Jindabyne
Directed by Ray Lawrence
Boy Culture
Directed by Q. Allan Brocka
Jindabyne and Boy Culture aren’t just literary adaptations, both are examples of filmmakers responding to other movies. In Jindabyne, director Ray Lawrence applies the tough, cultural-examination of Robert Altman’s L.A. epic, Short Cuts, to the terrain of New South Wales. In Boy Culture, director Q. Allan Brocka takes on the fairly recently developed conventions of gay romantic comedies; he applies self-examination to a usually glib terrain.
Boy Culture wins this contest for the simple reason that it avoids Jindabyne’s aura of self-importance. Brocka’s approach to the life of a conscience-stricken male hustler proves disarming, while Jindabyne headlines its portentousness. From Lawrence’s early shots of awesome-ominous Down Under landscapes, a deadly highway encounter between a young aborigine woman and a white man, glimpses of Laura Linney/Gabriel Byrne’s troubled marriage and schoolchildren sneaking contraband in their backpacks, Jindabyne becomes an official statement of alienation. Its super-seriousness prevents it from being taken seriously.
But in Boy Culture, when X the hustler refuses to tell us his real name, mocking both existential cool and identity-panic, he goes on to confess the contradictions he feels about love, work, trust, money, youth and experience. This confrontation with his own sentimentality is immediately appealing, especially given X’s surface charm (the actor Derek Magyar). Yet, Brocka’s left-turn approach to urban gay sophistication makes Boy Culture consistently startling, a genre reinvention as opposed to Jindabyne’s highly predictable genre exercise.
Using Raymond Carver’s short story “So Much Water So Close to Home,” Lawrence picks one of the more trenchant episodes that Altman already adapted in Short Cuts—the disturbing incident where a group of men on a fishing trip discover a woman’s dead body and continue their weekend outing before reporting it to police. Altman’s precise details of the men’s individual characters revealed the nature of their society; Lawrence works backwards, peremptorily condemning the culture these men represent. He follows Carver’s pessimism without the complex humor and contradictions that made Short Cuts so magnificently—and terrifyingly—lifelike. Lawrence’s too-faithful adaptation has more “arty” pretense than life.
Brocka’s adaptation of Matthew Rettenmund’s breezy novel, Boy Culture, is actually more ambitious. How do you translate Rettenmund’s sex-act index? Or match his description of a guileless, innocent character “It was written—in crayon—all over his face”? Brocka follows the slick egomania of much gay pop-lit but, instead of perpetuating that Proust-for-Partiers cynicism, he subverts it. Boy Culture mirthfully just-skirts tragedy as Gregg Araki used to. Brocka critiques the insular, smug commonplaces of gay pop when X falls in fascination with a wily older client, Gregory (Patrick Bauchau in a daring, sympathetic performance), and complicates it further when X falls in love with one of his two roommates, the recently-out Andrew (Darryl Stephens).
Not just screwball comedy, this is a cultural twist. X is white (inherent privilege, sponsored narrative are all implied), but Andrew is black. Their affair contradicts X’s glib/queasy declaration: “I’m not into black guys.” It’s exactly the cinematic adaptation that distinguishes Boy Culture from the casual racism of stereotypical gay pop-lit. When X accompanies Andrew to a wedding in his bourgie black hometown, Brocka refreshingly detours from sex ghetto into America’s abundance, multiplicity and surprise. This never happens in Jindabyne, where the tormented white characters only relate to the aborigines in grief and regret. Linney and Byrne visit the family of the dead aborigine girl—a plot point Altman avoided; he used anonymous non-confrontation (Anne Archer sneaking into a funeral) as signs of pathos and grace in modern life.
Race and age provide the distance and pathos in X’s relations with Andrew and his clients, but they also reflect his vanity. Brocka supplies gay pop narcissism in this non-seamy view of sex-trade, but he uses atypical examples—blue-eyed, dark-haired Magyar’s dreamboat-trade look compliments Stephen’s Audrey Hepburn-like, black beauty. By expanding gay types, Brocka approximates more substantive pop advances: Closing in on “Noah’s Arc,” a gay cable-TV series with such a revolutionary sense of peripatetic gay life not even the GLAAD Awards would touch it. And X’s relationship with Gregory recalls the generational exploration of Pet Shop Boys’ classic track, “Young Offender.”
By staying alert to such pop developments, Boy Culture becomes more than a literary adaptation; it keeps film culture relevant and buoyant.
Jindabyne, however, seems bafflingly out of date. Lawrence’s vision of Australian decadence doesn’t advance beyond Ted Kotcheff’s remarkable 1971 movie, Outback. Instead, Lawrence’s view is softer, less redneck-rugged and more art-house cynical. (The unsolved murder mystery comes too close to Zodiac’s hipster nihilism.) The last film I saw that was this complacent about sex and death in society was Lantana, also directed by Lawrence. Short Cuts is the pinnacle that Jindabyne can’t reach, and Lionel Baier’s gay-hustler movie, Garçon Stupide, remains superior to Boy Culture. So this week’s movie lesson: film adaptations may not be original, but they don’t have to be repetitive.
