FFWD Weekly
Copyright © 1997. All Rights Reserved.


The Birdcage without bars
Homosexual love story in need of a little crisis counselling
by D. Christensen

Beautiful Thing
Starring Glen Berry, Scott Neal and Linda Henry
Directed by Hettie MacDonald
At the Uptown Screen, Jan 17-23

"Certainly with me and my friends there wasn't much of a crisis about being gay, it was just natural to us. Beautiful Thing reflects this, it's a happy story. You can be gay and happy, you can be working class and accept homosexuality."

Beautiful Thing is based on the play of the same name by Jonathan Harvey and his above comment is genuinely reflective of the film; Beautiful Thing is a happy story with lower class characters who come across as sincerely liberal. But the story has no definable sense of crisis and while a situation like that may have been great for Harvey's formative years it has made for a lackluster film.

Taking place mostly in a lower middle class block of flats in Thamemead Estate, Beautiful Thing is the story of Jamie, a bright and sensitive boy who is happiest when he's alone. Jamie is attracted to his sports-minded classmate Ste, the boy next door. Ste is bullied and beaten by his older brother and ex-boxer dad and, when the inevitable one thrashing too many occurs, Ste is taken in by Jamie's mother. The boys find themselves growing increasingly attracted to one another at the same time as they are trying to come to terms with their sexuality.

Films with gay characters have often treated homosexuality as a contentious subject that demands a moral and social examination (think of all those movies-of-the-week in the '80s and Hollywood's attempts at presenting gay themes). Or, the gay relationships are reduced to the forms of conflicts that a heterosexual audience can appreciate. From Early Frost and Making Love to Torch Song Trilogy and the more recent The Birdcage, films with gay themes have tended to pick one of these two camps and plant themselves squarely in it. Beautiful Thing has tried to set up shop in both arenas with varying levels of success, mostly due to the relentless optimism that runs through the entire film.

Like Harvey's childhood memories, Ste and Jamie's relationship is an unsullied affair. They drift into one another's arms with very little adversity and their relationship plays out without the requisite encounter with skin-heads or some other form of violence that prods the narrative along. In fact, short of a couple of up-turned lips and some doodling in school books, there's nary a hint of oppression in Beautiful Thing. This does two things to the film: it works against your expectations but at the same time you feel you've been duped. By setting up the tension of Ste's beating at the hands of his father and brother and then failing to follow through with that parallel, the film feels unformed and lazily thought out. If Ste is beaten up as a heterosexual, he's completely left alone as a homosexual and given the film's structure, that doesn't make sense.

At the same time, the boys' relationship, with its chaste world of tentative sexual explorations, follows squarely in filmic first-love tradition without any of the accompanying angst or associative self doubt. It's a certainty from the awkward first frames of this film that Ste and Jamie are going to end up together and nothing throughout the rest of the film suggests that any sort of discord will get in their way. A refreshing change from the stereotypes of old is always welcome but it leaves the film floundering to make up tension and a sense of climax in other areas (there's a subplot with a next door neighbor who thinks she's Mama Cass and a storyline about Jamie's mother and her hippy-dippy boyfriend but these feel tossed off in the former and under-explored in the latter).

You have to cheer the lack of crisis in Jonathan Harvey's adolescence but it doesn't mean you have to appreciate it in this film. If anything, Beautiful Thing makes you yearn for the days when a film like Cruising really got everyone's hackles up, hetero and homo. Inflexibly optimistic films can really get you down.

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