The Cinesexuals

it celebrates a particular relationship and offers a passing glimpse of a particular milieu (the Silverlake district of Hollywood, though there are a couple of side trips to New Hampshire) and some wisdom about ways of coping with death. I wouldn’t want to claim that the film is easy to take, but neither are its virtues simply the negative ones of taboo breaking. At its best, it offers a way of looking at the world that concretely suggests — even to some extent requires — rejecting its present moral priorities.

What isn’t explained in the film — it would have been impossibly complicated to do so — is that Joslin started Silverlake Life as a series of short pieces about Massi and Massi’s illness when he thought that his lover would be the first to die. Then, as Joslin’s own illness grew worse, Massi took over more and more of the filming himself, and Friedman stepped in to complete the work five months after Joslin’s death.

Paradoxically yet vitally, the act of filming becomes not merely an act of witness but an anchor of meaning, and perhaps for this very reason necessitates the kind of focus and discipline that makes some forms of courage and nobility possible.

Through it all, what impresses one most is the film’s economy, as the diminishing energies of both men translate into a necessity for saying and doing things as simply as possible — a limitation that finally becomes a kind of strength, evident in Friedman’s editing as well as in the filming by various hands. Thanks to this unity of purpose, “the view from here” becomes not a distancing frame for a voyeuristic peek but a route to the other side: we sense the people in this movie looking intently at us.

With hundreds of BL series across various genres, it can be difficult to narrow down a list of the best BL dramas to watch. Most of us don’t have enough time to watch every show out there. Not to mention, we might not have the patience to sit through something boring for hours. As much as you may love BL, you have to wade through a lot of mediocrity in order to find the top BL dramas that define the genre.

“The experience of ‘Made in Heaven’ taught me that it should be always about the script. If a great script comes to me, I’ll do it (play a gay role) ten times over. I love Karan too much and I want to do this as truthfully as many times as I’ll be allowed,” Mathur told PTI in an interview.

Passages, Sachs’ latest film, is something of a return to form for the queer filmmaker. Like Keep The Lights On, it depicts the fraught relationship between husbands Martin (Ben Whishaw) and Tomas (Franz Rogowski), though their love isn’t jeopardized by addiction but rather Tomas’s affair with a woman, Agathe (Adèle Exarchopoulos).

At first glance, Il Mare may seem like a minimalist black-and-white remake of Morte a Venezia/Death in Venice (Luchino Visconti, 1971) – the archetypal gay-themed Italian film. In fact, Il Mare was shot a decade earlier and premiered at the 1962 Venice Film Festival. It marked the film debut of another gay Italian aesthete, the writer and director Giuseppe Patroni Griffi (1921-2005) who made his name with a string of plays on taboo sexual themes