All of us Strangers

[Olddaddy]

I just had a gay friend told me he just watched a "brilliant" gay movie set in a London high rise called 

All of us Strangers "

Any reviews on this ?

[reader]

 

[Olddaddy]

Do you know if it's on Netflix?

[forrestreid]

A gay film starring two handsome  Irish stars, whats not to like, lol

Here is what Pink News has to say:

All of Us Strangers review: Mescal and Scott stun in gay romance (thepinknews.com)

 

 

 

[Pete1111]

3 hours ago, Olddaddy said:

Do you know if it's on Netflix?

Probably not going to be on Netflix when it begins streaming.  However, it is not streaming yet, and probably not for another month.

 

I am looking forward to watching.  The cast looks great!

[unicorn]

Somewhat of a downer of a movie. It moved slowly for my tastes (and that of my fiance). 

[stevenkesslar]

I loved it.  Although it is not a feel good movie.

The critics are all right.  It is an emotionally evocative work about the enduring power of love.  And the complications of that when you're a Gay man of a certain age.

I also loved Red, White, and Royal Blue.  And this is pretty much the opposite.  RWRB speaks to young queers who want to and now can believe boy meets boy and they live in a fairy tale.  All Of Us Strangers isn't about a fairy tale world.  It's about the world we Gay men actually grew up in.  Lots of discrimination, lots of AIDS, lots of death.  Add some ghosts and it makes for one hell of a story.

The Queer Kids Are All Right. And Now They’re Making Me Better.

I don't know if that link will transfer, since someone posted it as a shared story from a New York Times reporter on a different site.  It's a good read. 

In case the link doesn't work and you can't get it online, the phrase that really worked for me in that story about recent queer cinema is "emotional reparations."  As in, a lot of recent LGBTQ film provides a form of emotional reparations for everything that we didn't necessarily get growing up.  Like support, and understanding.  I think RWRB and Heartstoppers are just sweet fairy tales.  I took All Of Us Strangers, appropriately titled, as a form of emotional reparations for those of us who didn't grow up in a sweet Gay fairy tale.  Fellow Travelers comes to mind as another recent and excellent example.

On 2/5/2024 at 11:51 AM, unicorn said:

Somewhat of a downer of a movie. It moved slowly for my tastes (and that of my fiance). 

The director and writer, Andrew Haigh, insists that the movie overall is a story about a Gay man accepting himself and overcoming obstacles to love.  One could debate that, given the final plot twist.  Haigh says he wanted to make a movie that made people think.  But I think you settled the question for us, @unicorn.  The fact that you can go see a movie like this WITH YOUR FIANCE (a man, I assume) settles the question.  To quote the fairy tale heroes of Red, White, and Royal Blue, "We won."  In real life, we got the happy ending. Congratulations!  Even if Gay men like Andrew Scott's character in the movie, and Andrew Haigh in real life, paid an emotional price for it.

[unicorn]

5 hours ago, stevenkesslar said:

...I took All Of Us Strangers, appropriately titled, as a form of emotional reparations for those of us who didn't grow up in a sweet Gay fairy tale....

Well, as for us, we're living the gay fairy tale...

[Pete1111]

On 2/9/2024 at 2:49 PM, stevenkesslar said:

I loved it.  Although it is not a feel good movie.

The critics are all right.  It is an emotionally evocative work about the enduring power of love.  And the complications of that when you're a Gay man of a certain age.

I also loved Red, White, and Royal Blue.  And this is pretty much the opposite.  RWRB speaks to young queers who want to and now can believe boy meets boy and they live in a fairy tale.  All Of Us Strangers isn't about a fairy tale world.  It's about the world we Gay men actually grew up in.  Lots of discrimination, lots of AIDS, lots of death.  Add some ghosts and it makes for one hell of a story.

The Queer Kids Are All Right. And Now They’re Making Me Better.

I don't know if that link will transfer, since someone posted it as a shared story from a New York Times reporter on a different site.  It's a good read. 

In case the link doesn't work and you can't get it online, the phrase that really worked for me in that story about recent queer cinema is "emotional reparations."  As in, a lot of recent LGBTQ film provides a form of emotional reparations for everything that we didn't necessarily get growing up.  Like support, and understanding.  I think RWRB and Heartstoppers are just sweet fairy tales.  I took All Of Us Strangers, appropriately titled, as a form of emotional reparations for those of us who didn't grow up in a sweet Gay fairy tale.  Fellow Travelers comes to mind as another recent and excellent example.

