AKA

"AKA" is a compelling new film from the U.K. by Duncan Roy. It's making the rounds of the American queer film festivals this year and was shown three times here in New York at the New Festival.

It's one of those dramatic experiences that hangs around long after you have left the theater. Extremely well acted and directed, with a brilliant eye behind the camera, it's really the story which finally knocks you out. Is it a documentary? Actually, it feels like you are being taken along on a real anthropological expedition, but without the accompanying mess of cables and microphones and improvised scenes. The director hints at an autobiographical source for his work, but even without that suggestion the film moves in a real world of fantasy, fantasy here for both the nobs and the snobs.

Oh, I almost forgot, an (almost?) innovation incorporated in the film is the projection of three side-by-side frames of nearly simultaneous action and sound rather than the single frame and single sound track which has limited our experience of movies for about a hundred years. This eccentricity was disconcerting at the beginning of the film but while its distractions were eventually replaced by the arguable pleasures of a sort of cinematic cubism, I think the verdict may still be out on this subject.

For some reason, Canal+ Film2 channel is showing on my boyfriend's TV. This movie was on this morning. I didn't even know it's name, I just searched with the name of a character since I felt I should comment on this. AKA is most likely a movie not many people have seen, since it deals quite heavily with things that are often swept under the carpet, such as homosexuals and drugs.

This is not a bad movie. I can't see why so many people seem to have rated it 1/10. I gave it 7 since it's not excellent, but still worth viewing. The main thing is the tension between British middle class and aristocrats. Do you remember the episode of Faking it where a sales girl was taught to be a lady? Well this is the same thing but with a boy and no one to teach him. The main character Dean Page is a mama's boy who must leave home and soon finds himself in Paris, pretending to be Lord Alexander Gryffoyn. David and his lover boy Benjamin take Dean/Alex under their wings, unaware of who he really is. Upper class proves to be mostly a bunch of arrogant cocaine sniffers that treat outsiders like s***. Notice when Dean returns home there is a pile of dog poop on the road. The ending is quite predictable, but what's said about David is quite funny.

This offering was recently presented on Sundance Channel without much fanfare. I had never heard of it before, in fact. The comparison to "Mr. Ripley" is immediately obvious at about thirty minutes in. If I had not subsequently learned more about evidence of an autobiographical source, I would have judged it a poor copy of the Highsmith novel and film.

Nevertheless, I rather liked it as a whole. The version I saw was limited not so much by any split-screen device as it was by extremely shoddy editing. Great gaps in both story line and character development occur almost from the start, and I was left floundering from time to time until I could infer this or that bit by slogging onward. Had it not been for a great supporting cast I might have switched it off before other redeeming pieces fell into place.

Those better features included an accurate social setting for 1978, some interesting costumes, and one or two experiences of the character played by Matthew Leitch in Paris that approximated some of my own contemporaneous involvements with that city. In other words, I am not able to be completely objective, and will say no more.

those of you who saw this in the theater (cinema, for any Brits reading this), as i did, might be interested to know that i have been told that the DVD release is in single-screen format. because of this, i intend to have another look at this film, on DVD. while i found the triptych format interesting at first, it came to be a distraction when used for the film's entire length. that device is not sustainable for such a long time and detracts from the film, as the viewer becomes more focused on form than on content, IMHO. others who saw this in theaters and were disappointed by it might want to give it another try on DVD this time.

What a bad film AKA is. Bad acting, bad dialogue, bad lighting, and hard to see images. Why of why did this director choose to use three tiny images instead of one? Does it serve a purpose other than to annoy you? I don't care if the director is writing his own comments on this site or if in fact he isn't a very nice person in real life, this film is plain and simple