The Last Straight Man

A beautiful story, seductive told. A story about friendship becoming love, about attraction and about 12 years period , one night, a hotel room, talks and drinks and sex and doubts about the other.

The best virtue is the impecable simplicity.

Second - the acting.

And the fair, gentle exploration of relations, fears, responsabilities, decisions and shadows of ambiguity game.

The second good point remains the lovely realism. The book, the shots, the talk, the crumbs of humor are just beautiful pillars of a story pretending be only a confession about hidden side of near reality. It is more than a romance but a wise crafted portrait of choices.

The end - obvious, one of the provocative ones. But, in essence, just this is the point.

By reading the summary, it soon became clear that this would be a room movie contained in a few sets. Once the first scene was completed featuring several characters in the bachelor party and we get to the actual motion of the film, I started to hope that the chemistry between the 2 leads would be enough to entice since basically, a hotel room becomes the center of the action and that can become quickly tedious.

But to my surprise, the rapport is quite fair between Mark Cirillo as Lewis the gay one who has a crush on heterosexual yet confused Cooper played by Scott Sell. There are several nude scenes which took me by surprise and even though I felt they were not necessary, it doesn't detract from the story. Obviously, this is a low budget production so a montage of pictures is all we see to illustrate the time both characters spend in between their yearly meeting.

That part of the story bothered me a bit since I can't see how meeting only once a year for sex is realistic even if the 2 men are great friends and we don't really hear about their friendship outside of the confine of their trysts over the years. Still, I was caught up in their emotional interplay and felt like the connection between the two men was genuine which helped soothe some of the awkward acting moments that made me cringe in certain places.

Yet, even though this is not a strong story and it made me feel like some more scenes outside of the hotel room would have helped create a better understanding of what made these men tick without them having to talk about it, I still enjoyed it enough to give it a rather strong and fair rating of 7 stars.

The ending felt rather truncated and I would have hoped to get a bit more substance added to the denouement but it still felt satisfying enough to recommend potential viewers interested in this subject matter to give it a fair chance.

It reminded me of a gay version of the old hetero play, "Same Time Next Year," and I liked that part about the story the most. I always wondered what a gay version of that play might be like...with obvious differences because both lovers are men. And I think it worked. It was honest and it showed the dilemma that so many gay men face.

Over the last week, I've seen a few gay-themed movies, and oddly several containing Mark Cirillo; well...I can honestly say this is the only one I liked. He is of course type-cast as "the gay guy" (not sure he can overcome his "gay voice") and his long-time friend is played by Scott Sell, who absolutely comes off as a virile, sexually curious man who struggles with his feelings for his friend on the eve of what for most is a lifelong commitment. The pace of the film is perfect as we see the "progression" of their relationship from year to year. If you can tolerate the sex scenes (and warning: they are very blunt...think Brokeback Mountain), there really is a good mix of character-revealing dialogue, to the point where you start asking yourself who is really being honest to whom...more by what ISN'T being said. The only negative is the odd insertion of rambling, sappy monologues (can't blame Mark for this...he didn't write it). All in all, this was a very well-thought, entertaining "fluffy" work, which can actually be thought-provoking if you read between the lines.

The Last Straight Man concerns a pair of friends who after a bachelor party for one of them, the groom and the gay best friend kick back and start confessing some frank sexual stories. Turns out Scott Sell has always wanted to experiment with the other side and Mark Cirillo looks forward to being experimented with.

This story is a kind of urban Brokeback Mountain where the two cowboys who are married after one summer of passion agree once a year to return to the Wyoming wilderness for what they tell the spouses and the world are hunting and fishing trips.

These two agree that on the same night once a year they would go back for a night of the same passion. For Sell it's to satisfy that gay side of his nature and for Cirillo who is a writer of romance novels it's to have an otherwise unattainable romance.

Four of these encounters are shown over a dozen years and we see the changes in the dynamic of the relationship.

This is a great two character gay study and Cirillo and Sell have some great chemistry between them.

Does it work out better for them than for Jake Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger? You won't regret checking into The Last Straight Man to find out.