Brideshead Redecorated Pt. 2

One exciting thing to note about Brideshead is that it is much sexier. The book is muted, but you pretty much get the idea, and the tv-series ran screaming from the whole issue. So in theory it was a canny way to make the film seem more authentic than its superlative predecessors. In theory. But the film is hamstrung by having to continually appeal to an american audience, and fails to capitalise on it. (Stephen Fry's Bright Young Things could not be named after the novel Vile Bodies, it was rumoured, because american audiences would think it was a horror.) This is even more surpising, since the script was written by adaptor of the wonderful Line of Beauty and period drama veteran Andrew Davies (Pride & Prejudice). The gay element just doesn't fit anywhere, but I can't help but love it all the same. Ecoutez.

One of the more famous scenes from the original is the lunch party at which Charles meets Sebastian and Anthony Blanche, the exotic, stuttering queeny foil designed purely to make Sebastian look even vaguely hetero. On entering the room, Antoine kisses Sebastian on the lips, which is perhaps not as anachronistic as reviewers have suggested. As Eve Sedgwick points out in Between Men, it was common for men to be much more affectionate with each other than even now, often walking arm in arm and holding hands. In any case prudery was much more vulgar than sodomy.

This scene economically implies a back-story between the two, although Sebastian is already smitten with Charles, and gives Antoine a hilarious little brush-off.

Sebastian falls for Charles, and takes him to Brideshead to visit Nanny, and says "I'm your family now." Revolting and cloying, but, again, I am helpless.

Hayley Atwell plays the cuckoo in the nest as the irritating cock-block sister, as she does in The Line of Beauty. Which is a very strange way to be type-cast.

They're making an actual triangle with their bodies! Fucking triangulation. Story of my bleeding life. Despite there being a sex scene between Julian and Charles, there is only one kiss between Charles and Sebastian, which helps to strengthen the heteronormativity of the book. Thanks a bunch, Andy Davies!

Bloody good kiss though. Ryder is completely passive (as he is throughout the film) and Sebastian is surprisingly wilful. And I LOVE the little blushing smirks in the awkward silence afterwards. (Click for greater detail).After "snogging", there is a lovely bathing scene (cf. Little Ashes, The Swimming-Pool Library, A Room With a View and My Summer of Love. Those gays sure love to swim.)

And then they towel off, before Julia comes to ruin everything AS FRICKING USUAL. The third wheel gets the grease. And by grease, I mean Matthew Goode's cock.
The film takes so many liberties, I don't know why they didn't just put a sex scene in between Charles and Sebastian. Instead of having Whishaw try to kiss Goode in the middle of a ballroom, they could have just had them kissing each other's ballrooms. I would have enjoyed it so.much. more.

Brideshead Redecorated Pt. 1

I have a troubling weakness for the aristo-drama. Characters who I would (and do) detest in life I find irrestible in fiction. The films I watch again and again include Metropolitan, A Handful of Dust, Gosford Park, Bright Young Things (the sublime marriage of Waugh and Stephen Fry) and the only great drama produced by ITV, Brideshead Revisted. That three of the aforementioned were based on novels by Evelyn Waugh is no-coincidence: he is the master of the dazzling veneer which occasionally allows a glimpse into a hidden pathos. And that's exactly the kind of emotional power I like.

I only recently got around to watching the 2008 film version of Brideshead, which stars some of my absolute favourite FACEs: Ben Whishaw as Sebastian (Perfume, Nathan Barley, Criminal Justice), Matthew Goode as Charles (My Family and Other Animals, Watchmen), Hayley Atwell as Julia (The Ruby in the Smoke, The Line of Beauty) and Emma Thompson, Michael Gambon and Greta Scacchi to fill out the britflick quotient. I've adored Whishaw for ages, fevered longingly over Goode in Other Animals (even though we decided his face has something indefinably missing) and since Atwell starred in two of the best minidramas possible ever (Line and Ruby) I was excited that they would all be frenching like crazy. But as a fan of the original tv series and novel, I was also a little terrified. Which explains why it has taken so long to view.

The new film is beautiful, as are the clothes. Indeed, they are a bit too self-consciously beautiful, as though this were a photo shoot rather than a drama. The lovely Ben Whishaw is a stellar actor, although I thought he was perhaps too slight for the part, and Goode too cold and ethereal. It's not that I mind lingering on the surfaces - and what lovely surfaces! - but that I was unable to lose myself in any of them.

The women's fashions were neglible, and the men were rather appropriately the focus of the gayze. Lots of crepe-de-chine, flannel, loose-knits, muted salmons, and pomade. Beautiful though the costumes were, and doubtless accurate, they were worn without the sort of louche insouciance and absolute confidence that they were immaculately dresed which characterise men of their rank and generation. Almost all period-dramas since Pride & Prejudice look like they have stepped out of the historical equivalent of Topshop.

I enjoyed it, but the film has many faults. Although the leads' faces fit together a lot better than Anthony Andrews and Jeremy Irons, I still couldn't quite believe it. Whishaw is undoubtedly sexy, but he comes across as far too wet, and Goode can never manage to express desire for either sibling. And much like Sebastian, the film feels an overwhelming weight of duty towards its predecessors, and eventually crumbles under the weight of its own beauty. It is chilling and thrillingly appropriate.

Glory and loveliness have passed away

Along with finding out the death of Clement Freud, I heard yesterday that the queer theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick had died, and felt incredibly sad. Freely admitting that as a married woman who enjoyed "vanilla sex", and that she was basically a fag hag of tremendous proportions, she introduced the world to the concept of triangular desire, without which fitcrit would be nothing. In Between Men, Sedgwick demonstrates that in the nineteenth-century novel, desire between men is often played out through a competitive desire for a third woman. It's a great concept, because you can apply it to any pair of straight up straighties and imagine them in all sorts of positions of panting, barely suppressed eroticism.

