This one falls into that darker corner of gay cinema. There was real potential buried in here, but the execution feels so flat that at points it plays out more like a filmed stage play than an actual movie. It's a dark psychological drama built around a street hustler confessing to a brutal, confusing murder of his own lover. Black and white flashback sequences do a solid job laying out the details of what happened, but the real focus stays on the dialogue and the writing itself. Right at the start, a young hustler has already killed his male lover Claude. Three days go by before he calls the police to turn himself in for the murder. But instead of just reporting it somewhere ordinary, he actually summons the police and the local press directly into a judge's private chambers. Yves has keys to the place, which tracks given what he does for a living, but having the press waiting right outside makes the whole scene look like some elaborate blackmail scheme against the judge. The ...
I still can't make up my mind of what I think of the movie overall. I do like fucked up family dramas but then they have to be done well. The plot is decent but there is something missing in all of this. This measured, claustrophobic drama about a pair of siblings reuniting with their terminally ill mother moves at a very slow pace, which sometimes can be off-putting, but some wide-screen cinematography comes as a saving grace. Elliot and Laura are running their family business in Manhattan and are visiting their mother whom they haven’t seen in a year and a half. They find out that she is dying of cancer. The mother Lilly admits that she wasn’t the best of mothers and the relationship strains between the three of them is very evident. She was more interested in her orchids than her children. She was married to a man who was a womanizer and interested in making a career in politics. Lilly lives in a huge estate now and unknown to the kids, Ted has been living with their mother...