because he keeps to himself. Because his theater is losing money, he reluctantly decides to advertise for a roommate.

Enter the roommate, Jack Carney, played by Hart Bochner. His entrance trumpets Adrian's closeted sexuality to the audience. The attraction between them is immediate. Jack, wearing a black leather jacket, is tall, dark and smolderingly handsome. From Adrian's point of view, he walks into the apartment, stands next to a framed photograph of James Dean, and gazes directly at the camera. His smile is both seductive and threatening. Jack seems amused by Adrian's nervousness, but the sexual tension as the two men look each other over is electric.

While the murders in town persist in the background, the film emphasizes the growing friendship, and tension, between the two men. Jack becomes a hit with the neighbors to Adrian's horror. While Adrian refuses to even talk to them, Jack sleeps with almost everyone in the building... a young gay man, a lonely married woman, a sad transvestite. All of the tenants seem to fall under Jack's "spell," especially Adrian.

The second half of the film becomes a psychological mindgame worthy of Hitchcock as it becomes clear that one of the men is a killer. As Adrian's need for Jack becomes almost obsessive, the world unravels for them both. Rather than opting for cheap thrills and the usual suspense cliches, the tension in Apartment Zero builds in subtle ways. Like Roman Polanski did in Repulsion, Rosemary's Baby and The Tenant, director Martin Donovan explores the cinematic possibilities inherent within the apartment itself. As the tension builds, the large apartment seems to shrink. Characters are filmed in constricted camera set-ups; walls and ceilings seem to close in during many agitated scenes.

Unlike most thrillers, there is fine character development, and the plot is not predictable. What makes this film stand out is the sexual tension between Adrian and Jack. Adrian's obsession with the cinema is central to the themes of appearance vs. reality. Adrian would rather lose himself in the movies than talk to real people, and Jack functions for him as a film icon that has come to life. It would be a crime to say anything more about the plot, except to note that the conclusion is one of the most disturbing in modern cinema. I guarantee that you will never forget it. It is well worth a look.

Both of these films, to the best of my knowledge, were never seen theatrically in Buffalo, but both films are available on video. You might find Apartment Zero at Blockbuster Video but both are available at Buffalo's more adventurous outlets, Mondo Video and Rainbow Pride. [Update for 2007: Apartment Zero is now available on DVD in its original 124 minute theatrical version. Click here for more details.]

More On Colin Firth:
Another Country

Reviewer's note, 2007: Interjecting a bit of autobiography and historical context here. In many of my older reviews there are references to these films being unavailable at Blockbuster Video. Times have changed, but in the 90s, that was the case. They were a "family store." Blockbuster's policy back then (since changed) of not carrying NC-17 or unrated films forced many filmmakers to emasculate their films to get an R rating so Blockbuster "the family store" would carry it. .I usually reported if the films were available for rent at Buffalo's two funkiest video stores - Mondo Video, which was owned by the film critic from Artvoice Magazine, M. Faust, and was the place to go to get the hard to find titles - and Rainbow Pride, a gay gift shop run by Frank Ball; he also rented videos. For years, his store was the front room in a popular gay bar, Buddies.

Anyway, when I wrote this review you could not find titles like these at Blockbuster. And I often ranted about it. I've left them in these reviews as I put them online because they are a kind of time capsule. Because early in the millennium there was a changing of the guard at Blockbuster. You could rent Queer as Folk there now! Their old policy of no gay films and no unrated films was gone, finished. And that was good news for filmmakers and film lovers everywhere. I even ended one of my columns with a public service announcement that Blockbuster changed its policies and now carried gay films. I'm not being coerced into writing this, I'm just being fair because that was a big turnaround. Of course it was also around the time I discovered netflix.com and saw that I could rent almost anything from them. Foreign films, independents and of course queer cinema. This note is just to explain how times have changed (for the better) and it is much easier to find queer titles now, whether for rent or for sale. The internet of course got us out of the dark ages too.