A movie made by James Franco (along with co-director Travis Mathews), ostensibly recreating 40 minutes of footage cut from the 1980 movie Cruising, which starred Al Pacino as an undercover cop who has to infiltrate a gay leather bar in order to find a serial killer. The 40 minutes were removed at the behest of the film classification board in order to prevent the film from being classified as pornography and therefore unsuitable for public release.
As Interior. Leather Bar points out, the missing 40 minutes have never been screened publicly (and some say they’re more legend than fact anyway, and so the movie they’re making becomes a re-imagining of what might have been. This is then mixed in with ‘documentary’ sections that look at the making of this re-imiagining.
The story, such as it is, revolves around Val, a straight actor brought in to play Pacino’s character from the original movie. He accepts as a favour to his long-time friend James Franco, but struggles to see the point of the re-imagining. The documentary aspect follows his quest to understand the project he’s become a central part of.
The main set-piece of the movie, a discussion between Franco and Val on the reasoning behind the project and why it’s important to Franco to make it, feels a little clunky and expositionary. The questions asked, and points made are valid – such as why extreme violence is much more allowable in mainstream culture than the expression of love between two men, and the hetero-normative nature of mainstream culture that Franco sees as a social construct that he was manipulated into subscribing to during his childhood. They are most definitely questions that should be asked, but this film comes across as slightly smug in the execution.
This docudrama plays with different levels of experience and regression: viewpoints switch from re-imagined footage, to the cameras filming the re-imagined footage, to the director watching the cameras filming until, at one point, the audience is watching a girl filming the guy filming the director watching the movie being filmed; and toys with the levels of meta experience several times, including at one point having Val sitting reading his script out loud to himself, including the direction to sit and read his script out loud to himself (so ultimately it’s impossible to tell how much is ‘real’ and how much pre-scripted..
Themes of trust, faith and the boundaries that we each set run quite overtly through the film. For example Val is trusting the much more successful and famous Franco, against his better judgement, to ensure that this project doesn’t damage his burgeoning career. There’s also the trust shown between the actors in different BDSM roles throughout the project, most of whom have never experienced this level of kink before. But, as is the case of the BDSM actors who’re not into anything so kinky, the final sex scene is rather tame in comparison to the build-up, which includes group scenes of spanking, leather-worship and drug-taking.
Will this project damage Val’s acting career? Hard to tell. And, while it’s obviously a project that means to ask more questions than it answers, it lacks a little something between the set-up and the punchline.
As Val reflects to his fellow actors at the end of the day, sometimes the idea of something becomes much bigger than the thing itself. And while this is almost definitely true of the missing 40 minutes of Cruising, it’s also true of this film itself: James Franco directing and starring in a film set in a gay sex club? It would be hard for anything to live up to an idea like that. And while the viewer may come away with that idea most certainly underlined, I hope the questions that Franco et al ask about the supposed acceptability or otherwise of violence and sex shown in mainstream media are also bubbling away in their heads.
Reviewer: Scott Elliott
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