Tan Lines

I thought I had seen more than enough gay coming of age stories. Some told well, others not so well. It's a genre that is unbeatable: pretty young thing figures out who he or she is.

TAN LINES is a gay coming of age tale but it is amazingly up to date.

This movie is a wonderful surprise---a small gem, really. The photograph on the DVD and the title are actually misleading. The actor on the cover is not the lead, though he is good.

The standout performance in TAN LINES is the by the actor playing the main character. Jack Baxter is absolutely sensational as a smart and mouthy youth coming of age. He is attracted to other boys but also lets himself be distracted by females.

The Australian director of this movie has done a gorgeous job of creating a totally believable world of young slacker/surfers. This screenplay for TAN LINES is smart, funny, sexy, interesting and compelling.

Bravo to all involved, especially Jack Baxter!

As somebody who has criticized many badly made American gay movies, I must blushingly admit that Australia has now joined the ranks of the incompetent in his field.

The premise of Tan Lines is good, if familiar, and the two boy lovers, played by Jack Baxter and Daniel O'Leary, are effective. In fact, Baxter is perfectly cast as the lovely, attractive teenager and is a reasonable actor. O'Leary is almost as good as the troubled older boy, Cass. Their love scenes are the best things in the film. In fact, without Jack Baxter the film would be a complete waste of time. You really do want him to get his man. Apart from a few good jokes, the rest is appalling. The acting rarely rises above that of a third rate amateur theatrical group.

The director Ed, continually misjudges the film's pace, relying on long shots of the surf when he should have left most of it on the cutting room floor and lifted the pace of the film. He mis-casts the brothers Cass and Dan, so that the ineptly acted younger brother Dan is 16 and looks about 23, whilst his older gay brother Cass looks about 20.

The opening shot, that of Jack Baxter asleep with his headphones on, goes on and on and on. Why? Surely it can't be so that we can have the joyous experience of listening to the crappy rock music that boys of his type seem addicted to? There are some interesting and quirky moments which in a better film would have been effective. The fact that the boy sleeps with his abandoned mother, clearly in very difficult circumstances, emphasizes the shallow life that many in the film lead. (In a nice touch we never see her, only her sleeping body buried under bedclothes.) The loony aunt of the boy's putative girlfriend (easily the most dreadful piece of acting I can recall) lives a large house almost empty of furniture. What goes on there is bizarre, and again, could have been delicious in a better film.

Sadly, Tan Lines is just a badly made, badly scripted, badly acted and overlong film. I can almost guarantee that apart from Christian Willis as the teacher, none of the cast is professional and boy does it show. The last thing this film is is a gem, or anything else of substance.

With a taste of Larry Clark's teen angst and desperation but without the moral emptiness of Clark's "kids", the teens in this Aussie film do care for each other and for the most part "do the right thing." The surreal scenes: a geriatric drunken game of strip poker, a chorus of Christian wall images occasionally commenting on the action, a Gothic setting where the "hero" Midget "works" (too bizarre to describe and ruin it for you), all these make it interesting. That Midget is struggling (but not too much) with working out his gay desires along with a try for a girl doesn't compete with the dreariness of every day life and the hope to leave this dismal town.

If a modest goal is to make the viewer care about the people and the plot, this movie achieved that goal and more. The photography was effective with snappy cuts from one scene to another.

I saw this last week at a gay and lesbian film festival, and quite liked it. It wasn't what I expected at all. I thought we'd have adorable blonde surfers caressed by the bright Australian sun during carefully timed outdoor shoots. The guys are cute, but mainly because they're young and do something physical -- they're not preposterously cute. They're a bit ... well, not vacuous, but limited in their interests. There's no indication that anybody willingly opens a book. The town they live in may have a beach and waves but it's a dreary little backwater where money is hard to come by and people fall into sex situations for lack of much else to do. The kids may be inexperienced and untutored but they're not particularly innocent, and the adults don't seem to be much different from the kids -- just various degrees of Older.

The director seems unsure how to go about making a conventional film properly, so he gropes, and ends up making the movie very interestingly. There are establishing shots we don't need, of things that aren't important. And somehow the arbitrariness of that echoes the characters' ennui and drift and cluelessness.

The young people are nice enough, and they have real feelings for one another, but their imaginations are so limited that life seems like a choice between (a.) sticking around and doing some kind of poorly paid labor or (b.) going out and seeing the world -- subsisting on various kinds of poorly paid labor. The first place that comes to mind is always Paris, France, and somebody always points out that there are no waves there. Cass, who has traveled the globe, has no stories of doing anything but working in supermarkets. He paints no pictures of his experience. The main advantage the larger world seems to have is that his parents aren't in it, and it's away from this nothing town.

The hero Midget (Jack Baxter) is sweet and pretty born loser who shares (platonically and by necessity) a small bed with his slutty mother (we never see her awake, and we only see the back of her head or an occasional hand). He's illegitimate and doesn't know who his dad is, and his big escape is smoking grass and/or putting on sound-blocking headphones and blissing out on rock music. (There's a great scene of a teen party where everybody is dancing to different music through the earbuds of his individual IPOD.) Back from a lengthy exile comes his best friend's runaway brother Cass -- who has fled the shame of being exposed in a homosexual affair with the 30ish local geometry teacher. Knowing that Cass swings that way, and having apparently been attracted to him for years anyway, Midget initiates a secretive affair.

The movie indulges itself in a few kinds of welcome whimsy -- Midget's secret summer job is pretty kinky, and Catholic Cass's bedroom photo of John Paul II, and his various kitschy holy pictures and statues, carry on an animated conversation in (subtitled) Italian, with some holy figures criticizing the libidinous boys and others defending them. This isn't the ubiquitous gay coming of age picture. It's really quite charmingly different, and even its crudities (like the trouble they have racking shots) seem to add to its charm. The sky always seems to be overcast, even on surfing days, and the whole gray atmosphere is all too real and familiar. It would probably be familiar even to a lot of 17 year olds in Paris.

A contemporary masterpiece of the Arthouse genre, featuring impressive performances by adolescent lead actors and a more mature supporting one (Christian Willis). Atmosphere and emotion without neglecting the plot. The incorporation of elderly amateur actors and surreal elements doesn't really fit in, but could be explained as an exercise in style, done by the director to make his long-film debut more diverse. - Absolute recommendation for all gay and straight audiences interested in coming-out related stories, and that - in my opinion - from the age of 12, unlike the actual certifications.