I Want Your Love

I first caught sight of this film in Time Out magazine... where it got good reviews. I was intrigued that Peccadillo Pictures, famous for LGBT film, had teamed up with Naked Sword, a pornography company to produce it.

I'm always reluctant to buy gay film... the majority of the time they bore me and depend on sex and six packs to maintain the viewers interest. 'I Want Your Love' was a surprisingly perceptive take on gay life in San Fransisco. The sex was natural and the films part improvisation made it feel like a realistic view into the characters lives. The film made no apology for its approach to explicit gay sex, but interestingly its association with Naked Sword seemed to be kept fairly low key on the film's cover. It was obvious that the film wanted to be taken seriously.

However, despite the film trying to deliver it failed to maintain my interest. The characters aren't that interesting to watch and their lives are fairly mundane. It affirms my thoughts about films that contain explicit sex. Sex generally replaces more subtle, interesting and intelligent portrayals of emotion that help us to connect with a character. Therefore sex, unless used well, acts as more of a distraction from what the film is actually about.

If you're looking for serious gay cinema learn from some of the most successful gay films ever made and avoid explicit content.

If you like porn with a plot -- I do! -- then take a look at this movie. I was expecting an NC17 kind of movie, but when you include cum shots, sorry in my book that crosses over to porn. In that category, it might have been a 6 or 7 except for one small problem.

I am a typical American in very few ways, but I really, really, really do not like point in time stories with no beginning, climax or end. I think of this as a European / International genre. I always feel cheated because just when I am engaging with the characters -- oops its over.

Now, if you like this type of story and you also like porn with a plot, this movie will probably "WOW" you...

My rating system: 10-The Perfect Movie 9-I will watch it over and over again 8-Ther is something special about this movie 7-Well above average 6-slightly better than average 5-Average Movie (Worth Watching!) 4-Slightly Blow Average 3-Boring / Well Below Average 2-So Bad I Got Up and Walked Out 1-I cannot imagine anyone liking this movie

I was having problems with this film. It sagged heavily half way through. However it did continue to produce flashes of originality, the main points i list below:

1. Whilst struggling to stick with the film (see below), in an attempt to scrape the bottom of the barrel, i was gratefully amused for the slogan 'lesbian bed death' - referring to the condition of the cessation of sex in long term relationships.

2. The film documents a kind of fin de siecle moment for a San Franciscan gay generation who interestingly are not particularly defined by any significant notion in the political struggle for gay rights; a detail which is startling for the fact of it's final appearance after effectively 60 years of multiple generations entirely defined by successive phases of political struggle. The film also focuses on the twilight of youth, where the protagonist, Jesse, sensing his impending maturity into full adulthood seeks to return to the place of his youth and to leave the city which has defined the first part of his young adult experience. It is a timeless right of passage and small details capture that strange sense of change and reappraisal with a quiet sophistication.

3. Characteristic of this generation's gay themed cinematic work, perhaps because of a diminishing sense of identity rooted in oppression and struggle, lies a problematic vacuum. Films such as this and also for example, The Lost Coast, also set in San Francisco, evoke a genre, which though not so much narcissistic, display a lack of capability or willingness to dream up a relationship with the future and consequently portray an intense over involvement in the experience of the present. This creates a genre which has a tendency to over dramatise what could be undeserving issues. Relatively minor events in the path of life are over magnified and their importance exaggerated with a post/adolescent preoccupation whose departure is at times long overdue. One is left with a sense of a potentially lost and tragic generation, who have been entirely defined by a profoundly conservative free-market ideology and show no sense of having engaged in any real spirit of rebellion. What we see is reassuringly quotidian, but also lacking any connectivity to a wider social context.It's essentially stuck at the inward looking. Jesse's departure offer's no sense that this wider malaise is due for a change. It's frustrating to sit through, because cinema in the past has been so much more than this. It raises the question, where are we headed as this generation comes to power ?

4. Something the new generation do offer and which is seen extensively in this film is the growing trend to show explicit sex as an extension of the cinematic language of emotional intimacy. This film raises the bar and pushes that to greater heights than the plethora of recent films which have exploded with a laid back approach to cinematic (gay) sex. However, because the last third of this film is literally saturated in sex it did raise an interesting question. As i gagged and squealed my way through the images i wondered if sex in cinema was like sex in literature; namely incredibly hard to do well. It's not enough just to show the whole ugly load. You need to do something cinematically. Certainly i would not say this is manufacturing moments of porn. But it was also uncertain what it's intention was other than to revel in a new found freedom to let it all hang out. period. That's just not enough. It's immature because as happens in this film, it detracts from the essential flow of energy in the work as a whole, especially for a film whose story is so incredibly thin on the ground. What happens is the sex becomes just another symptom of the portrait of a generation who don't really have anything to say for themselves at all and remain largely undefined and invisible as an entity.

5. Regarding the title, 'I want your love', the meaning is ambiguous on inspection. Certainly the protagonist Jesse, spends the film contemplating the cessation or diminishment of his emotional bonds in general. He may be sensing a future to come where the definition of love is going to have to be far broader than his previous assumptions. The title could also refer to the short-sightedness and frustration of emotional bonds and sex in young adult groups in general. The people we meet here stand in contrast to the old 1970s and 80s San Franciscan gay 'communities' defined by a celebration of hyped up promiscuity as a mark of liberation and also the more recent era preoccupied with AIDS and death. But either way, it remains unstable as a title. It speaks more of insecurity, of a need unfulfilled rather than a love successfully acquired. To this extent it supports the idea of a new generation who remain undefined and occupy a vacuum, despite ironically, finally inheriting the legal right to fully love in public. Is this a depiction of a generation in shock at the arrival of the 'you are now normal' identity and it's options ?

I gave this film 4 because i do remain impressed with this new breed of actor who is willing to share their body so intimately. I also gave points for the 'lesbian bed death' slogan. But i remain concerned at the appearance of yet another film which portrays an emerging generation caught in a sense of unarticulated and broody crisis about their sense of purpose.

If you're going to watch this movie expecting a love story, then don't, because it is not.

This is the story of a man suffering from disillusion, a man facing his own failures, regrets and wrong choices. It's the story of a man who has to admit defeat and who regrets his choices. He has to leave the city, going back to his parents because he has to go back, not because he wants to, as going on is not an option.

The last thing left to him is going out with a bang. There is a party, there is a lot of sex. He ends up taking part in neither, and there is no bang. There isn't even a sizzle. There is just a sad weariness, and it's the main feeling of the whole film. No one even notices his absence, the scene he has loved so much and has to leave behind just spits him out like an old chewing gum and forgets about him. There is nothing bittersweet about it. It's just bleak.

This movie is not a gay love story, it's a movie with gay characters. It's full of sex, heads on and no filters, but the general depressing atmosphere of failure would be the same without the sex, and the film would hardly change if the explicit sex scenes were replaced by a fade-to-black.

Young man needing to leave the city for home. 30-something/late 20-something life angst - where am I going, what am I doing? Old relationships resurfacing. All of that had great potential for some solid story-telling. This effort certainly had some decent actors. Decent production values as well.

So WHY did this story get told? It was very difficult to connect to any of the characters, with the possible exception of the older artist who is a friend of our departing lead character. Don't misunderstand me - I wanted very much to like everyone in the film - but it was hard to find any reason to relate with them, or even figure out what they were contributing to the story (again, with the exception of the older artist.) Baffled. That's what I'm left with at the end of this film. The sex in the film was for the most part equally disconnected - it was never clear WHY we needed to see these sex scenes, with the possible exception of the first.

Wanted to like this film. Watched it beginning to end. Don't know why it was made.