Mark Finch Memorial
Victim Victorious?
by Mark Finch
from London's City Limits, November 1985
As a new film, My Beautiful Laundrette brings the love of two men to London's cinemas. Mark Finch looks at the changing faces of lesbians and gays at the movies.
If you're lesbian or gay, watching mainstream movies is like competing in an assault course. First off, movie romances are heterosexual, so there's no easy way into the narrative. Every story of girl meets boy, and all the variations on that, exclude you. Modern films often flirt with same sex liaisons, but this is always accompanied by incidental characters who remind us what homosexuality is really about. There's the predatory lesbian roommate in Girlfriends or the lonely gay best friend in 10 -- gays in mainstream film never seem to have gay friends. You may shrug all of this off, but how do you dodge the volley of anti-gay remarks fired in the name of "realism"? Frankly it's exhausting.
My Beautiful Laundrette, written by Hanif Kureishi and directed by Stephen Frears, changes all that and features one of the most pleasurable gay representations ever to appear in the cinema. "I originally wanted it to be an epic, like The Godfather," explains Kureishi. "No, like both Godfather films in one. In the end I wanted it to be a romance, like those old 1940s films you watch on Sunday afternoons and melt by." This is far more than romance however. It's the tale of two cities, of Asians and whites in Thatcher's Britain.
"There's a persistent American myth of the outcast white boy and the black boy and the union between them as they drift on a raft down the river. They're both outsiders from society. That was the idea I wanted to explore in the film, of two boys reconciling their own lives and symbolically, the lives of whites and blacks, through their love for each other."
Kureishi is only half-serious. His script is like an Ealing comedy by way of Harold Pinter and David Hare, confronting contemporary subjects sideways to gain a different insight from a head-on approach. Two teenagers, a business-suited Asian and a flat-topped white punk, scrub down and open up a washeteria in Lewisham, furnished with an aquarium, potted plants, and a deejay console. But Johnny's National Front past and Omar's family conflicts cause trouble.
Omar is played by Gordon Warnecke, a graduate of fringe and educational theater, and Daniel Day-Lewis, last seen in BBC2's My Brother Jonathan, plays Johnny. "I did wonder if Stephen (Frears) was ever doubtful about casting someone from a comfortable public school background," says Lewis, "but the important thing was to get people who could be believably attracted to each other." Certainly, there's a genuine frisson when Omar and Johnny kiss for the first time. No thunderous music, no suspenseful high-angle shot, no angst, just a thrilled gasp from the audience. "Gordon and I saw their love as a kind of insolence, as if the two boys were saying 'Not only are we going to open the best launderette, we're going to snog as well.' But Hanif kept reminding us that their romance is more than a rude gesture. It's love."
And love is what's been lacking for a long time. The history of gay characters in British cinema has been as fraught as the fight for gay rights. Basil Dearden's film Victim was crucial in both respects. In 1961, around 90 percent of blackmail cases involved gay men. (Lesbianism was, ironically, never against the law; so although exposure often meant disgrace, lesbians were not likely to be imprisoned.) The Wolfenden report in 1957 had recommended the decriminalization of homosexuality, but it took until 1967 and the Sexual Offenses Act for this to happen. Victim is often credited with helping to bring about this change.
A key talking point was Dirk Bogarde's willingness to risk his bankable romantic hero image by playing a blackmailed lawyer who fights back. Although Janet Green's script suggests that the lawyer might be a hero too -- a hero for gay rights -- Bogarde's performance reminds us that British cinema has a long tradition of denying sexual passion. Remember Brief Encounter? For all its talk of adultery, Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard never actually do it. Dirk doesn't do it either. Victim makes it clear that the protagonist has never "given in" to his desires. When Sylvia Syms, playing Bogarde's estranged wife, demands that he explain why he stopped seeing his friend, Bogarde volcanically exclaims, "Because I wanted him!"
If Victim increased discussion of male homosexuality, it didn't win itself many fans. "We got attacked on both sides," remembers producer Michael Relph. "On the one hand for propagandizing and on the other for treating a serious subject without due weight. Our feeling was that by sugaring the pill, so to speak, we reached a much wider audience and therefore the 'propagandist' element reached far more people." But who cares that the medicine isn't sickly when most people can't even read the label on the bottle? Despite being one of the first films to use the word "homosexual," Victim remained incomprehensible to many viewers at the time. It started off by breaking records at the Odeon Leicester Square, but once it reached the provinces no one knew what it was about -- even after they'd seen it!
In the 10 years between the Wolfenden Report and the 1967 Sexual Offenses Act, British cinema started to take gayness Very Seriously. Lesbians and gay men found themselves taken on board by the kitchen sink school of realism as part of a guest list that also included alcoholics, adulterous husbands, and illegitimate babies. Room At the Top waved the starting flag on this procession, which in turn gave rise to the anemic gay companion from A Taste of Honey and the bored husband tempted by a wayward motorcycle gang member in The Leather Boys.
Looking back, it's easy to see why these portraits seemed a step forward for sexual frankness. The sour cynicism of The Leather Boys worked as a sharp antidote to the juvenile optimism of Carry On movies and other British farces. Instead of the indomitable dyke from Doctor In Love -- kitted out in tweed suit and Brylcreemed hair and armed with her "sissy" assistant Dr. Flower -- we got Dame Cicely Courtneidge as a single lesbian in The L-Shaped Room. An eccentric lady in the downstairs flat, she spends most of her screen time trying to entice Leslie Caron in for tea. When Caron finally accepts, Courtneidge relates a melancholy anecdote about her dear departed "friend."
