How Gay Movies Get The Straight Audiences
A Magnificent Haunting: the film's publicity material makes no mention of the fact that the lead character is gay
In Italy, attitudes towards homosexuality are still pretty conservative, so the Italian distributor of Stranger By the Lake – a French thriller about a killer at large in an idyllic gay-cruising area – had to be careful about its publicity. Careful, that is, to ramp up the gay angle. Where the picture's international trailer opens with a cryptic conversation about a fish before showing glimpses of male nudity and a bit of groping in the bushes, the Italian trailer drops the fish, adds some flesh and shows two men passionately getting it on.
This wasn't an act of politically motivated provocation; quite the opposite, in fact. "In Italy, we have a lot of problems with censorship for homosexual films," says Dario de Lorenzo of Teodora Film, the distributor in question. If there's room for confusion about a film's content, he adds, "there's a chance the theatre couldn't show the film. The international trailer was quite ambiguous and I thought that, for Italy, it was better to make it more clear."
And now a counter-example. This weekend sees the UK release of A Magnificent Haunting, the latest film by Italian-based Turkish-born director Ferzan Ozpetek. The publicity material from its distributor, Peccadillo, describes how its lead character, Pietro, encounters ghostly apparitions after moving into a new apartment and refers to the story as a "fantastical comedy that explores themes of love, friendship, and mortality". It makes no mention of the fact that Pietro is gay.
"It's just not that important, really," says Tom Abell, chairman ofPeccadillo Pictures. "The sexuality of the main character is incidental to the story. Stranger By the Lake [which Peccadillo will release in the UK next year] is very much a gay film, whereas A Magnificent Hauntingreally isn't."
"It's just not that important, really," says Tom Abell, chairman ofPeccadillo Pictures. "The sexuality of the main character is incidental to the story. Stranger By the Lake [which Peccadillo will release in the UK next year] is very much a gay film, whereas A Magnificent Hauntingreally isn't."
Whether a film's publicity campaign should explicitly refer to a leading character's homosexuality may seem a subtle question, but it represents a deeper point: asking whether advertising should emphasise difference or assume commonality is another way of asking whether gay people are still considered "other".
That used to go without saying. I remember, aged about 10 or 11, watching Clue, the tongue-in-cheek 1985 movie based on the board game known as Cluedo in the UK. I had an inkling that I was gay, so when one of the characters – Michael McKean's Mr Green – said he was "a homosexual", I flinched and my ears pricked up. I watched with anxious interest as the other members of the ensemble shifted away from him with distaste and unease. My feelings changed to happy incredulity as he emerged as the hero of the piece, then disappointment laced with shame when he proudly asserted his closeted heterosexuality: he had been an undercover agent all along and was now "going to go home and sleep with my wife".
It's a trivial example, but the life of a young queer is steeped in such examples, and cumulatively they let you know you're second best. Of course, things have got better, at least in Britain. Lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) identity and experience are increasingly accepted as incidental aspects of a person's life rather than all-defining deal-breakers. Imagine if, at a party, I happened to mention my boyfriend, and another guest took exception because they had not been forewarned that the event would contain gay subject matter. I'd hope the consensus would be that they were out of order rather than me being castigated for not keeping quiet, or being blamed our host for failing to take the guest's bigotry into account when sending out the invitations.
This, I'd suggest, is analogous to Peccadillo's campaign for A Magnificent Haunting. Anyone who struggled to engage with the story on the basis that Pietro's fleeting romantic misfires involve men rather than women would, frankly, have a problem with gay people. And there are plenty of signs that, when it comes to the simple fact of LGBT identity, the consensus is shifting towards a shrug in movieland as well as the real world.
