EXTERIOR. NOWHERE IN PARTICULAR.
The 1980 William Friedkin movie Cruising sent Al Pacino undercover for the NYPD, threatened not by other cops as in Serpico but by the gay S&M scene. The butch detective questions his own persona once he starts identifying with the “other,” providing the story’s real interest within a banal cops-and-robbers framework. Cruising is problematic for reasons artistic (the visual aesthetic is airbrushed and shiny, inappropriate to Friedkin’s tone of guilty voyeurism; the tedious storyline occasionally breaks preposterous) and political (it treats queers as a titillating, poisonous zoological exhibit). The movie inspired less box office than bad press: Friedkin received death threats; gays marched in the Village and tried to disrupt filming.
The wonderful conceit of 2013’s Interior. Leather Bar. springs from 40 minutes of footage cut out of Cruising to avoid an X rating. The new picture imagines those lost minutes by casting a straight, married actor (Val Lauren) to play a straight, married actor named Val Lauren, who’s very ambivalent about playing the Pacino character in a “re-creation” of the missing scenes’ hedonistic sexuality. Oh, the places this could go! But Interior. Leather Bar. is a movie that blurs every line, including the one with which it could draw an intelligible form. Another project from a weary-looking James Franco, who co-directed (with screenwriter Travis Mathews) and makes appearances as James Franco, the famous actor and filmmaker, this might be an agitprop mockumentary; certainly we are shown glimpses of script. It might be a self-referential documentary with scripted elements. Most likely, it’s a sincere gesture toward creating a dialogue. But it lacks the moral and intellectual legwork necessary to make itself useful to the conversation.
One of Leather Bar‘s basic flaws is that this culture-clash/question-of-identity ground was already covered in the original movie. This picture makes few discoveries. Franco is presented sometimes as a Machiavelli, sometimes as a thrill-seeking amoralist, most convincingly as a well-meaning progressive without the time to define his great idea. When asked on-camera by his star what the project is about, he gives inchoate answers loaded with “I don’t know, man, it just is” -type filler. Essentially he and Mathews wanted a film to question established notions of tribe and normalcy, to expose Us-and-Them as an unnecessary social construct.
Familiarity, according to this theory, breeds out contempt. But the movie doesn’t pay on its promise. We do witness several minutes of a pretty tender blowjob session between bears awkwardly dressed in BDSM gear. It’s fine if you like that sort of thing, but this scene does not bring me closer to the queer nation; I’m an arts critic; I couldn’t be closer without a Christopher Street pad. Which I used to have. Still, I unapologetically avoid watching men have sex. It’s not homophobic to say vive la différence and decline tickets to the show. So I find this method of outreach a failure. Besides, is anyone who already finds gays off-putting really going to seek out this movie? For whom was this thing shot?
More importantly, this extraordinarily self-conscious movie has no opinion of its own action. Val Lauren says at the end of the shoot that he’s not the same man who walked onto the soundstage that morning, but he doesn’t look different. He utters a couple of platitudes but, given the company he’s in, this might just be politeness. Hooky set-ups repeated as if they’re important (Val has to get home to his wife by a certain hour; Val might be tempted to cross his own boundaries subsequent to witnessing gay head) are abandoned or left intentionally ambiguous. The third act that ought to follow the one-hour running time is not there, so that this missing-footage show has its own missing footage. But it’s the sort of story that cannot successfully be left open to interpretation precisely because it’s about “going there,” about being in-your-face with its message. If we don’t know what happens, we don’t get the message. I’m not sure the picture successfully avoids exploitation; it certainly is not porn. Neither is it particularly funny or thought-provoking. It just is.
photos © 2013 – Strand Releasing
Interior. Leather Bar.
Strand Releasing / USA
no MPAA rating / running time: 1 hour
currently playing at Cinefamily in Los Angeles
scheduled to end on January 8, 2014
for tickets, visit www.cinefamily.org
for more info and other screenings, visit www.interiorleatherbar.com
