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Site updated Jan. 24, 2010 |
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The Advocate, April 28, 1987
Gay sensibility has been sighted. After years of snorkeling around among plays, films, novels, and designer labels, we have found a species of it in the work of Stephen Frears, director of "My Beautiful Laundrette" and the new "Prick Up Your Ears". Confounding two decades of "liberationist" theorizing, this forger of gay sensibility is not gay. Divorced and with two children by his former wife, Frears has been living for the past 12 years with painter Annie Rothenstein, with whom he also has two children. In his recent films, gay men are the guys you root for, the character you identify with, the heroes. A toast, then, to the imagination.
"Prick Up Your Ears" tells the story of British playwright Joe Orton and his lover Kenneth Halliwell, who, in 1967, bludgeoned Orton to death in his bed. Based on the biography by John Lahr (son of actor Bert Lahr), the film swings between Joe's and Kenneth's life in the 1950s and 1960s, and Lahr's efforts 20 years later to write the tale of the two men.
By putting Lahr's biographical research into the script, screenwriter Alan Bennett makes the process of writing Orton's biography as much the subject of "Ears" as the biography itself. Lahr transforms Orton's life into a book, just as Orton transforms much of his life into plays. A working-class boy from Leicester, Orton hated the hypocrisies of class and loved the thrill of cottaging (tearooms, to Americans). He wrote ribald satires that cut into the arteries of money and sex.
The parallel between Orton and Lahr creates a second pairing, and in "Ears" it is the more important one: the similar predicaments of Halliwell and Lahr's wife. When the "Ears" audience meet Mrs. Lahr, pregnant and transcribing her husband's interviews, she tries to explain that she and John together are writing the book about Orton. Peggy Ramsay, Orton's agent and confidante, gives her a tight, patronizing smile. On better days, Halliwell got like treatment - and not just from Ramsay. In public, Halliwell was referred to as Orton's personal assistant; in private, Orton was urged to drop Halliwell as an extraneous piece of baggage. Ramsay is complicit, but she has no delusions about the setup. She calls it the problem of first wives who "do all the work and all the waiting."
In "Prick Up Your Ears", Joe and Ken are the protagonists, Lahr and his wife only supporting figures. Viewers feel tenderness when the boys fall in love and tension when they fight. Lahr's marriage, set in the background, is seen through Orton's. Straight has become foil for gay.
In the past, films with gay characters have too often been boosters or primers in tolerance. The boosters isolate gays so that any stray heterosexual who might wander on screen has no bearing on the central struggle of the plot. This is called the ghetto film. (A few exceptions come to mind, like the party scene in Bill Sherwood's "Parting Glances", where the hetero- and homosexuals mingle, and love is troubled or untroubled, not gay or straight.) In the primers, directors place gays in supporting roles to straights, and make the liberal plea that "they have feelings just like we do." The "we," of course, is straight; the movie, condescending. By setting the gay relationship center-stage and the heterosexual one to the side, Frears and Bennett also say, "They have feelings just like we do." But the "we" is gay.
This is the second time Frears has reversed audience sympathies. In last year's "My Beautiful Laundrette" , the romance between a Pakistani youth and a National Front skinhead sits in the foreground while, in a subplot, an older Pakistani man has an affairs with a red-headed (white-skinned) beauty named Rachel. The tensions in the older, heterosexual couple set off those between the two boys. "All I wanted to do," said Frears of "Laundrette", "was get it out of the ghetto of being a minority film." And he did. "Laundrette", a hit here and abroad, was nominated for an Oscar.
Frears, born in 1941, read law and Cambridge and learned that he didn't want to practice it. He became an assistant director at the Royal Court Theatre and went on to work in film, causing his mother "to go to her grave," as Frears put it, "wondering when he would get a proper job." He worked with Albert Finney on "The Burning" and with Lindsay Anderson on "If". In 1972, he directed his first feature, "Gumshoe", starring Finney. For the next decade, Frears worked exclusively in British television, enjoying "the lack of interference and the lack of obligation to make money." After two more feature films, "The Hit" and "Laundrette", he began working with Lahr and Bennett on "Prick Up Your Ears". His next film, now in production, was written by Hanif Kureishi (who also wrote "My Beautiful Laundrette") and is titled "Sammy and Rosie Get Laid".
Shaggy-haired and unshaven, Frears gave a fuzzy appearance sitting in the slightly ratty armchair of his hotel room. He has a sharp, tongue-in-cheek wit. Later, downstairs in the lobby, he read in "Women's Wear Daily" that he was on the "in" list along with the Merchant-Ivory filmmaking team. "Who," he asked movie critic Vito Russo, "do you have to fuck to get on the 'out' list?"
Frears was attracted to the Orton project because "we come from the same town. A lot of Orton's life reminds me of mine, not the sexual adventures but the Dick Whittington aspect of it - going to London where the streets are paved with gold. Orton was part of the history of my times. I remember the death, the plays - his life seemed typical of postwar Britain and the changes that came in the '60s. There's a Philip Larkin poem that says it:
Sexual intercourse began in 1963
(which was rather late for me)
between the "Lady Chatterly" trial and
the Beatles' first LP."
