Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP
Posting-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site bbncca.ARPA
Path: utzoo!linus!bbncca!sdyer
From: sdyer@bbncca.ARPA (Steve Dyer)
Newsgroups: net.motss,net.movies
Subject: Re: YAFM: movie review
Message-ID: <921@bbncca.ARPA>
Date: Fri, 24-Aug-84 12:08:19 EDT
Article-I.D.: bbncca.921
Posted: Fri Aug 24 12:08:19 1984
Date-Received: Sat, 25-Aug-84 02:32:49 EDT
References: <920@bbncca.ARPA>
Organization: Bolt, Beranek and Newman, Cambridge, Ma.
Lines: 27

Another good example of a movie with characters who just "happen to be" gay
is a new Dutch film, "The Fourth Man", in which a gay (or more properly,
bisexual, but gay-identified) Catholic author, Gerard Reve, gets involved
with a beautiful young woman after he sees just what her current boyfriend
(a European James Dean/Brando punk) looks like, with the intent of seducing
him.

Far more central to the film than any "gay issues" is its use of Catholic
(gothic, pre-Vatican II) iconography: Reve recreates the world around him
as a series of religious symbols.  A woman holding her child becomes the
Madonna, ketchup spilled becomes the blood of Christ, Christ on the cross
takes the form of a beautiful young man in a swimsuit.  The sacred and the
worldly are co-present, but irreconciled.  By the end of the film, Reve is
either stark-raving-crazy, or saved by the intercession of the Virgin Mary.

This sounds lugubrious and heavy-handed, and it could be, but the director
has a light touch, allowing us to smile at Reve's over-wrought world view,
even as he remains uncommitted to resolving where the truth lies.

This film reminds me a lot of "Don't Look Now", Nicholas Roeg's supernatural
thriller.  By the way, it is gruesome in one or two scenes, probably
mild stuff compared to the slice-and-dice genre, but worth noting if you
are completely intolerant to this.
-- 
/Steve Dyer
{decvax,linus,ima}!bbncca!sdyer
sdyer@bbncca.ARPA