The L-Shaped Room, like Victim is obtuse. Both films make great play for photographs which "reveal" the protagonists sexuality to other characters. The picture of Courtneidge's "friend" is held by Caron with its back to the camera, even though we can guess it is a woman's portrait. A similar tactic is used with Victim's incriminating photo. No longer a case of "it takes one to know one," by the mid-sixties it was "Okay, you know and we know -- but we won't show you."
Of course the problem all along has been how can you tell? In 1968, The Killing of Sister George was hardly astute with its answer. Beryl Reid with a whiskey bottle, Susannah York with her pre-Oedipal dollies, Coral Browne with a vengeance. It was back to tweed suits again. Robert Aldrich's film did show us what Dame Cicely couldn't, but the sex scene is shot through with shadows and self-disgust.
While key lesbian images were Cicely Courtneidge in drag and Beryl Reid spilling alcohol and four-letter words onto the carpet, the key gay male image after Bogarde's tortured, repressed lawyer was Peter Finch in Sunday Bloody Sunday. John Schlesinger's film mates Carnaby Street morals with Observer Magazine chic to produce the romantic triangle of Murray Head, Peter Finch, and Glenda Jackson.
Finch starts the film smiling and we're plugged into one of the earliest, happy gay embraces. Bisexual Murray Head greets the doctor after a hard day's work with a close-up kiss and a hand through his graying hair. When Head's away, Finch tends to play Cosi Fan Tutti a lot, but this is a film about loneliness -- a British film after all. Finch ends up without his boyfriend and with a face-to-camera monologue: "All my life I've been looking for somebody courageous, resourceful; he's not it. But something. We were something." Watching this, you can imagine he will finish life like Dame Cicely and her melancholy anecdotes.
The line can be clearly traced from Bogarde's devastating confession "I wanted him" to Sunday Bloody Sunday's shocking kiss. Passion was beginning to crack the whitewashed stone wall of British cinema, and in the mid-1970s the repressive mold seemed to splinter in different directions: the stately camp of Naked Civil Servant, based on Quentin Crisp's autobiography; the sensuousness of Sebastienne; and, crucially, the collective introspection of Nighthawks. At last gay men were pictured in gay contexts. But at the same time, lesbians disappeared altogether.
Nighthawks divides its running time between gay and non-gay environments: Jim, played by Al Pacino look-alike Ken Robertson, works as a teacher but spends his nights at the Back Streets disco. Directors Ron Peck and Paul Hallam wanted to promote discussion and participation. They invited involvement through letters in magazines known to have gay readership. "The response was overwhelming," says Peck. "Everyone had an idea of what they wanted to see." Nighthawks' hero was defined by what previous representation of gay men had missed out. Today, Nighthawks still has much of its original boldness, despite belonging to a period made historically remote by massive unemployment and the fear of AIDS.
Nighthawks suffered heavy criticism, but if there is a problem, it is with the weight of demands placed upon it. Hanif Kureishi resists the impossible responsibility to fully represent minority communities. "A film is just a film, either you enjoy it or you don't. How can you say that a film is representative of anything? I mean is Casablanca representative of life in North Africa during the German occupation? My Beautiful Laundrette isn't representative of the Asian community. I don't see why it should carry the weight of being representative when no other film has to. If it gives one person an erection and makes one person laugh, that's good enough for me. I want to cause laughter and sexual excitement at the same time."
The film refuses the "social realism" that's dogged the representation of gays for so long and thinks of what our fantasies should look like -- but it doesn't lose sight of reality. My Beautiful Laundrette also restores class and race to the agenda of images. The racism at work in British cinema has only once before churned out a black gay man -- another of the emotional derelicts in The L-Shaped Room. This mix of race, class, money, and age is a recognition of the multiplicity of the gay experience, full of humor and passion. In this respect it was at the vanguard of a clutch of radical images at the 1987 London Film Festival, leading with Donna Deitch's lesbian melodrama Desert Hearts and a documentary to better The Times Of Harvey Milk, Greta Schiller's Before Stonewall.
A lively gay history, Schiller's film has been picking up awards from festival to festival, although, like My Beautiful Laundrette, it was originally commissioned for television. Before Stonewall mixes rare archive footage with personal anecdotes and teases out some surprising alternative views on lesbian and gay involvement in American culture.
"Our point was to reappropriate images with archive footage," explains Andrea Weiss, who also worked on Before Stonewall. "When I went to the National Archives in Washington and asked them for material, their reply was 'forget it.' Well, it's true they didn't have a section highlighting Homosexuality, but it depends on how you want to interpret the images. There's one piece of footage used showing thousands of soldiers from World War II. You're not telling me that among all those men there's not one homosexual?"
Weiss is now writing a book on lesbian representation in the cinema and, as she'll no doubt illustrate, gays and lesbians in mainstream film have been knifed, raped, blackmailed, tortured, dismissed, cajoled, censored, and bashed. The answer is not merely more positive "realistic" images, but more diverse images. It's time the notion of an ideal gay film is laid to rest. The makers of Before Stonewall and My Beautiful Laundrette are saying, "Forget it -- let's look at fantasies as well as histories."
"I never set about to write a gay film," says Kureishi, "but when I wrote the script and got the characters down on paper, well, you know what boys are like. They wouldn't stop mucking about with each other. People have often said to me in the past, 'The boys in your work must be gay, why don't they get down to it?' Well, at last they have."
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