Beefcake Borscht

After the digital-video banality of Russian Ark, Alexander Sokurov gets back to Kodak film stock with Father and Son and reclaims his status as a great visual artist. This rumination on filial love shared between a young soldier (Aleksey Nemyshev) and his war veteran father (Andrey Schetinin) features layered and overlapping metaphors. The male-male relationship is political, familial, erotic, philosophical, cosmic, satirical, holy. Often at the same time. This taboo-teasing movie is an event in the history of film sensuality.

Gender and soul (the latter a specialty of Russian cinema from the silent master Dovzhenko to Andrei Tarkovsky) are combined on an exalted plane. In this way Father and Son recalls the year's other fine Russian release, Andrei Zvyagintsev's The Return, a father-and-sons reunion tale that was conventionally dramatized as a domestic mystery-thriller yet could also be taken as a quasi-spiritual study of patriarchy. Both movies limn child-parent relations as an allegory of mankind's pursuit of God. But the handsome, strapping body-display in Father and Son suggests an idealization of Father, Manhood and the Creator. (The pledge, "This is my father. I love him very much" has biblical associations. So does the son's declaration, "A father's love crucifies. A loving son lets himself be crucified.") Sokurov is committed to showing the immanence of human experience. Such imagery as the opening shot of his two protagonists, their limbs intimately entwined, is more fleshly than Zvyagintsev's exhilarating nature studies. This exquisite achievement makes Father and Son stranger and more daring.

Set in an unspecified time and place, Father and Son's enigmas are intriguing due to the consistency of Sokurov's khaki/flesh/earth-coordinated imagery. With cinematographer Alexander Burov, he offers a spellbinding spectrum of brown, beige, rust, green, gray and pink. They work in the tradition of Sergei Eisenstein's sinewy male portraits (Battleship Potemkin, Que Viva Mexico)-one of the great sexual quandaries of film history-but use a soft, muted palette rather than Eisenstein's personally ecstatic radiance. This is the key to unlocking Sokurov's link of highly physicalized naturalism and spirituality. The real world isn't transformed, rather, the interchanges between the preternaturally handsome Nemyshev and Schetinin are abstracted into pantomime and secret conversation. Life's numinous qualities are unveiled.

Despite that first startlingly erotic vision, this movie really isn't gay in a conventional sense. That is, it isn't superficially gay like the drag-queen diminishment of human relations into the supposedly progressive in-jokes of the new Stepford Wives. Sokurov has a greater sexual awareness than Stepford's broad, brazen, illogical camp. On visual evidence alone, he understands the quintessence of physical and emotional attraction, which puts him ahead of most gay indie-movie panderers. Some defensive reviewers have insisted on calling the introductory scene a dream (it is accompanied by vague whisperings-a woman's? a child's?), but if so, it can only be Sokurov dreaming about the intimacy in Patrice Chereau's Son Frere. That first shot is like a male pieta. It depicts fear and comforting, a supernal evocation of the parent/child emotional connection. Puritanical alarms may be triggered, but Sokurov is clearly trying to get past that squeamishness. His effort, an art-school folly, lifts Father and Son into an erotically enticing spiritual universe. Even Fassbinder and Genet might be awed at this high-art fulfillment of both Querelle and Un Chant d'Amour.

Scholar David Bordwell has described art cinema as that form that eschews commercial conventions. I can't imagine whom the ideal audience for Sokurov's art cinema can be other than someone who is willing to give up customary narrative expectations. Knowing this, Sokurov intentionally bridges linear and abstract narrative just like that wooden plank the son walks on between the windows of the apartment he shares with his father and that of a lonely, envious, fatherless young soldier. Sokurov connects gay and straight sensitivity through Art. (There's even a discussion of Rembrandt's The Return of the Prodigal Son hanging in the Hermitage.)

This film is so extreme and hermetic that some of the dialogue (discussions of morning dew between just-showered men) and many of the settings (a poster of an acrobat's musculature, the actors' hunky physiques, a father/son piggyback ride that rises into the clouds) suggest that Sokurov might be some kind of innuendo-obsessed kidder. The son tells the father, "You're like a tree. Your legs are the roots, your chest is the trunk." Yet the film's imagery is powerful and serious. One of the highlights is the son's bus ride with a friend through the city sparked by anxious, mysterious masculine cruising and eye-widening, real-world spectacle. (It's Lisbon passing for Russia, but the unmistakable reference is to the trolley sequence of F.W. Murnau's 1927 Sunrise.) Sokurov's lead actors look so compatibly young that sexual frisson is heightened. He cannot be unaware of the possible, low-down interpretations-still, he elevates them.

In the 1962 Mamma Roma (just released on Criterion DVD), Pier Paolo Pasolini similarly experimented with film form to show how parent/child emotional relations reflect social pressures. Pasolini used sexuality as one of the troubling, affectionate terms of family and society-means of male and female exploitation. Much of Pasolini's audacity passed without critical comment, due to Anna Magnani's galvanizing presence in the title role. At times she is Magnani, at times the street-smart soul of Italy-simply one of the most astounding performances on film. But Mamma Roma set the precedent for Father and Son-not spiritually but through its wide-ranging sexual frankness. Some of Sokurov's beefcake poses recall that ecstatic shot of Alain Delon in Rocco and His Brothers that Mark Rappaport pointed out as a pinnacle of gay (human) desire in The Silver Screen: Color Me Lavender. To accept Sokurov's images without fear or limitation-to think love not smut-points lust in the direction of progress.

DE-LOVELY Pretending to be more honest about composer Cole Porter's homosexuality than the 1946 biography Night and Day that starred Cary Grant, De-Lovely founders between the license to be sexually open and the blandness of being commercially tame. When Porter (Kevin Kline) marries socialite Linda (Ashley Judd) who, in their "open" relationship, procures young men for her husband, the film doesn't explore the intricacy of private marital arrangements or sexual jealousy; it avoids complexity by inserting badly sung musical numbers. (The premise resembles Dickens' A Christmas Carol, with Porter visited by Jonathan Pryce as the angel Gabriel, who offers a revue of the composer's sordid life.)

None of this will interest modern audiences (it's for the When Harry Met Sally geriatric crowd). Yet director Irwin Winkler, who proved with Guilty by Suspicion, Night and the City, The Net and Life as a House that he has no business directing movies, thinks he's being hip by imitating the travesty style of Baz Luhrmann's Moulin Rouge! But using Porter tunes as haphazard autobiography is suspect (and especially lame when performers like Alanis Morissette, Sheryl Crow, Elvis Costello and Mick Hucknall raze each tune to ruins). Winkler's musical numbers are unimaginative and visually grim. He might be the worst director working today. (Actually, no one's worse than Luhrmann, but a Luhrmann clone deserves jail time.)

Alan Rudolph would have been ideal to direct this project. His natural lyricism and interest in emotionally complex, compromised relationships suggest the sophistication needed to make sense of Porter's strained life-as Rudolph did of Dorothy Parker's in Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle. The fake candor (exposed when Kline balks at sexual secrecy, asking, "What is discretion but hypocrisy wrapped up in good breeding?") makes this film's point of view and its esthetics unacceptable. o