sdyer@bbncca.ARPA (Steve Dyer) (08/24/84)
Another good example of a movie with characters who just "happen to be" gay
is a new Dutch film, "The Fourth Man", in which a gay (or more properly,
bisexual, but gay-identified) Catholic author, Gerard Reve, gets involved
with a beautiful young woman after he sees just what her current boyfriend
(a European James Dean/Brando punk) looks like, with the intent of seducing
him.
Far more central to the film than any "gay issues" is its use of Catholic
(gothic, pre-Vatican II) iconography: Reve recreates the world around him
as a series of religious symbols. A woman holding her child becomes the
Madonna, ketchup spilled becomes the blood of Christ, Christ on the cross
takes the form of a beautiful young man in a swimsuit. The sacred and the
worldly are co-present, but irreconciled. By the end of the film, Reve is
either stark-raving-crazy, or saved by the intercession of the Virgin Mary.
This sounds lugubrious and heavy-handed, and it could be, but the director
has a light touch, allowing us to smile at Reve's over-wrought world view,
even as he remains uncommitted to resolving where the truth lies.
This film reminds me a lot of "Don't Look Now", Nicholas Roeg's supernatural
thriller. By the way, it is gruesome in one or two scenes, probably
mild stuff compared to the slice-and-dice genre, but worth noting if you
are completely intolerant to this.
--
/Steve Dyer
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