“Keep the Lights On”

Not many people have seen the films of American writer-director Ira Sachs, which is a shame. His micro-budgeted 1997 debut feature, The Delta, about an ill-fated interracial romance, was completely unique and oddly resonant, and his 2005 sophomore work, Forty Shades of Blue, was one of the best films of the decade. About an aging Memphis music producer (Rip Torn) and his much younger Russian émigré wife (Diana Korzun), Blue imposed a cool, vaguely European style on a rowdy, all-American setting, and it bowled me over with its stubborn originality and intelligence. Though it won the top prize at that year’s Sundance Film Festival, it barely made it to theatres and was largely ignored by critics; I don’t recall it showing up on more than a handful of year-end lists.

Sachs’ latest, Keep the Lights On, seems much less likely to be neglected. Not only did it pick up great notices when it debuted in New York a few weeks ago, it has the allure of dirty laundry exposed. Sachs based the film very closely on his troubled ten-year relationship with the prominent literary agent Bill Clegg, a high-functioning crackhead at the time, and he leaves in the shockingly intimate details most other biographical movies leave out. (Clegg already went public about this period in his life in his 2010 memoir Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man, which surely helped to free Sachs up here.)

Keep the Lights On is easily one of the strongest American films of the year, but I’m not sure it’s all it could have been. Scene for scene, it’s a work of marvellous, even unerring observational detail — a warts-and-all look at one specific couple and at modern gay life in general — but the relationship at its heart never quite comes into focus. Perhaps inevitably, it’s a one-sided movie; though Sachs is totally grudge-free and as blunt about his own failings as he is about Clegg’s, he lets us come to know — and more or less understand — his character, whereas Clegg remains vague, sketched-in. It’s probable that Sachs still feels at a loss to understand his ex and wants us to experience his incomprehension — wants us to understand how far a relationship can go without either person ever really knowing the other. But in dramatic terms, the approach feels not quite sufficient. We want — maybe even need — to know something of what Clegg feels, too.

We first meet Sachs’s stand-in, the scruffily handsome Erik (Danish actor Thure Lindhardt), in 1998, doing what so many gay men did before the invention of Grindr: trawling for sex via Ma Bell. After a few dead-ends, he accepts an invitation from the boyish, well-put-together Paul (Zachary Booth, playing the Clegg role). The two meet at Paul’s apartment, and though the attraction is immediate, their night together ends on a discordant note. “I have a girlfriend,” says Paul, “so don’t get your hopes up.” Having been around the block a time or two, Erik knows this is hardly an obstacle, and before long the two are an item. The real obstacle isn’t Paul’s lingering attachment to straightness, it’s his increasing attachment to hard drugs (he favours weekend-long binges in fancy hotels) and Erik’s willingness to indulge it. The rest of the film documents the couple’s ups and downs — emphasis on the downs — over the ensuing decade, checking in on them every two years.

It’s no exaggeration to say Keep the Lights On is one of the most unblinking, unsentimental portraits of a relationship — gay or straight — ever to reach the screen. Most other movies about ill-fated couples, even many very good ones, feel the need to adopt a tragic pose, to imply that the protagonists found a great love and let it slip through their fingers. Here, there’s no suggestion Erik and Paul are anything other than what all couples are: two people trying to make a relationship work. Erik and Paul love one another, but it’s an open question how far their love extends or how much it can endure.

The film is also unblinking in a more literal sense, with Sachs refusing to look away from the messy, sometimes unflattering realities of urban gay life. Indeed, while gays will find themselves laughing or wincing in recognition, straights may find themselves watching on an almost anthropological level. See: Erik and Paul going through emergency clean-up protocol after Paul soils the bed during anal sex. See: Erik suffering through yet another one-night-stand with a gym rat who wants his body worshipped. See: Erik essentially channel-surfing on that phone-sex line, hanging up on anyone who doesn’t do it for him. (I reckon it would take about three minutes of this movie to send right-wingers into conniptions.)

Ultimately, Keep the Lights On is perhaps most noteworthy as an honest self-portrait. Throughout, Sachs paints Erik as smart, earnest, and likeable, but also as flaky, irresponsible, and vaguely indulgent of both himself and Paul. Erik’s decidedly marginal filmmaking career has been underwritten by family money, and his sister (Paprika Steen) scolds him for failing to get a real job and for contenting himself with being forever “up-and-coming.” In practically any other movie, a comment like that would be engineered to make the sister look mean and the protagonist sympathetic, but here it has the sting of truth. Furthermore, we never catch Lindhardt — who gives a wonderfully lived-in performance — trying to win us over. At all times, his rough-hewn face seems both open and veiled. He’s almost like a kid: eager to forge connections one moment, locked inside his own head the next. 

The missing fragment is Paul, who’s only ever seen from Erik’s perspective, and who spends too much of the movie off-screen, away on his drug binges. It doesn’t help that Paul is one of those perfect-on-the-outside, totally-messed-up-on-the-inside types, the sort of person who’s almost impossible to identify with onscreen. (Even if you’re one of those types yourself, the outer perfection of the performer wouldn’t match up with the inner you.) Accordingly, Booth — with his generic, almost mask-like Tommy Hilfiger prettiness — is both ideally cast and problematic. You keep trying to understand him, yet you get nowhere. I’ll grant that, dramatically speaking, a character like this is a legitimate conundrum; I just wish Sachs had grappled with it more.

If it sounds like I’m nitpicking, well, I am. But what Sachs gets on the screen is so good it’s hard not to wish it added up to something great. As it is, it falls just short of the recent British film Weekend, which was a similarly intimate look at modern gay romance. While Keep the Lights On spans a ten-year relationship, Weekend focussed on the first 78 hours, and in so doing, seemed to say all that needed to be said. Maybe it’s just that our ability to understand other people’s relationships stretches only so far. Maybe, after a certain point, they simply become too knotted, too shrouded in messy particulars, to be seen clearly.
 

“Stories We Tell”

Ira Sachs isn’t the only one exposing himself to cinematic scrutiny this week — so is hometown gal Sarah Polley. Her new autobiographical documentary, Stories We Tell, is damn near impossible to describe without ruining, so let’s just call it an examination of a highly tangled family lineage. The movie’s central character is Sarah’s mother, Diane Polley, who died when Sarah was 11, and she’s a legitimately transfixing figure: outwardly free-spirited and jolly, inwardly haunted. Polley recreates her life with staged footage made to look like home movies, and the recreations are almost too good — I confess I had no inkling they weren’t legit until very late in the film.

I’m sure a few cynical types will write the movie off as navel-gazing on Polley’s part, but it’s nothing of the kind. Her family history would be interesting no matter who she was, and she unfolds the many twists and turns expertly. It’s an endlessly fascinating story, impeccably told. My only criticism: it gets a wee bit bogged down toward the end trying to interrogate itself. Polley plunges into the whole “nature of truth and memory” bit, taking her cue from a passage in Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace, and I’m not sure the material really warrants it. Part of what’s fascinating about her muddy family history is how cleanly it came to light in the end. I’m sure it will forever hold mysteries for her, but for us, it feels like a mystery unambiguously solved.

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