Parallel Sons

At the end of this movie I sat in silence absorbing the impact of the movie. Although I have only seen the movie once, back in 1996, it still stays with me. It is a story that is beautifully filmed and very well told. It is impossible to describe the details of this movie other than to say that it struck me as very true to life.

I myself am half way through writing a screenplay that I hope to direct, and I was tremendously inspired by Parallel Sons. The story is deep and multi-layered, without being confusing, it treats the audience with respect. The DVD cover image does not do this movie justice, as movie is everything more than soft porn.

I will not try and categorize Parallel Sons as a character study or put it in any other genre. All the characters had soul, with the revelation of Seth and Knowledge being the most developed, and occurring much like when one gets to know real people in real life. The story revealed a lot about the world too, and particularly about race relations in the USA and the moral dilemmas it breeds for it's citizens.

A picture paints a thousand words. I could watch this one again straight away. Obviously for all this to work the acting, music, sound and production design have to be top notch. A lot of love went into making Parallel Sons.

You can count the number of gay films that have featured black actors as main characters (I actually know of four: two of which were documentaries and two were German films by Fassbinder). That's enough reason to make anyone sit up and take notice of this film even if it were bad. But the sad thing - in correlation to this obscure rating at IMDb - is that this is not a bad film. It's actually quite good. A young white male is having a hard enough time being gay in a rural town, on top of that he is obsessed with Afro-American culture, and African-American men. When a black man does show up on the lam from the law, the white guy takes him in and cares for him (the black man had been shot escaping from the police). This plot is in essence sort of an old-fashioned fairy tale, usually fashioned for a lonely young woman who takes in the misguided but non-dangerous criminal, nourishing him back to health. But despite the rather pat plot (why does the black guy always have to be a criminal?), there is an authenticity to the characters and to the town that surrounds them. You feel their desperation and sense of alienation. It's an old-fashioned movie with a 'modern' sensibility, but it thankfully never gets self-conscious about its black-gay twist. It's too busy being honest to the emotions of the characters (to all the characters - no one in the small town is stereotyped). At a time when gay films are becoming as bland and predictable as Hollywood films, and black films assume there are no black men who are gay, this film is a very bold, original experience.

This is a very underrated drama about an encounter between two young, gay men, one black, one white, in a mountain town in New York's Adirondacks, in which the "parallels" between the two men's lives, and their tragic outcome plumb depths of several fundamental issues: growing up gay in a hostile society, racism, gun violence, and adolescent independence. While the sleepy little town's exterior calm is shattered by the appearance of a black escapee from a state mental facility for convicts, this same escapee provides a solution to Seth Carlson's search for his deepest yearnings. At the same time, Seth provides a solution for the escapee's (Knowledge's) life-and-death emergency, bringing the two together through an amazing process of derring-do and cultural and sexual bonding. The story is told with just enough hometown realism to make it thoroughly believable, if ultimately tragic. The two main characters are acted with stellar sensitivity by Gabriel Mick (Seth) and Laurence Mason (Knowledge). Mick's casting is particularly apt. The film takes full advantage of the glorious mountain setting as well as the rural mores and the isolation of its small-town, upstate subject community. This film is a must-see for all young, gay American men!

This movie has a very deep meaning to a person who has lost a love a fell in love again. A few twists and turns towards the end. .....The ending is a scorcher!!!! Probably, in my opinion, one of the best alternative lifestyle,interracial love movies of all time.