© Obscured Releasing
Every year, so-called provocateurs come out of the woodwork with films that promise to shock audiences, challenge norms and push boundaries, leaving behind broken taboos in their wake. And yet, true transgressions are few and far between. More often than not, viewers are met with the pretension of risk-taking on the part of artists too timorous to take any actual risk. When a picture comes about and honestly earns these descriptors, one should take note. So, please note Elliot Tuttle’s Blue Film. It’s the sordid yet simple story of the night spent between a gay camboy and the stranger who paid for his company.
During those hours, perversity takes on another meaning as actors Kieron Moore and Reed Birney playact a scenario in which nothing feels more verboten than a show of affection, empathy extended toward those who would rightfully revolt us. Blue Film forms a lewd poem of broken hearts and sad monsters, a mural of cumstains and razor burns, topped by a secret song that you listen to while feeling like you shouldn’t, like you’re encroaching on something so private that to witness it is a violation. All throughout, there’s this pervading sense one is peeking into what ought to remain unseen…
Blue Film opens on a livestream as our resident camboy, known by the pseudonym of Aaron Eagle, addresses his audience as faggots, degrading them in a sexual gameplay that sees him in a place of worship and domination over those who watch. The way the scene is constructed further amplifies this by putting the film’s audience in his line of sight, in the role of degradee before the dirtbag Adonis. We’re being forced to participate in the virtual roleplay, affiliated with those ravenous in-universe viewers. But, after all, aren’t we willingly watching Blue Film? Aren’t we already participating in these transgressions?
Maybe it’s not just the character talking to his patrons. Maybe it’s the film talking to those who felt compelled to take a look at its promises of pushed boundaries, shock and awe. Maybe it’s Tuttle denying our distance from what we’re watching, binding together the audience within and without the narrative. Whatever the case, there’s an implication happening that will soon seem like the most benign and easily digestible idea Blue Film has in store. Because Aaron has a client that evening, some mysterious older man who receives him wearing a balaclava and insists on conversing with the digital sex worker while recording everything.
In front of the camcorder and within the obscenities of this conversation, Aaron insists everybody likes to be watched, confident or perhaps just performing confidence. It’s all a performance anyway, and in such fantasy, some can grasp liberation, a safety they can’t find anywhere else, even control, and a notion of transcendence that borders on the religious. At least, that’s what Aaron tells himself and the client, denying the older man the single thing he’s asking for – the emotional vulnerability of truth, something that’s not for public consumption or private pleasures, something more secret than all that.
It’s not the salacious story of a threesome and rape roleplay Aaron throws at his interviewer like a grenade, nor another spiel on the art of domination and how submissives feel powerful in their surrender. For his part, Moore is constantly recalibrating the performance, playing someone trying to protect themselves through layers of subterfuge and self-fictionalization. It’s the plight of any performer who travails in the business of selling the fantasy that their audience knows them. Only, it becomes more desperate by the minute. When Aaron calls himself the boss, Moore plays it in the manner of Sally Bowles, singing that life is a cabaret. It sounds true, but tastes like self-deception.
His efforts are put into stark relief by a mise-en-scène that uses plainness like a weapon, turning something as minor as the angle each actor approaches the camera into a subtle power play. First of all, as the two men are initially sheathed in anonymity, they don’t share the same shots. The older man is often in the center frame, almost facing us, Ozu-style. And then there’s our camboy, slightly to the side, less confrontational and, because of that, more obvious in his guardedness and, paradoxically, more open, too. Somehow, he looks steadier when seen through the diegetic camcorder footage. The more conventional film style reveals cracks in the armor.
Specifically, when, upon finding himself more disturbed than he’d ever admit, Aaron moves to leave and the camera loses its perch on the tripod. Blue Film grows as visibly shaky as the emotions at hand. It’s a disruption that signals what happens next will redefine the picture. For, less than a third of the way in, our players’ identities are revealed. Aaron is Alex and the stranger is Hank, one of his former teachers who, many years ago, was caught attempting to rape a twelve-year-old boy. Alex doesn’t leave then. Indeed, he asks, almost hurt, why this pedophile never tried to fuck him when he had the chance. Why did he arrange this meeting? Hank’s answer is what twists the film away from lurid shock value and into the form of an actual transgression.
