Film review

  • Winter Kept Us Warm

    David Secter (1965)

    It was fascinating to watch Lloyd-Eyre Morgan and Neil Ely’s Departures, then David Secter’s Winter Kept Us Warm, at BFI Flare – two films made sixty years apart, screened just a few hours apart.  I was drawn to Secter’s because of its Eliotian title and, once I’d read the brochure blurb, by its antiquity.  The characters are students at the University of Toronto and Winter Kept Us Warm was shot, in black and white, on location there.  The timeframe extends from late 1964 to early 1965 (the winter during which T S Eliot died, coincidentally); same-sex sexual activity in Canada for consenting adults in private wasn’t decriminalised until 1969.  This means – as Flare programmer Zorian Clayton, introducing the screening in NFT1, explained – that Secter’s film is extensively ‘coded’.  That may be an understatement.  Winter Kept Us Warm is thoroughly opaque – but that opacity adds to its historical interest.  It also has an amusing aspect.  David Secter was in his very early twenties, and still a Toronto student himself, when he made the film, on a $750 grant obtained from the University’s students’ union.  He advertised for cast members in the student newspaper:  several of those who ended up in the cast were unaware the story had gay overtones.

    Even though Winter Kept Us Warm has recently been restored, it takes a while, watching it now, to adjust to the lack of technical sophistication, especially the sound quality.  The writing – Secter shared the screenplay credit with Ian Porter and John Clute – is far from primitive, though.  The main characters are two students, Peter Saarinen (Henry Tarvainen) and Doug Harris (John Labow), apparently chalk and cheese.  Peter is a shy, unconfident freshman, reading philosophy and English; Doug is a popular, gregarious senior student, reading economics.  An introductory sequence cuts between their road journeys to the halls of residence – Peter in the back of a taxi with plenty of luggage, Doug driving his own car and travelling light.  Secter uses different pieces of music to accompany these journeys – a thin, almost plaintive melody for Peter, a jazzier arrangement for Doug.  Peter, whose ancestry is Finnish, lives somewhere in rural Canada and, in his first few weeks as a student, receives a regular supply of parcels from his mother – extra blankets, Finnish pastry.  Doug’s background is metropolitan; in one scene, he meets up with his parents in Toronto.  He also has a regular girlfriend, Bev (Joy Tepperman).  One of Winter Keeps Us Warm’s strongest elements is how Secter defies the expectations encouraged by the initial impression given of his protagonists.  The stage seems set for shy, somehow feminine Peter to fall in love – unrequited love – with handsome, self-assured Doug.  Something like the reverse happens but another of the film’s strengths, thanks in part perhaps to its persistently muffled quality, is that it’s not quite as simple as that.

    To earn some pocket money, Peter signs up, as other freshmen do, to wait on tables in the student refectory.  Doing his first session there, he finds Doug the most volubly derisive of a group of senior students; soon afterwards, Doug realises that he’s upset Peter and that upsets Doug, too.  It’s from this point that their friendship starts to develop but with Doug usually taking the conversational lead and Peter seeming to welcome Doug’s protection, not least in social settings.  Doug’s other friends, including Bev, seem amused that he bothers spending time with awkward, diffident Peter.  It’s after the turn of the calendar year that the ground starts to shift.  Peter auditions for a part in a student production of Ibsen’s Ghosts and, to his and Doug’s surprise, gets the part of Oswald.  As he grows in confidence during rehearsals, Peter also gets friendlier with Sandra (Janet Amos), who plays Mrs Alving and is much more experienced than Peter, both as a student actor and socially.  As Peter spends more time with Sandra, tensions grow between him and Doug, whom Bev finds increasingly distracted and remote.  Puzzled by what’s happening, she says to him at one point, ‘Honestly, if I didn’t know you better, I’d think that you and Peter …‘  Doug reacts angrily and Bev says no more, which makes the exchange all the more tantalising.  It’s worth noting that David Secter, regardless of his priorities in making Winter Kept Us Warm, treats Bev just as sympathetically as he treats Doug and Peter.