The director and writer, Andrew Haigh, insists that the movie overall is a story about a Gay man accepting himself and overcoming obstacles to love.  One could debate that, given the final plot twist.  Haigh says he wanted to make a movie that made people think.  But I think you settled the question for us, @unicorn.  The fact that you can go see a movie like this WITH YOUR FIANCE (a man, I assume) settles the question.  To quote the fairy tale heroes of Red, White, and Royal Blue, "We won."  In real life, we got the happy ending. Congratulations!  Even if Gay men like Andrew Scott's character in the movie, and Andrew Haigh in real life, paid an emotional price for it.

Sorry if I'm a little slow but did Adam really make love to Harry or did most of the movie exist inside Adam's head. 

I want to watch again while staying a bit more alert.

I sense that we were fed a lesson.  You can stand still and share nothing with your parents until it's too late. 

You might have a sweet guy available to you, yet decide to take the safe route and stay in your comfort zone, and never get another chance. 

Whatever the case, it was a remarkable movie for me.   

 

[stevenkesslar]

12 hours ago, Pete1111 said:

Sorry if I'm a little slow but did Adam really make love to Harry or did most of the movie exist inside Adam's head. 

I want to watch again while staying a bit more alert.

I sense that we were fed a lesson.  You can stand still and share nothing with your parents until it's too late. 

You might have a sweet guy available to you, yet decide to take the safe route and stay in your comfort zone, and never get another chance. 

Glad you liked the film.

I read several interviews with the director, Andrew Haigh.  He wanted to leave what really happened open to interpretation, so that people talked about the movie after the movie.  He succeeded!  He also said one of the sub-plots he wrote into the movie is that Adam, thanks to Harry, was finally able to get out of his lonely world and find love - with Harry.  You can imagine that however you want to.  But ending the movie with "The Power Of Love" wasn't subtle.

Of the maybe half dozen articles/interviews I read, this interview with Haigh, and this article in Empire which quotes Haigh on key points, were the most helpful in elaborating what Haigh's intentions and subtexts were.  There's spoilers in both articles for anyone who hasn't seen the film.  I'll quote what Haigh said in the Empire article about whether most of the movie existed inside Adam's head:

Quote

“The basis of the film is that out of Adam's longing, he has brought whatever it is into existence,” says Haigh. “It could all be in his head or you could read it as ghosts. I let the audience come up with how logical they want to be or if they want it to actually be that these three people are ghosts. Or that it all exists as some kind of manifestation of Adam's longing. To me, the latter is sort of my understanding of it — that out of a desire for connection and understanding, everything has been brought into existence.”

So you can choose to view it however you want.  The feeling that resonated for me is that whether you think some of the people we meet in the film are really ghosts, or this is all just happening in Adam's head, Haigh said he wanted to make a "ghost story".  So Adam is haunted, one way or the other. 

In a different interview he said he could have had a much happier and simplistic ending.  But he preferred a more difficult ending, because that is how life actually is most of the time.  That resonated for me, too.  Certainly for someone like Adam.   That New York Times article I hyperlinked above talked about how this film, like many other recent LGBTQ films, provide a form of "emotional reparations" for Gay men who grew up in a world that was a lot less tolerant to Gay men than the one we live in today.  That works for me.  Andrew was a deeply wounded guy.   The point Haigh clearly wanted to make is that, in the end, there was healing and moving on for Adam.  He was able to find love.  But in a difficult way.

For me, the final plot twist with Harry wasn't the most interesting part of the movie.  I would have been fine with the simpler happy ending Haigh did not choose.  What resonated the deepest for me were the scenes with Adams parents.  Because that is a form of haunting I feel, and I think many if not most Gay men feel.  I think what you said is correct:  you can share nothing with your parents, and then it's too late.  But I think Haigh made it more complicated than that.  Even if you do get to share, in the ghostly way Adam got to, it's still not ever going to be quite right.  Here's what Haigh said, which I'll quote extensively.  Because I think he really nailed it.