The teacher claims to have loved him and wants to know if he still does, now that he’s grown up. Suddenly, those interstitial home videos of a blond boy that have been serving as odd transitions don’t look like a clichéd contrast between the sex worker and his younger, innocent, self but like an idealized vision of purity that would carnally excite a pedophile. Suddenly, the dignity with which Birney insists on playing Hank sours into a complex flavor profile that’s hard to swallow without gagging. It’s almost as if he were acting in a romantic drama rather than whatever this is, weaving notions of desire as a source of connection and alienation, meaning and meaninglessness.
Suddenly, we’re no longer the camboy’s observer, implicated in the exploitation of his eroticized image. Instead, we’re closer to being in his shoes, regarding this other man with a strange mix of sentiments that should probably go unnamed. Perhaps, that earlier dictum needs some rewriting. We don’t all want to be watched, but we all yearn to be seen. More deeply, we all want to be wanted, to be loved. It’s precisely the use of that word - love- its insistent repetition in Hank’s mouth that strikes me as the film’s greatest provocation. In the face of it, all the popper training live show, the dom/sub philosophizing, the rape fantasy… it all feels remarkably provincial, even safe.
Across 82 minutes, Blue Film unravels like a chamber piece holding its audience on a knife’s edge, digging further and further into the two characters, together until sunrise. That doesn’t mean Tuttle lets it all rest on his actors’ shoulders or settles into audiovisual displicency. A first blowjob scene is shot like religious prostration, the adored body splayed before a supplicant who wants nothing more than to feel old desires again. Its graphic quality is somewhat spoiled, with clear intention, by the way Moore’s body hair fuzzies up the lines of his figure. Emotionally-charged closeups are somehow more erotic than this, especially after Hank speaks about what attracted him to this man when he was a child.
Sure, the perverse teacher found lurid pleasure in the sight of smooth legs and a youthful countenance. But the flame of what he calls love was fueled by the loneliness he recognized in the pupil and the twisted kinship it inspired. His sadness made him lovable. And his sadness makes for some of the film’s most arresting images as Tuttle lets Moore’s face shine, sculpted by moonlight, projecting that visceral upset you get in the pit of your stomach when leaning over an abyss. For as much praise as Moore deserves, cinematographer Ryan Jackson-Healy is a major reason these visual strategies work. More so when Blue Film shifts again, allowing non-diegetic camcorder footage into the mix.
It starts with a shaving ritual as prelude for a pedophile’s teacher-student roleplay. The mixed visual textures throw the film further off its axis, pushing us into a space between fantasy and reality, between the old man's illicit desires and the camboy’s tentative willingness to participate in them. Looking at Alex on his knees, boyish, in this impossible camcorder frame, it’s as if Tuttle is asking us to consider him through a pederast’s viewpoint. It’s sickening. And then, it cuts back to traditional coverage as another utterance of love changes things for Alex. I don’t want to reveal much more, but it’s safe to say that Blue Film becomes an escalation of discomfort the likes of which we rarely see in contemporary American cinema.
You can feel it getting under your skin, character work and further revelations like tiny teeth sinking into you, gnawing. Concepts of purity in perversion and perversion as loneliness beckon serious thought, but they also circle back to the monstrousness of Hank and his hypocritical rationalizations. Moreover, though his pathology may have been born out of abuse he himself suffered, the actions he chose to enact and the desires he continues to engage with aren’t excused away by that. Blue Film asks for a modicum of curiosity in understanding another human being, but it doesn’t ask for forgiveness. Neither does Birney’s performance, always attuned to Hank’s self-image without making a case in his favor.
By the end, though, Blue Film belongs to Moore. As the last act rises in a wave of Klein blue, Alex shares his own brokenness, beckoning a serenity that’s as fleeting as it is overwhelming. He’s so easily hurt but, in that moment, Tuttle and his actors allow us to see the men using one another, pretending they are something else, somewhere else, in pursuit of an intimacy they desperately need. In that moment, face pressed down on the pillow, Moore delivers a vision of openness that comes close to the spiritual quality both characters ascribed to desire and sex throughout these nocturnal passages. Blue Film is never an easy watch, yet it can be profoundly moving to match how profoundly disturbing it remains from start to finish.
Blue Film is currently enjoying a limited theatrical release from Obscured Releasing. While it can be a tough sit, this is the sort of project that deserves to be appreciated for its bold vision, its daring ruminations. Writer-director Elliot Tuttle certainly put his name on the map with this one.