She also had a really cool aesthetic, which I adored.
As an appropriate tribute to the inventor of the concept of the homosocial, I thought I would put quote one of my favourite passages from Shelley's Adonais, in which he mourns the death of the beautiful Keats:

He is a portion of the loveliness
Which once he made lovely; he doth bear
His part, while the one Spirit's plastic stress
Sweeps through the dull dense world, compelling there
All new successions to the forms they wear;
Torturing th'unwilling dross that checks its flight
To its own likeness, as each may bear;
And bursting in its beauty and its might
From trees and beasts and men into the Heaven's light.

My latest GILF is Frederico García Lorca. No doubt I have something of a penchant for dark and brooding poets, with Romantic deaths and a taste for bow ties. I also find the Sonnets of Dark Love unbelievably sexy. In the intense 'Night of Sleepless Love', Lorca addresses his lover, the young student Rafael Rodríguez Rapún, in a very dark version of an aubade. (Dark here is usually taken to mean 'homosexual' but Lorca plays with the image of light beautifully; a lovely queering of Othello/Romeo and Juliet?)

Dawn married us on the bed,
our mouths to the unfrozen spout
of unstaunched blood.

The sun came through the shuttered balcony
and the coral of life opened its branches
over my shrouded heart.

Frozen spout, indeed. Anyway, of course I am not (solely) interested in the high-brow. Pop-culture slut-bag as I am, I am really only able to understand the gilfitude of Lorca through the medium of film. Tickets for the new biopic Little Ashes went on sale today, and the film charts the love affair between Lorca and Salvador Dalí, with a little bit of Luis Buñuel thrown in for good measure.

Dali and Lorca

The film stars Robert Pattinson (of Twilight fame) as Dalí, and Matthew McNulty as Lorca. McNulty is no stranger to the biopic, having starred as a rather Frankestein-ish Ian Curtis in Control, nor is his tongue a stranger to the face of Sugar Rush's Olivia Hallinan, whom he macked on in Lark-Rise to Candleford. Anyway, now I guess he'll be shoving his tongue in the Diggory.I am always suspicious that these queerifiying movies are going to cop out instead of copping off, and there was latitude for them to do that. Dalí repeatedly claimed that, although Lorca 'was madly in love with me' and 'tried to screw me twice', it hurt too much and 'nothing came of it'. To me, this doesn't really ring true. Firstly, I don't understand why Lorca would try to put the ostensibly-straight Dalí in the passive role (although I can't wait for Pattinson to act that one out). And secondly, in a typically contradictory mood he suggests that they did indeed do it: fast and nasty. Dalí felt flattered by Lorca's attentions and 'deep down I felt that he was a great poet and that I owe him a tiny bit of the Divine Dali's asshole.' Deep down, indeed.

Happily, it sounds as though the film is really running with it, and Cedric Diggory in the GQ interview says that he shot an 'extremely hard-core sex scene' with Javier Beltran, and there's some synchronised fucking between the leads in a beautiful E. M Forster/Swimming Pool Library bathing scene. Plus, Pattinson revealed that in one bit, Lorca, frustrated by not being able to fuck Dalí sleeps with a mutual female friend while Salvador just wanks tearfully in a corner. I know I say this in every fit crit, but triangular desire MUCH?

Thus, in conclusion, Little Ashes sounds like a riot. But my god, this is a booger trailer if ever I saw one. They make Dalí look like Mo Mowlam. I'll probably still see it anyway. But first I have Brideshead to catch up on. Adíos.

Dorian Gay, or, A Mid-Bummers Dyke's Cream

In other Dorian Gray related news, I fear mine and Caro's hopes that the new film version of Wilde's novel starring Colin Firth and Prince Caspian would be tremblingly homoerotic are to be quashed and thwarted. In a convenient example of triangular desire, it seems the introduction of the character of "Emily Wooton" will serve as both a validation of Lord Henry's frankly dubious heterosexual credentials, and a potential love interest for Gray, and thus provide a cathexis for Wooton and Gray's less Hollywood friendly mutual-facexploration.

AND YET, the choice of Ben Chaplin to play the pro-active aesthete Basil Hallward (and seen here with Billy Crudup in Stage Beauty) is surely some sort of subtle sign? They say a nod is a good as a twink, but I like my nineteenth-century gothic queers to be hot, hard and flaming. I'm writing to gay santa as we speak.

Fangerlin

BBC One's latest Doctor Who replacement - Merlin - requires minimum three fitties to fill the, I'm guessing, rather large shoes of David Tennant. One is Arthur:

The squeaky clean, blond do-gooder counterpart to the darker Merlin, but with a rebellious, sexy side as embodied by this snapshot of him in prison. Seriously, this looks like the beginning to every german porn ever made. His looks fit with Merlin's like a key in a lock:

Here he is looking both innocent and seriously broken by the sexy poison induced fever during which he literally screamed "Arthur, faster, faster." Is the BBC taking the legendary relationship and running with it? Because that would seriously make my year. But what will happen next week when a strange combination of both Merlin and Arthur's beautiful bonces in the form of Lancelot comes to court and has a reediculously symbolic fight with Arthur?

Oh to be that fangirl in the background! The only real test as to whether the creators of this infernal show will do the decent thing is next week's episode. Properly, Merlin will become jealous of Lancelot's arrival, perhaps mediated through a woman a la Eve Sedgwick's theory of 'triangular desire.'
But enough about theory! I want to know the answers to the eternal questions:. Does Lancelot like to lance-a-lot? And will Arthur ever find his Martha? I'm praying we find out.