    The film’s climax takes place on an evening that Peter spends with Sandra, and that Doug spends with Bev.  As in the opening sequence, Secter cuts to and fro between his two principals, eventually in bedrooms.  The sex there is filmed as discreetly as any implicitly gay interactions in the story but it’s clear that Doug and Bev’s sleeping together is desultory and unsatisfying, and Peter’s night with Sandra quite the opposite.  Peter’s still euphoric when he tells Doug the next day that he’s lost his virginity.  One of Peter’s set texts is The Waste Land, in which, early in the film, Doug shows little interest.  In the closing scene, he returns to the library, takes The Waste Land from the shelves and starts to read from ‘The Burial of the Dead’.

    A middle-aged hall porter (Sol Mandlsohn), welcoming Peter to the student residence at the start, tells him he’s in ‘Lowrey house … there’s lots of mighty fine fellows in Lowrey’.  A later sequence showing students in the showers ends abruptly as Doug is soaping Peter’s back.  Both moments got a big laugh in NFT1 from the pre-alerted audience though I wasn’t sure that either qualified as coded.  The audience reacted to the shower sequence as if Secter had cut away just when something homoerotic was about to happen but there’s nothing in subsequent scenes to suggest that Peter and Doug have shared physical intimacy of a romantic kind, let alone had sex together.  Winter Kept Us Warm is confounding because it’s governed by three aspects of contemporary taboo in relation to same-sex relationships which, as you watch the film, are virtually impossible to disentwine – what the film censor wouldn’t pass, what the law of the land didn’t allow, and what feelings young people were constrained from expressing or even admitting to themselves.

    This last aspect is enriched by Secter’s successfully conveying that the Toronto students, smart but still unsure of themselves, are to an extent putting on an act whatever their sexual feelings.  At the same time, the non-professional cast perhaps adds to the film’s confusing nature.  It wouldn’t be fair to describe these student actors as amateurish but of course they’re short on professional training and discipline.  As Peter, Henry Tarvainen hits some effective notes but isn’t emotionally precise – a few times, he seems to play a scene as he feels it rather than according to what would make better sense in relation to the story’s development.  John Labow’s portrait of Doug is more coherent and focused, though also limited because the script virtually ignores (or deliberately obfuscates) whether Doug struggled with homosexual feelings before Peter came along.  All four main players in Winter Kept Us Warm went on to substantial creative careers in Canada:  Henry Tarvainen as a theatre director; John Labow as a television producer; Janet Amos as an actress in film, TV and theatre, and a theatre director; Joy Tepperman (now Fielding) as a novelist.

    29 March 2025

  • Departures

    Lloyd Eyre-Morgan, Neil Ely (2025)

    It won’t win as many Oscars as Anora but Departures has even more f**ks in it, verbal and physical – pro rata anyway.  Lloyd Eyre-Morgan and Neil Ely’s self-funded film, screening at BFI Flare after premiering earlier this month at the Manchester Film Festival, lasts only 82 minutes, compared with Sean Baker’s movie’s 139.  Concision is one of this British sex story’s several virtues – one reason why I think it’s superior to laurelled AnoraDepartures is also better than High Tide, the film I saw at Flare a few days ago.  Both involve heartbroken protagonists – at one point in Departures, which often uses zany graphics by way of narrative comment, a little heart drawn on screen splits in two.  But Eyre-Morgan and Ely often use comedy to tell their tale, with absorbing and entertaining results.

    As well as co-directing, Lloyd Eyre-Morgan plays Benji, the lead role in Departures and its voiceover narrator. Thirty-something, working-class Mancunian Benji is not in a good place.  Early on, he summarises his present routine as ‘drink, f**k, grindr’.  He lives at home with his mother, Janet (Lorraine Stanley).  In her younger days, Janet was more of a mess than Benji is now but she’s impatient for him to buck up:  if she’s going to have a gay for a son, she says, she wants at least a happy gay – and one with a better job than door-to-door calling on behalf of what Janet calls ‘save the pigeons’.  Benji does his part-time work for a bird charity in the company of Ryan (Tyler Conti), who pitches more confidently but is liable to insult potential supporters if they get difficult.  Benji occasionally fantasises about Ryan being gay but knows he isn’t.  Jake (David Tag), the he-man Benji gets talking with in an airport bar while they’re waiting for a delayed flight to Amsterdam, is a different matter.