Frears' club sandwich was brought to his room just about the time the photographer arrived, which worried him. He did not want to be photographed foaming with mayo. I asked him about a comment he made that all his films are about "misplaced people, people out of place, reconciling their insides with their outsides."
"It sounds rather articulate for me. But I'd say that Orton falls into that description - though it's not true of the working class in general, who are mostly settled. Progress has mostly come from immigrants, though this is largely unrecorded: Jews, for example, who brought business to the north of England, and Blacks and Asians. But if you were gay coming from Leicester, you'd certainly feel misplaced. And alienated intellectuals - they're also misplaced.
"I find it startling, for example, when I answer you and you write it down. I come from the very conventional middle class with no tradition of actually saying anything. It's all very conformist - other people decide how you're supposed to be. And I work with writers who do the saying. Film directors always feel that others tell them how to be. You feel like you're letting the job down if you're not wearing jodhpurs or snorting cocaine. Or being an auteur.
"Probably, everybody feels they have no voice, but you become much more conscious of it with people who are disenfranchised - like the white boys in 'Laundrette'. It's also easier to dramatize with gays, women or immigrants."
"I wanted 'Ears' to be accessible to everybody. We wanted to say this is what happens inside marriages regardless of sex. To do that you have to make a film from your characters' point of view, from the inside. You have to think your way into their feelings. Since the actors are subtle, you follow them. What's nice about 'Laundrette' is that is doesn't shoe gay people with two heads. They're ordinary.
"Now Orton and Halliwell were very odd. When they rode the buses, people stared - particularly at Halliwell. But I wouldn't be interested in a film that looked at them from the outside. I wanted to make them seem like people you were in the room with. That's why we shot a sex scene, to get on the inside. And it's why we cast the boys in 'Laundrette' together. They have to play people in love. If you can't play it with him, get someone else. You have to let the characters talk for themselves, and the audience will form its own sympathies. Maybe I make films this way because of my being British and getting on with it and not theorizing.
"We all construct private lives in the midst of public policies and politics and laws. In England, the state intrudes quite a lot and people spend whole lives creating privacy. "Laundrette" and "Ears" are about people disregarding the law and living out their lives anyway. That's where I've come to in my life. You live in your house with the people you love - hopefully - and it doesn't seem to have much to do with what's in the papers. Of course economic and political factors affect you, but these films are about people picking their way through them."
"So why," I asked, "did you do two films in a row about gay men? Or why did you do them so well?"
"Impenetrable. I can't explain it. I give credit to the people I talk to. It must be perplexing to have someone who doesn't know a lot about gay people make these movies. But, as you say, gays have been making films about straights for years.
"Maybe it's harder for me to do films about people like myself, maybe I look for metaphors. Maybe gays are especially good metaphors for misplaced people. I remember reading Hanif's script and rejoicing when the gay relationship starts. It's completely unexpected yet part of the radicalism. It's a way of turning everything - all the predictable business about immigrants and blacks and the National Front - upside down. It makes them just people picking their way through."
"Is that why you put Lahr and his wife in the Orton script?" I asked.
"You need some device to look at the past, someone's perspective on it," Frears replied. "We were going with John's [Lahr], and in the biography, Orton's life is filtered through John's marriage. John is very frank about it. He's obsessed with collaboration, with Halliwell's lack of credit. His books are full of tributes to his wife. Orton cheated. The film is an argument for the first wife. Alan [Bennett] was also struck by the fact that first wives do an awful lot of work and then the bugger foes off.
"Halliwell turned out to be with someone famous, but his predicament is true for all women - the women who are interested in their husbands' work, who have their husbands' bosses over for dinner and get interested in the bosses' wives. I live with this all the time. I'm interested in Annie's [Rothenstein] work. But film is such a monstrous thing. People call at odd hours and take you to America.
"What's the solution? I don't know, but the resolution of the dilemma is essential to our lives together. If I'm nice, it helps. But think of that Elizabeth Hardwick quote that Alan put in the press material: 'This unspoken contract of a wife and her works. In the long run wives are to be paid in a particular coin - consideration for their feelings. And it usually turns out that this is an enormous, unthinkable inflation few men will remit, or if they will, only with a sense of being overcharged.'"
"Did you feel," I asked Frears, "that showing a man - Halliwell - in a traditionally female position exposes the predicament?"
"If I'd been as clear about it then as you've just articulated it now, I'd have concealed it even more.
"I'm very conscious that I'm about to make a film with lots of women and I don't know much about it. I've made so many films about men, gay and straight, and so few about women. Maybe I feel more familiar with men, gay or straight. Now I have to think about clothes - and I have to do a straight sex scene, and I have no idea how to shoot it. I shall be curious to find out what it's about or if I can make a film about women in the way Cukor really could or Woody Allen can. Perhaps I won't find any detachment. I think I make my films when I cast them, like Woody Allen must. I depend on the actors - not the lines - to lead the way. The sensibility comes from my observing them."
After years of working in government supported British TV, Frears is now directing films that demand a profitable return. I asked him how he is weathering the shift.
"British TV doesn't require that you make any money at all. Now the people who give me money want some back. But the material is what I want to do. No one has asked me to sell out. I'm dying to be asked. I'd like to see what my price is."
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© marcia pally, new york 2005