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Sometimes, then, being away from the city can mean escaping social expectations. There's not too much distinction made here between the moaning of men getting laid and the rustle of the wind in the trees.
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This is a world unto itself in which gay desire and sex – of which the film has plenty – are taken for granted and portrayed not as problematic aspects of social identity but more or less as part of nature. Set entirely at a French lakeside cruising spot, Alain Guiraudie's film uses only natural light and sound, and features only men, often naked. On the other hand, Stranger by the Lake, which opens this Friday, might be considered part of the "natural idyll" subgenre of gay cinema. Reading on mobile? Click to watch a clip from Tom at the Farm The film's few images of urban streets come as a blessed relief. At certain points, such as a pursuit through a field of razor-sharp corn, it seems as if nature itself has become weaponised against the arty gay city boy. Nor is it unwarranted: without giving too much away, it's fair to say that Tom's time at the farm is sinister, traumatic and punctuated with violence. This sense only increases as paved roads and phone signals drop away. Its opening images – aerial shots of Tom's little car amid bare, ploughed fields – are reminiscent of the overhead photography of the Torrance family car early in The Shining, evoking the same sense of exposure, isolation and foreboding. So the setup for Tom at the Farm, in which Dolan plays a grieving young man about to visit his late boyfriend's family farm for the first time, is ominous. When they do venture out of town, it rarely goes well.
His characters are sophisticated, savvy urbanites who might not know their emotional arses from their elbows but could find the hippest local bar or vintage store with their eyes closed. With pictures such as I Killed My Mother, Heartbeats and Laurence Anyways, Dolan has established himself not only as a hugely talented and stylish film-maker but as a firm lover of the city. Tom at the Farm, the latest film by the young Québécois director Xavier Dolan, is an instant classic of gay rural panic. And, as a couple of new films show, the onscreen relationship between gay sexuality and a countryside setting can take many forms: often stifling or threatening but sometimes also liberating, even euphoric. It's unlikely, for instance, that many youngsters on their way out of the closet would have rushed to book a ticket to New York after watching Cruising. It's not as if the city is without its own hazards, from rigid social expectations to poverty, self-loathing to homophobic violence. The tragic worst-case scenario is found in Boys Don't Cry, the story of trans murder victim Brandon Teena, in which the combination of deviance from the norm and inability to disappear into the crowd spells doom.īut things aren't always quite so clearcut. The recent Dutch film It's All So Quiet, about a lonely farmer, covered similar emotional terrain. Brokeback Mountain made icons of its repressed rural protagonists, men whose inability to articulate their desires even to themselves doomed them to lives of regret. The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert is wholly structured around the idea of gay people in the country as fish out of water, its basically feelgood vibe laced with moments of real macho menace directed at our drag-queen heroines. Leave town and things get less comfortable. On TV, Queer as Folk was all about Manchester in its original UK incarnation and Pittsburgh in the US remake, while San Francisco is the setting for both new HBO show Looking and the literary adaptation whose title says it all, Tales of the City. Innumerable movies with claims to gay-classic status are inseparable from their urban settings: London has Victim, My Beautiful Laundrette and Beautiful Thing New York has The Boys in the Band, Paris Is Burning and Torch Song Trilogy Berlin has Cabaret and Taxi zum Klo Philadelphia has, erm, Philadelphia. That's the stereotype, anyway, both in reality and on screen. The countryside, on the other hand, is the place they escape from – a realm of social conformity with limited opportunities for culture, sex or socialising, and perhaps even a site of danger. From the molly houses of 18th-century London to 1970s San Francisco via prewar Berlin, the urban environment has always been the natural habitat of queer culture – a place where LGBT people can set their own rules, form their own families, be anonymous when they want to and find company when they fancy it. G ay people and the city have been a good match since Sodom and Gomorrah.