Quote

It took a long time to get that scene [where Adam comes out to his mother] right. I was writing it endlessly because I knew it was sort of doing two things: It's Adam coming out to his mother, but it's also reigniting all of the feelings that he used to feel living in the ‘80s because everything his mother said to him is what every single person said during the ‘80s; what queer people were being bombarded with constantly. It was about having sympathy, as you say, for both of them. As queer people, there’s so much complexity involved in it all because we often want the other person to feel okay as well and be like, “Oh, don't worry! I'm telling you this thing but I know it's complicated and I’m fine!” But actually you're not fine and you need them to see through what you're giving them. And then for the mother, you’re right: It can’t be easy for parents to suddenly have a different idea of their child. That's really, really difficult — especially back then. I mean, Jesus! It’s a very different situation. So I was trying to be generous to both of those people and both of those characters, realizing it's complicated and messy and very hard to come to some kind of conclusion, and I feel like Adam leaves that experience feeling complicated about himself and whether he does feel lonely because of his sexuality. Has his mom accepted it? Sort of, but not really. I think that’s lots of people's actual experience. When I came out to my mom, it was a pretty similar experience.

I was sobbing during that scene.  Because it brought up all the feelings with my own Mom and Dad, when I came out to them as an adult.  My Mom was textbook correct, in saying, "We love you any way you are."  Then she asked me if there was anything else I needed to tell them.  Which I'm pretty sure meant, "Are you telling us this because you are dying of AIDS?"  All I said is, "I'm fine.  I'm healthy."  My Dad took having a Gay son very hard.  He read and thought and came around.  Sort of.  So my point is that is was definitely okay, and maybe even good.  But it was never great.  And, like Haigh, it was easy for me to be in an empathetic space, even though I was still the kid that was strange and seeking acceptance.  I don't think my parents, lifelong Catholics, could every completely embrace the idea of having a Gay son.  But that was okay.  Like Haigh said, it's complicated and messy.

One of the best sets of experiences I had with my Dad was the last five years or so of his life, when my Mom was in a nursing home with dementia and he deeply missed his lifelong partner in crime.  I spent a lot of time with him, just bullshitting.  And the nice thing is at that point it had nothing to do with being Gay, or sexuality.  It was just about love and caring between a father and son.  Even if there were elements of it that were better left unsaid.  Haigh said in one of those interviews that his own Dad, who died of dementia, at one point forgot that his son was Gay.  Haigh said that didn't really matter to him at that point, either.  I can relate.

It was a really beautiful, wise, and deep movie that captured a lot of my experience about growing up Gay.

[xpaulo]

On 2/9/2024 at 3:49 PM, stevenkesslar said:

In real life, we got the happy ending.

I hope so. There's a concerted effort in Canada now to turn back the clock on acceptance of gay anything. Not sure if it's mostly a fringe thing, or widespread. But people are definitely feeling they can get away with publicly attacking anything gay. A pretend populist right wing politician seems destined to become our next prime minister. When he was a teenager his adoptive father came out, but he never talks about it or gay issues much. He supports various right wing groups that are certainly anti-gay and praised the organizers of Save the Children marches last fall which were blatantly accusing all trans and gay people of wanting to sodomize children and particularly targeting people working in schools, etc.

[stevenkesslar]

25 minutes ago, xpaulo said:

I hope so. There's a concerted effort in Canada now to turn back the clock on acceptance of gay anything. Not sure if it's mostly a fringe thing, or widespread. But people are definitely feeling they can get away with publicly attacking anything gay. A pretend populist right wing politician seems destined to become our next prime minister. When he was a teenager his adoptive father came out, but he never talks about it or gay issues much. He supports various right wing groups that are certainly anti-gay and praised the organizers of Save the Children marches last fall which were blatantly accusing all trans and gay people of wanting to sodomize children and particularly targeting people working in schools, etc.

Sorry to hear that.

I assume you're talking about Donald Trump, of course.  😉

Actually, by coincidence, I had a lovely dinner last night with a sister-in-law who was born in Canada but is now a dual citizen, and her (still) Canadian brother and his wife  who are escaping the Canadian cold .  And so I got a first hand account of some of Canada's version of the culture war backlash.  Sadly, MCGA just doesn't have the ring of MAGA.

In some ways I take it as a compliment.  It amazes me still, and makes me very proud of my community, that during our lifetimes we won these huge victories like same sex marriage that really did overturn the way things have been .............. well ................. always.  So the fact that some people want to turn things back is to be expected.  Buckle your seatbelts.  It's going to be a bumpy ride.

The good news is the overwhelming majority of young people, including conservative young people, aren't going back.  I hope.  But that hasn't stopped Republicans from passing a slew of anti-LGBTQ laws in red states.

