Just across the street from the bookstore where I work is a wonderful old movie house, one of a few in the city that has been restored and that now run mostly independent and foreign films. It's in a college neighborhood, so the occasional bloody blockbuster or horror film plays there as well, always in the largest of the screening rooms, on the ground floor. I not sure, now I come to think about it, that I've ever seen a movie on the main screen on the ground floor. The building has been adapted with two much smaller theaters on the floors above. That's where one goes to see the Renoir reissues, the earnest Iranian peasant dramas, and the gays. The gays always play on the top most floor, up in The Gods, as it were; up past the second screen, and the men's room, and up and up and up... The screen is actually a fair size for this kind of venue, and the seating's actually quite comfortable, but part of the amusement of going to the first afternoon show, as the husband and I always do now, is joining the caravan of gray headed gays as we climb and climb and climb to see the latest independent gay domestic comedy, street hustler/addiction tragedy, earnest in memoriam, or the first ever mildly queer film from _______ (fill in the blank with the latest oppressive-third-world-dictatorship/theocracy to let one slip out.) Not terribly chatty by the time we drop into those comfy seats before the previews, I can tell you. Everybody's a little winded.
Of course there is invariably the little pack of middle-aged gym enthusiasts -- read single gay guys -- usually half a dozen together, who always seem to arrive just after dear A. and I have finally gathered up our program-schedules, and our popcorn and bottled water and sodas and candy bars and have set off at last up the stairs. (No elevator.) The staircase is twisty and narrow and the poor gym rats behind us often make impatient noises as we lumber along. Does them no earthly good. Irresistible force? Meet the immovable object that is us. Besides, there's usually some even older and slower old thing climbing ahead of us, bless 'im. If you aren't going anywhere fast, my darlings, well, neither are we. One daring, specially agile fellow, with just a bit more hair than his companions, may try to pass us quickly on the right, when we finally get as far as the men's room landing, but dear A. and I are a couple of particular... gravity at this stage in the relationship, and only the slimmest and nimblest faerie has any chance of making that hairpin turn before the gap closes behind us and we continue our stately ascent. And trust me, however graceful his jeté, he'll never get around the dear old party with the cane and the elderly companion animal just two slow steps ahead of us, so what was the point of being rude, dear? We'll all get there eventually. Hopefully the previews will run long.
Queer cinema has come a long way since we first went all breathless watching Michael Ontkean kiss Harry Hamlin full on the mouth (!) way back when, but the basics of gay nonporn haven't really changed all that much in the intervening years. Our last expedition to see the gays in The Gods was to watch a sweet little Swedish import of the domestic comedy type. Patrik Age 1,5 is a sweet little story of a perfectly nice, quite attractive gay couple anxious "to start a family." They have a rather hideous little house in a thoroughly ugly little suburban community, and they are trying to adopt a baby. I don't think I'm really going to spoil anything by telling that a typo on the adoption agreement lands them in a series of predictably comedic situations, what promises briefly to be a dramatic complication, and then everything resolves itself in a heartwarmingly uninspired happy ending and an amusing little family outing behind the final credits. It's all too inevitable of course, but charmingly done, well acted and handsomely cast. Gustaf Skarsgård plays the maternal pediatrician in a winningly wide-eyed way, Almost lactating in anticipation of delivery. The smoking hot Torkel Petersson plays the good doctor's less committed partner with a sexy little pot, the usual baggage of a bisexual past, and a slight drinking problem. (Hard to judge, that, in a Scandinavian setting, but they do make an issue of it.) The eponymous potential adoptee is played, and with genuine feeling, by a beautiful blond boy with the rather hideous name, Thomas Ljungman.
If this reads as a less than ringing endorsement, I do apologize. We actually enjoyed Patrik Age 1,5, just for what it was. One might have wished for at least some suggestion that not everyone, gay or otherwise, feels the need of offspring, or even pets for that matter, in order to find domestic contentment. Hell, I'm still waiting for the movie, gay or straight in which the protagonist leads a a life of single blessedness without ending in either suicide or eating alone in a diner in the final shot. (I think the nearest I can come to naming such a film might be the superb Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould, and that's hardly a portrait of a typical sort of person, now is it? Great movie though. Love me some Colm Feore, um-hum.) Still, as gay love stories go, I must say the happy ending has been a welcome new standard, so why bitch?
The most interesting thing about this little movie may well be the fact that it is now in its third week at the cinema across the street from the bookstore! That's all but unheard of for the gays in The Gods. Most of our movies play there just a week before disappearing into pay-cable-television-packages and the DVD rental qeue. Catch 'em quick, or they're gone. Clearly, something about this heartwarming little number appeals to more than the usual number of the largely settled Seattle gay set. Got us out of bed and into pants on a Sunday.
There's your recommendation. "Here Films" may feel free to use that last as a pull-quote.
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