Food of Love

I wanted so much to like this film, and I tried very hard to do so. But it is so inept, and has so many flaws, it is hard to know where to begin.

The basic story is simple enough: piano student Paul is seduced by and falls in love with his idol, fortyish concert pianist Richard; he gets dumped inexplicably and spends the rest of the film trying to make sense of it. But add these extra ingredients -- Paul's neurotic mother also falling for the pianist, Richard's lover/manager seducing Paul while the boy is being kept by yet another older man -- and you have a rather heady Freudian stew, indeed.

What these noxious, self-absorbed characters have in common, keeping the handsome 18-year-old confused and depressed, is their duplicity. Nobody tells Paul the truth, rendering him unable to make a decision in his own interest. His beauty makes him desirable. His ingenuous nature makes him an easy mark.

The dialogue is oddly disjointed though lifted directly from David Leavitt's well-written novel, The Page Turner. For some reason, about half of Mr. Leavitt's lines have been deleted, making those that remain a crazy-quilt of non-sequiturs. Adding to the confusion are British actors playing American refracted through the eyes and ears of a Spanish director. Then there are the Spanish actors who have learned their lines phonetically, wildly inflecting words incorrectly. Finally, a classical music consultant could have insured the proper pronunciation of composers' names, or pointed out that most of the pieces Paul plays are embarrassingly inappropriate.

What the film does do well is to depict the haute-gay classical music demi-monde of New York, and the predatory older men who rule from lofty Central Park West enclaves. This exclusive oligarchy devours the seemingly unlimited supply of hopeful young artists, like Paul, who want to succeed but cannot due to inexperience and inaptitude for the game. A 'civilized' veneer covers, but never quite hides, the self-serving artistic Darwinism.

Exquisite Kevin Bishop, who plays Paul so perfectly, is a real find. He has a low-key style, lovely body, and astonishing blue eyes. Barcelona is exotic, the photography is beautiful, and the original score is well done, but the DVD itself has problems. The dialogue is somewhat out of sync, is overly loud in some places (mainly due to Juliet Stevenson's histrionics), and nearly inaudible in others.

Maybe it's because this Spanish director never did an English-language movie before, or maybe it's just a superficial screenplay that does this film in--no matter, it just doesn't work. Kevin Bishop (Paul) has the great looks and body to become a successful actor, but his acting in this movie is often wooden, and his manner later in the film is very unappealing, not a likeable hero at all, who sleeps around evidently to improve his lot in life. His mother, Juliet Stevenson (again maybe because of the poor direction) is annoying...we have little sympathy for her either. Paul Rhys and Allan Corduner are quite good in their roles. But the film just bogs down, changing its focus from Paul to his mother in mid-stream, and therefore the film changes from the coming-out strains of the hero to the angst of the mother who has to handle her son's sexual identity. We lose our interest in Paul because of this unwise change of focus in the story.

I just saw this movie at the San Francisco International Lesbian & Gay Film Festival. It was a sold out screening and the director was present. While the performances were good (though sometimes overboard) and the production qualities were excellent (the style reminded me of Whit Stillman which was odd since some of this movie was shot in Barcelona and Stillman made a movie called "Barcelona"), this film was hampered by a terrible script. The first few scenes establishing the characters were passable but about 15 minutes into the movie, when Paul and Richard meet again in Richard's hotel room and Richard gives Paul a "massage", the dialogue started turning laughable. For the rest of the film, the audience was in a uproar, laughing during serious and sometimes sexual moments. In the end, the movie was fairly enjoyable as in "I don't believe what I'm seeing or hearing". That was too bad since the story itself is a compelling one.

I guess I was fooled by the classical music setting into thinking this would be a `sensitive' or `classy' portrayal of a young gay artist's coming of age. But I realized halfway into the first ham-handed seduction scene (`Hello, nice to see you again.what's your name? Would you like a backrub?') that it was just another case of prostituting the `gay theme' with a half-baked story that meshes the worst aspects of porn and soap opera without offering any payback in sentiment or even titillation.and then throws in a gratuitous round of `bash on the clueless mother'. I generally love m/m romance and drama and I forgive a lot of weakness in terms of plot and character development, but this was so badly drawn on so many levels, from the incongruous actions of the characters to the unimaginative and obvious plot mechanisms. Maybe it's because I watched this back-to-back with Roger Dodger, an excellent film that leaves you sympathetic with an extreme jerk because his character is so brilliantly defined. In contrast, Food of Love left me annoyed and unsympathetic with every single character by the end, even the tender, confused young protagonist, who I really wanted to like. What is the denouement supposed to mean? Talented young pianist quits Julliard because he can't stand being ignored? Mother and son come to a mutual understanding that life goes on, even after your ideals are shattered? Love and enchantment are fleeting things, so take it one day at a time and always wear a condom? These are far too prosaic outcomes to be arrived at in such a heavy-handed sequence of contrived scenes played by characters so devoid of either depth or charm. Richard the pianist was a despicable ogre-okay, he seduces a barely-legal young man who worships him, I could deal with that. Then drops him like a hot coal. No, sorry, that's where he lost me. But what really sends this guy to Hell in a handbasket is how he ignores his life partner, who tries for days, in great personal distress, to reach him while he is pursuing his affair with Paul. Not that I liked Richard's letchy old man much. And the way the two of them turned against Paul in the end to save themselves from a little honesty in their own relationship was disgusting. Obviously the scenes of Richard ignoring his lover's frantic messages were mindfully included to make us realize that Richard was a self-absorbed jerk and Paul's obsession with him was setting Paul up for a big fall. But why? Was the point to set the artistic aspirations of the young man against the gauntlet of sexual awakening and see if the art survives? I guess I was EXTREMELY disappointed that Paul's art did not survive the challenge, and I was left wondering who he really was and why I should care. I know that's probably the point of the movie-that's what he was struggling with too, but the movie never answered the question, as phrased by his mother, of whether that awful Richard Kensington had something to do with his desire to quit. It is said that good dramatic action is like a roller coaster-ups and downs-but for Paul and his mom it's all downs. Jeez, this filmmaker could have done anything he wanted here, so why not open up some kind of window for young Paul at the end? Okay, Ventura, naturalism is all well and good, but the audience WANTS the protagonist to be exceptional-if you set him up as an aspiring pianist and then you take that away, then give us something else. And the mother was so stupid and hysterical it was an outright insult to all women. Her attempted seduction of Richard was unbearable, as was the support group. Wake up, Ventura-women, even mothers, are now aware of gays and likely to recognize them well before the point of becoming the laughing stock of a humiliating party scene. Just a depressing outing all around.

I enjoyed the movie, but it seems to me it is mistitled. The only love in the movie was between Paul and his mother, who seemed to suffer from some emotional problems, but their love at least seemed genuine. Basically this is a story about a talented young cute kid who gets in over his head. Paul is used by Kennington, who is Paul's idol. Then Paul gets used by Kennington's manager/lover. Paul does have a relationship with another older man but we don't get to see much about that relationship, but again it seems he is being used as a boy toy. Being that Paul is very young I can only hope he learned from these bad experiences, and pursues his real dreams.