To bring it back to All Of Us Strangers and its director, Andrew Haigh, one of the interesting questions in some interviews is whether Gen Z Gay men would even get a movie like this.  Since so much of it is based on the ghosts of the past - AIDS being a death sentence, being Gay still being a crime basically.  Haigh said it's a very personal film, since that was the world he grew up Gay in.  One way that surfaces in the movie is the older Adam uses "queer" and his young lover uses "Gay."  Because when Adam was a kid "Gay" was always meant as a put down.  But for the reasons you say I have to imagine life still isn't a bowl of cherries for Gay kids in Canada and the US.  And it's certainly not for trans kids.

[Pete1111]

On 2/26/2024 at 8:47 AM, stevenkesslar said:

Glad you liked the film.

I read several interviews with the director, Andrew Haigh.  He wanted to leave what really happened open to interpretation, so that people talked about the movie after the movie.  He succeeded!  He also said one of the sub-plots he wrote into the movie is that Adam, thanks to Harry, was finally able to get out of his lonely world and find love - with Harry.  You can imagine that however you want to.  But ending the movie with "The Power Of Love" wasn't subtle.

Of the maybe half dozen articles/interviews I read, this interview with Haigh, and this article in Empire which quotes Haigh on key points, were the most helpful in elaborating what Haigh's intentions and subtexts were.  There's spoilers in both articles for anyone who hasn't seen the film.  I'll quote what Haigh said in the Empire article about whether most of the movie existed inside Adam's head:

So you can choose to view it however you want.  The feeling that resonated for me is that whether you think some of the people we meet in the film are really ghosts, or this is all just happening in Adam's head, Haigh said he wanted to make a "ghost story".  So Adam is haunted, one way or the other. 

In a different interview he said he could have had a much happier and simplistic ending.  But he preferred a more difficult ending, because that is how life actually is most of the time.  That resonated for me, too.  Certainly for someone like Adam.   That New York Times article I hyperlinked above talked about how this film, like many other recent LGBTQ films, provide a form of "emotional reparations" for Gay men who grew up in a world that was a lot less tolerant to Gay men than the one we live in today.  That works for me.  Andrew was a deeply wounded guy.   The point Haigh clearly wanted to make is that, in the end, there was healing and moving on for Adam.  He was able to find love.  But in a difficult way.

For me, the final plot twist with Harry wasn't the most interesting part of the movie.  I would have been fine with the simpler happy ending Haigh did not choose.  What resonated the deepest for me were the scenes with Adams parents.  Because that is a form of haunting I feel, and I think many if not most Gay men feel.  I think what you said is correct:  you can share nothing with your parents, and then it's too late.  But I think Haigh made it more complicated than that.  Even if you do get to share, in the ghostly way Adam got to, it's still not ever going to be quite right.  Here's what Haigh said, which I'll quote extensively.  Because I think he really nailed it.

I was sobbing during that scene.  Because it brought up all the feelings with my own Mom and Dad, when I came out to them as an adult.  My Mom was textbook correct, in saying, "We love you any way you are."  Then she asked me if there was anything else I needed to tell them.  Which I'm pretty sure meant, "Are you telling us this because you are dying of AIDS?"  All I said is, "I'm fine.  I'm healthy."  My Dad took having a Gay son very hard.  He read and thought and came around.  Sort of.  So my point is that is was definitely okay, and maybe even good.  But it was never great.  And, like Haigh, it was easy for me to be in an empathetic space, even though I was still the kid that was strange and seeking acceptance.  I don't think my parents, lifelong Catholics, could every completely embrace the idea of having a Gay son.  But that was okay.  Like Haigh said, it's complicated and messy.

One of the best sets of experiences I had with my Dad was the last five years or so of his life, when my Mom was in a nursing home with dementia and he deeply missed his lifelong partner in crime.  I spent a lot of time with him, just bullshitting.  And the nice thing is at that point it had nothing to do with being Gay, or sexuality.  It was just about love and caring between a father and son.  Even if there were elements of it that were better left unsaid.  Haigh said in one of those interviews that his own Dad, who died of dementia, at one point forgot that his son was Gay.  Haigh said that didn't really matter to him at that point, either.  I can relate.

It was a really beautiful, wise, and deep movie that captured a lot of my experience about growing up Gay.

This article in Vulture suggests Harry and Adam never got together.  Interesting thoughts from Haigh.

 

The piece suggests the music is key to the story and represents  very personal references for Haigh's own life growing up gay.