I Want Your Love

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.

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.

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.

Supposedly expanding a short film of the same title (although there isn't much to connect the two productions apart from the leading man), 'I Want Your Love' features lots of swearing, several scenes of unsimulated homosexual sex, and talk of 'being ploughed by six dudes'. As such it represents a stark departure for Disney (joke - it's actually a production of Naked Sword, a company which makes gentlemen's films - and not very discerning gentlemen, if its website is anything to go by!) The plot follows a man in his early 30s who due to money troubles is leaving San Francisco to return to his hometown in Ohio. While he wanders around being miserable, his much-tattooed friends experience their own domestic troubles (of the lightweight variety - someone cleans his boyfriend's room without telling him) and pair - and in one case, triple - off with each other.

It's not much of a plot, and there are far too many shots of San Francisco streets, presumably in an effort to pad out the running time. As for the sex - well, it is never necessary to show sex or nudity in a production, but it *is* nice to do so - providing, that is, those shedding their clothes look good without them, which isn't always the case here! Pleasingly, many of the actors are good enough at clothes-on acting as well; but as the friend who accompanied me to the screening said, did any of them invite their mothers to the premiere?

A contemporary view of gay men struggling to define what real is - for themselves, their love relationships and their career. This is a story about a protagonist who is having a hard time reconciling with his life choices that form a symmetrical pattern with his art and his relationships - both lead to his restlessness and dilemma of giving up what might actually be important.

I won't say much as I don't want to spoil but the fact there are gratuitous scenes of sex in this movie actually, in my opinion, reflects the boldness of the director to take on the subject head on. Of course there is easy sex available in the life of the character and that reflects the dilemma of the main character. Male genitalia and orgasm in a movie about a gay man in Sf - and what's wrong with that?

The supporting cast is amazing in their realistic performances. It's shot almost in a documentary style and that lends a credibility to the whole aspect of story telling.

Finally a movie that does not wrap up a story of gay humans in a neatly predictable package and serve it to us.

Of course there can be improvements and yada yada but in 2012 this is a movie about an artist searching for his meaning of life. And he is gay. And he is in Sf. So prudes you've been warned.

Oh and as far the story being meaningless, no plot etc is concerned, we could have had a more dramatic fleshing out of what the existential crisis is but I don't feel it needs further explanation. But that's only my opinion.

Whatever. Watch it.