New Queer Cinema pioneer Tom Kalin delivers a powerful follow-up to Swoon
Alongside the likes of Gus Van Sant and Gregg Araki (whose latest films, Paranoid Park and Smiley Face respectively, also feature in the Festival programme), Tom Kalin spearheaded the New Queer Cinema of the early Nineties. A movement characterised by an unflinching treatment of all aspects of the gay experience, Kalin's contribution was his bold take on the infamous Leopold and Leob murder case, Swoon. Now, in his second major feature, he turns his attention to another real-life killing with a gay dimension - that of Barbara Daly Baekeland, former wife of Bakelite plastics heir Brooks Baekeland, in London by her son Tony in 1972.
An American abroad, striving for acceptance by European high society, the purposeless Barbara forms a stiflingly close bond with her child, clouding the teenage Tony's sexual identity. And when his indolent father leaves Barbara for Blanca, a young woman with whom Tony has begun an affair, moral meltdown ensues. Caring for his devastated mother becomes Tony’s 'inheritance', and her association with a handsome gay escort, to whom both are attracted, leads to ultimately fatal transgressions. With Julianne Moore reliable as ever as the unstable Barbara, and newcomer Eddie Redmayne admirably understated as the adrift Tony, Kalin's sumptuously shot film refuses to judge, coolly detailing the decadence that drove a privileged young man to kill.