Blue Is the Warmest Colour: winner of this year's Palme d’Or at Cannes
Where once playing gay was seen as a high-risk strategy for mainstream movie stars, no one now expects Daniel Radcliffe orBenedict Cumberbatch's careers to suffer for their playing Allen Ginsberg or Alan Turing (in the forthcoming Kill Your Darlings and The Imitation Game respectively). Coming out is also a more relaxed, incidental affair than it used to be. This year, Jodie Foster made her first public acknowledgment of her sexuality in passing at an awards ceremony, Ben Whishaw matter-of-factly confirmed he was in a same-sex civil partnership, and TV actor Wentworth Miller came out in the context of declining an invitation to a Russian film festival. It remains to be seen whether such moves will affect their careers, though neither Zachary Quinto nor Neil Patrick Harris seems to have suffered since coming out. Things are perhaps harder for aspiring actors than established names – a recent Screen Actors Guild survey suggested many out actors in Hollywood feel they have suffered prejudice, not least when it comes to perceived marketability – but increasing numbers of young performers, such as Russell Tovey, The Perks of Being a Wallflower's Ezra Miller and Glee's Chris Colfer, gamble on being out more or less from the start.
There are even hints in the right direction in Hollywood's output. Gay characters still tend to be swishy clowns when they're best friends, preening queens when they're villains (Javier Bardem in Skyfall) or sainted martyrs on the rare occasions that they're the lead (presumably Cumberbatch as Turing). But there are some impressively so-what characterisations too, including Kieran Culkin's clued-up roommate inScott Pilgrim Vs The World, Tom Wilkinson's retired judge in The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel and the dumb-jock brother in animated movieParanorman. Lee Daniels has even declared his ambition to create a gay action-hero couple whose sexuality would be revealed at the film's end. (Personally I'm not sure how progressive it would be to watch a couple of closet-cases kick ass, but I suppose we'll have to see.)
Stranger By the Lake has two trailers – an 'ambiguous' one for the international market and a more explicit one for Italian viewers.
So there's welcome, if subtle, progress on the incidental side of things. When it comes to full-on faggotry, though, cold feet abound, especially in the US. The humongously flaming Behind the Candelabra failed to get theatrical distribution despite starring Michael Douglas and Matt Damon, while Interior. Leather Bar – in which James Franco dipped his toe in the S&M scene – provoked much nose-holding consternation. "Any film that addresses the explicit physical and sexual nature of gay life could be alienating to a straight audience," says Paul Smith, a UK film publicist who has worked on campaigns for many LGBT-themed films, including A Magnificent Haunting.
Stranger By the Lake might fall into this camp: rather than fleeting romantic misfires or incidental references to gay identity, it contains graphic sex scenes. Whereas a few years back, such content might have made the film hard to distribute theatrically and even harder to market to non-LGBT viewers, the ground has shifted. "It'll never play to a general multiplex audience," says Abell, "but I think an arthouse audience will come because of strong reviews such as Peter Bradshaw's[following its screening at the London film festival] that put the sex and nudity in context."
The awarding of this year's Palme d'Or at Cannes to Blue Is the Warmest Colour, about a teenage lesbian relationship, is perhaps a sign that queer storylines don't disqualify films from cinema's highest honours – though general audiences have conventionally been more receptive to girl-on-girl love than man-on-man, and not always for progressive reasons. Indeed, the creator of the graphic novel on which Blue Is the Warmest Colour is based has distanced herself from the film's explicit sex scenes, which she felt were exploitative.
The real indication of gay no longer being a mark of irreducible otherness comes when straight audiences identify personally with stories about LGBT characters. Queer audiences have long imagined themselves into movies without overtly gay subject matter, from Pillow Talk to Mommie Dearest. Why shouldn't heterosexual viewers do the same? Last year, Weekend, about two men meeting and hanging out, attracted a considerable crossover audience. And Pietro's situation in A Magnificent Haunting is one that slightly lost daydreamers of any gender or orientation could recognise. Stranger By the Lake, which takes place in a heady, all-male bubble of sun, sand, sex and violence, seems less associable. Yet its director, Alain Guiraudie, sees no reason why straight audiences shouldn't see themselves in its tale of obsessive infatuation.
"There are lots of straight films that have become metaphors for the gay world," Guiraudie has said. "You could say I wanted to make the opposite: a gay-themed film that could become a metaphor for contemporary society, for desire and for humanity in general." That interview ran in the Italian newspaper La Repubblica – and if they can get over it in Italy, there's hope for us all.
• A Magnificent Haunting is released in the UK on 25 October. Stranger By the Lake will be in cinemas from March 2014.
by Ben Walters
The Guardian
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