Cannes Diary 08: Queer Cinema Highs & Lows

by Elisa Guidici

Straight couples and monogamous relationships seem to be an endangered species at this year's Cannes Film Festival, especially in the sidebar sections. We've seen a wealth of films centered on queer love stories, set in a more open and aware contemporary world. Yet, this world often still struggles with a perspective that doesn't immediately stiffen when behavior is framed as "deviant." Unfortunately, mere representation doesn't equate to consistent quality. To summarize the spectrum seen here at Cannes, let's dive into the most exciting film and the most disappointing currently tackling these themes...

Pillion by Harry Lighton
Harry Lighton's Pillion, which played in Un Certain Regard, is one of this edition's most stunning debuts—a fortunate festival for first features. The striking and beautiful film tackles a complex theme with a confident hand and a dash of genuine horniness: relationships based on submission and domination within biker culture. It's a topic that will make some potential audiences immediately uneasy. But Lighton's script is a delight, crafting what is essentially a romantic comedy about an impossible, yet surprisingly functional, couple. Harry Melling plays Colin, a mama's boy, chronically incapable of forming a relationship. While singing a cappella with his father's quartet in a pub around Christmastime, he meets his polar opposite. Ray (Alexander Skarsgård) is a biker with an icy allure, his beauty so inhuman and self-evident it borders on unbelievable next to the shy protagonist.

After one of the most awkward and embarrassing blowjobs ever depicted on the big screen—a sequence where Lighton spares no embarrassment or impasse, never losing his comedic touch even while pushing the sonic envelope—the biker dictates the terms. The sexual relationship will be built on Colin's hidden talents: immense pain tolerance and a remarkable aptitude for devotion. He's willing  to keep sleeping on the rug on the floor of his lover’s bedroom even when self-respect, social conventions, and sheer pain suggest it's time to end things.

The way this relationship blossoms isn't ideal, but that's precisely the point. The power dynamics evolve surprisingly, or perhaps not. At the heart of this type of relationship is the desire to understand oneself and one's needs fully, disregarding social conventions and normative limits. It doesn't matter who's licking the leather boots or who holds the key to the heavy chain around the other's neck. The ability to be honest with oneself, to not view one's desires as weaknesses, and to allow a partner to change us are the lessons Pillion imparts as it unfolds. It manages all of this while showcasing an irresistible British humor that pops up in the most extreme situations, yielding unpredictable results. A true gem.

The History of Sound by Oliver Hermanus
What a searing disappointment The History of Sound is. Not because the film itself is outright bad, but worse: it chooses the most conventional and dusty path to tell a story we've heard before. Its specificity isn't highlighted; instead, its execution harks back to mainstream films of this kind from the '90s, complete with all the limitations of that era.

On paper and in practice, the film is a sort of folk musical where Paul Mescal and Josh O'Connor spend a life-changing winter exploring the most remote regions of North America. After meeting in a pub and discovering they are music scholars with complementary gifts (one with a prodigious memory for melodies, the other with highly developed synesthesia), they organize a journey to find traditional songs to record on wax cylinders, preserving them from obscurity.

From their first meeting, it's clear the attraction is physical, not just a friendly commonality of interests. Like Pillion, we explore this story from the more naive, youthful perspective: Mescal's character, confused by O'Connor's sporadic appearances and disappearances in his life. What they share, a tent and a deep physical and spiritual connection, is a brief, unrepeatable interlude that forever shapes their lives. It will take the protagonist decades to piece together the full story, to understand how that winter in the American woods and mountains changed him, and what it meant to his lover, lost and found multiple times, who offers few words about his long absences due to war and life. Their romance is forged in difficult social contexts where words reveal little. Small gestures—mending a sock, frying an egg, collecting feathers from a torn pillowcase—narrate their mutual affection.

The main problem with The History of Sound is that its lead duo has been seen in similar roles before but with more complexity and emotional depth. Still, Josh O'Connor confirms his status as a major leading actor of his generation and almost steals the show from Paul Mescal. In fact, they almost swap their past roles: O'Connor, once the tentative first-timer in God’s Own Country, here becomes the emotional enigma to be solved; Mescal, full of unresolved issues in All of Us Strangers, is now the man with quiet confidence regarding his own feelings.

Sadly, the film is banal in its development, "chaste" in the worst sense when depicting their affection. The small gestures aren't charged with eros. Instead it's a film with a coyly placed sheet halfway down a buttock as if to say: 'Here you go, but let's keep it PG-13.' Worse still, it’s a film that thinks it has a masterstroke plot twist, when in reality, it follows a now-proverbial stereotype of a "permissible" way to narrate homosexual relationships from the recent past. Moreover, it’s convinced that revealing every single mystery, every shadow, every unspoken thought of O'Connor's character will elevate the story's quality, when it does the exact opposite. It’s a watered-down Benediction, lacking that film's caustic English ability to love desperately while verbally disdaining.

Curiously, The History of Sound feels like second-hand queer cinema, made by someone recounting an experience not their own, by hearsay. Every moment of yearning feels sanitized, mediated, or choreographed, neutering the performances of two actors who have already proven they can bring incredible intensity to these types of roles. The ending, with at least ten subsequent conclusions, each more explicit and condescendingly explanatory than the last, destroys what little magic the film had managed to capture. Here and there, a scene or a touching passage emerges, but it's drowned in a sea of conventionality.