GLR May-June 2024

matography, the sets, even the darkness and twilight in which the movie mostly takes place—is so beautifully done; it’s no surprise that this story came originally from Japanese culture. Everything is stylized. We don’t question why Adam and Harry are the only two people who seem to be living in the high-rise. I didn’t even know it was London until I read a review after wards. We don’t know where we are when the Tube breaks into the sunlight while going by a lake ringed with high-rises. Time, place, weather—almost always crepuscular—are all in service of a melancholy mood that pulls us in. Walking out of the the

I so wanted a happy ending for this movie that I decided I’d been confused in thinking Adam had discovered Harry’s corpse and that the two of them were going to survive and live happily ever after. I drove home that day, in fact, thinking there was no getting around what movies are—fantasies—since most of us do not have a Paul Mescal waiting for us, dead or alive, when we get home in the evening. Such is the reality, not the fantasy, of gay life. And when I got home—to find not Paul Mescal but the Internet on which I could read reviews of All of Us Strangers —I came upon one critic’s speculation that not only

ater at three thirty in the afternoon into a sunny parking lot of a Florida shopping mall could not dissipate what I’d just seen. All of Us Strangers has only two loca tions (the high-rise and the house) and four actors—but how deep it goes! Part of its depth is the idea of airing one’s childhood anxieties and secret sorrows to one’s parents beyond the grave, after the Sturm und Drang

were Adam’s visits to the parents a day dream, but so was the affair with Harry. In reality, not only was Harry dead, but he’d died the night Andrew turned him down when Harry first knocked on the door. This, of course, made the ending even more de pressing. They’d never even had the affair, the night out at the disco, the post-coital con versations. Andrew’s rejection had led either

The loneliness in All of Us Strangers is established at the start. The high rise in which Adam lives seems to have no other residents but him.

of childhood is over. But what All of Us Strangers is about above all is loneliness—a specifically gay loneliness, I think— not only the feeling of being an outsider in grade school, sub ject to bullies who give you female nicknames (how soon they introduce us to drag!), but also hiding the persecution from one’s parents for fear that they may discover the reason for the bullying. It is this secret that the young Adam must live with, the one that separates him from his father, that estranges him from the family, that makes one wonder: Is the car crash just another way to lose them, when the real cause is their knowledge of his homosexuality? The final thing Adam does with his parents is to have lunch with them in a diner; but when he decides to take his new boyfriend over to the house to meet them, they refuse to let him in. Our final glimpse of the dead couple reveals a pair of figures beyond the window rapidly fading into nothingness. The idyll is over—for what reason I’m not sure. Do the parents withdraw because their purpose has been served, because Adam is mov ing on now that he has found someone and is no longer alone? Or because they disapprove of the actuality of their gay son hav ing a boyfriend? One can only speculate—and on other matters as well. At the very end, when Adam realizes his parents are no longer accessible to him, have left the house and will never ap pear again, he goes back to his apartment building, knocks on Harry’s door, and discovers that Harry is not only dead but giv ing off an odor as he decomposes in his bed. Then Adam goes into the kitchen and there is Harry, still alive. &BOOKLOVERS READERS ATTENTION Tim’s Used Books 242 Commercial Street, Provincetown, MA timsusedfilms@gmail.com | 508-487-0005 | Open year-round. Are TIM’S USED BOOKS of Provincetown has been traveling throughout the Northeast since 1991, buying book collections, large and small. Scholarly, gay interest, the arts—all genres. Immediate payment and removal.

to Harry’s accidental death or to his intentional suicide by pills. But then the movie takes another turn: the final image is of Adam in bed with Harry, both of them in the fetal position, spooning as they sleep. A minute after that, a small dot of light moves from their sleeping forms to the universe itself, the galaxy in which we live, in which they become yet one more point of light, decomposed, returned to the cosmos in which we are all $1.87 worth of chemicals when finally broken down. Cold comfort, lovely image. In the end, All of Us Strangers is

May–June 2024

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