Blue Film Review: Masterful Two-Hander Confronts Flaws with Empathy

“Provocation” has become watered-down in recent times. All it takes to provoke someone is tossing off a bunch of half-assed offensive statements or aiming your cannon at every divisive mainstream issue on a quest to push people’s buttons. Getting a reaction out of people is easy; actually making them consider things is another matter entirely. Blue Film, by that token, is provocative in the truest sense of the term. Elliott Tuttle’s film seeks to unsettle, question, and, yes, provoke you. But his masterful two-hander wants, more than anything, to extend understanding to both men at the center, asking you to see them as flawed humans with depth and complexity, even if we’d rather not.

Aaron Eagle (Kieron Moore) is introduced hosting a camshow—complete with stuttering video and horny comments—in which he plays a straight, masc, dom-top bro who just got back from the gym, hurling slurs at his audience in classic humiliation-play fashion. One of those watching is a man at first only glimpsed in a balaclava; we soon learn his name is Hank (Reed Birney) and he has hired Aaron for a night. Their introductory scenes set both the terms of the night and the themes Tuttle wishes to explore, with Hank at first appearing to want a sort of sex, lies, and videotape experience where Aaron details his background, sexual experiences, and why he became a camboy. But a disconnect arises: Aaron views this as simply part of a kink, or perhaps a “scene” that he’s been hired to perform. Hank, on the other hand, gets frustrated that Aaron isn’t being honest with him. One of the brilliant touches here is the use of different camera formats, ranging from home-movie interstitials (Tuttle’s own) to low-quality camcorder footage that gives Aaron’s interview an intimacy that resembles “amateur” pornography (and will come into play later).

The controversy comes when Hank’s own truth is revealed: he’s actually Mr. Grant, Aaron’s former 7th-grade English teacher and a convicted sex offender who attempted to molest a young boy when Aaron (real name Alex) was in high school. Moreover, he was in love with Alex when he was a student, and this meeting is his attempt at seeing if that love is still there. It’s not hard to understand why several prominent festivals rejected it (I saw it at the Philadelphia Film Festival): Hank is open about his desires and what he found attractive about Alex, and Birney plays him like an ordinary elder gay man, teacher’s instincts still intact. But crucial to the enterprise––as much as Birney’s projection of warmth and normalcy––is Aaron’s constant questioning and pushback on his reasoning and excuses. Much of Blue Film is a series of conversations and monologues touching on the nature of desire, sexuality, and perversion as a form of spirituality, and what form “honesty” takes. Indeed, Moore’s performance suggests an immaturity and petulance resulting from something deep inside Alex—perhaps because of trauma, perhaps not. As he says in a riveting monologue, he was loved by his parents and still he came out the way he is: as much a pervert as Hank but to different ends. Both men are honest up to a point, but do they believe each other? Better yet: do we, the audience, believe they’re actually being honest with us?

All of this would make for great material on the stage—Birney won a Tony Award for his role in The Humans—yet Tuttle elevates his feature debut through background droning, Isaac Eiger’s ambient score, and striking cinematography from Ryan Jackson-Healy. Lost Highway is evoked in the use of shadows and contrasting blue lighting and red objects; differing cameras create uniquely jarring effects, like a lower resolution for an age-play sex scene that abruptly switches back to higher definition with a shot firmly focused on Moore’s face to signify the shifting dynamic. And then there are home movies, functioning as both the opening credits and something like chapter breaks. In these scenes, there’s no sound but music, creating a mysterious, haunting effect that perhaps serves as a reminder of how young the type of boy Hank goes after really is, or maybe just showing us Alex’s happy upbringing in contrast to the classical story of rough childhoods leading to damaged and “sexually deviant” gay men. Tuttle’s acknowledgment of cultural history even extends to references to Ancient Greek pederastry, where mentor-mentee relationships between boys and men often crossed the line to sexual behavior. It’s easy to draw lines to the characters’ own histories of sexual abuse and trauma, less as explanations than personal and historical contexts. The refreshing self-awareness is deepened again from the question of what that knowledge allows one to do.

Blue Film, admittedly, will not be an easy watch even for those with the most open minds. Its frankness guarantees discomfort but is also part of what makes it among this year’s finest films. As it enters theaters, a certain biopic is dominating the box office while erasing the history of its subject; by contrast, Blue Film asks viewers how we live with these people in our communities, and how we live with ourselves in the aftermath. There are real people hurt by these actions—in a bracing moment, Hank chides Aaron for making light of it, theorizing how embarrassing and traumatic his actions must’ve been for the victim—just as there are real people who know it is wrong and will never offend again. Tuttle’s film doesn’t offer any answers, but in an era when so many try to obfuscate or redirect, perhaps the boldest choice one can make is raising the issue directly and asking the viewer to sit with it.

Blue Film opens in limited theaters on Friday, May 8.