Together Alone

"Together Alone" is the affectionate story of two men, Brian and Bryan, who meet in a bar, have sex, fall asleep--then awake to find they have had the exact same dream. What transpires afterwards is a real, intimate discussion on such issues as God, abortion, sexuality, friendship, marriage, AIDS, innocence, soulmates, judgment, Yin, Yang, and other issues. While the storyline is a bit stagnant, the film is so powerful and so touching it aims for a higher purpose than plot--and achieves it. If you can find it, I strongly suggest you watch it!!!

It's as if the writer was listening and writing down conversations I have had after one night stands. The fear that what we did might be "un-safe"; the defining of ourselves as gay, bi-sexual, heterosexual, whatever; the will we see each other again thing.

Strong acting and gloomy black and white photography enhance the mood, and help us to forget that this is far too wordy for a film - it would make a great stage play though.

What emerges is what a rotten thing HIV/AIDS is - how it has completely transformed our sex lives - inhibited us and filled us with fear when we should be able to completely let go. Bring on the cure!

This movie is a conversation about honesty, love and fear. Nothing is missing. It is a conversation between a scared but charming queen, and a disillusioned bisexual. I don't want to understand "Who's afraid of Virginia Woolf," but I understood every moment of this conversation. Sometimes the acting is apparent. But sometimes the dialogue is so real, I wondered how anyone ever found these words. I saw "Relax, it's just Sex," before this. It's funny, but it seems as if "Together" grew out of "Relax. "

What a great, powerful, brave film.

Simple, though. Two men have a conversation on a bed after a hookup. I read it was made with a very small budget, which makes sense after watching the film. But it does not make it cheap, quite the contrary.

The conversation is like a river, and watching the film feels like taking a cruise (sometimes bumpy), and being witness to something happening: the other side of intimacy. The first side happens before the film: they meet in bar, flirt, feel a connection, and then go home and enjoy a fierce, memorable moment of sex. Raw, unprotected sex. This is already a huge moment of shared intimacy. Could it get any better afterwards? Post coitum animal triste?

The film is about the fragile, intense, vertiginous building of another kind of intimacy: getting to know each other after having already "known" (in the biblical sense) each other. Brian and Bryan are very different in many ways, but they share the same name (well, almost: is the Y of Bryan the equivalent of the lacanian object petit a?), the same dream and the same loneliness. The title of the film captures very well the tension at stake here: they are together and alone at the same time. And they talk and talk and talk, hoping to switch from loneliness to the wonder of a shared loneliness with a special, inspirational other.

The film addresses many topics, especially AIDS, first love stories, literature, ethics and identities. The actors do a great job and the photography conveys a dramatic chiaroscuro. But let's remember Bryan's words: although we want everything to be black or white, we need to learn to embrace various shades of grey (not exactly his words, my rephrasing). So grey it is.

This film could be made into a play (it reminded me of In the solitude of cotton fields, by Koltès), and I would love to watch both a prequel and a sequel of Together Alone. Although it was directed in a unique and dramatic context (in 1991, when being diagnosed with HIV felt like a death sentence), it did not age at all because it raises existential issues in a universal way.