    Departures is mainly the story, told in flashback, of Benji’s ‘toxic’ (the film’s blurb’s word) relationship with Jake.  The relationship has ended but Benji can’t get it out of his head or heart.  From the moment he sees Jake, Benji longs for him to be ‘a bit gay’ but can’t be sure that he is.  Jake boasts about his success with women; the first sex action in Amsterdam sees him with a female prostitute and Benji, at Jake’s invitation, watching them in bed together.  It’s not long, though, before the two men have sex with each other and it’s Jake’s idea that they fix up another weekend in Amsterdam, which soon happens.  Professing disbelief when Benji says he’s not had sex since they last met, Jake claims to have slept with ten women in the meantime.  After more bedroom action, which Benji summons the nerve to describe as gay sex, Jake insists it’s ‘just a bit of fun’.  Even when the Amsterdam visits turn into a monthly event Jake dismisses the suggestion that he’s gay.  He’s in every sense the dominant partner in the relationship:  ‘it’s not gay,’ he insists, ‘if you’re doing the shagging’.

    Jake also tells Benji – at least Benji tells us – that he’s a personal trainer to footballers, ‘which means he’s dead rich’.  Their Amsterdam base is a sleek apartment that Jake presumably owns (to have such regular access to the place).  He pays Benji’s air fares and all their other expenses in Amsterdam.  This is the upside of Jake’s control of the relationship, which is conducted entirely on his terms.  There’s to be no contact between him and Benji when they’re in the UK.  Often verbally cruel, Jake sometimes gets physically rough with Benji, too.  Benji, in two ways, gets hurt and, also in two ways, is overpowered by Jake – infatuated, incredulous that this seeming alpha male is intimate with a sad sack like him.  Why is Jake aggressively controlling?  Lloyd Eyre-Morgan and Neil Ely dramatise his backstory.  Jake, as a teenager (Jacob Partali), abandoned by his single-parent father, received practical sex education chiefly through his ‘Auntie’ Jackie (Kerry Howard), who moved in when the father moved out, and her fellow sex worker.

    As you watch this episode, you may start wondering if what’s on the screen actually happened or reflects what Jake told Benji about his past or is Benji’s invention.  Departures is Benji’s account of events and he could be an unreliable narrator but the directors use that possibility effectively and with integrity.  Introducing Jake’s ‘toxic origin story’, Benji admits wanting to find excuses for him.  We’re shown a low-key romantic moment between the two men in Amsterdam; Benji’s voiceover immediately acknowledges this is what he wishes had happened rather than what did happen.  As their affair goes from bad to worse, attention switches to Jake’s home in England – and evidence, through his relationship with Olivia (Saira Choudry), that he’s a bit straight as well as a bit gay.  At first, you think the Jake-Olivia scenes too may just be figments of Benji’s jealous imagination.  They become more real when Benji turns up at the couple’s home, even though Jake, shocked and furious, gets rid of him before there’s any kind of confrontation with Olivia.  (I’m not sure how Benji tracks Jake down, given the latter’s determination to exclude him from his life in England, but let that pass.)

    At one point, well into their time together in Amsterdam, Benji asks Jake to quantify his straight vs gay sex lives as percentages:  Jake concedes ’70-30’.  Yet Departures doesn’t turn into a series of incremental admissions from Jake along the road to accepting and admitting that he’s wholly queer.  In what Benji announces as their final meeting, in a deserted lay-by, Jake is unimpressed by Benji’s tearful misery, telling him he should be grateful (‘You’ve had a good run – now f*** off’).  This is seemingly not their last meeting, though.  The flashbacks finally over, the narrative moves forward.  On a plane to Amsterdam, Benji sees Jake, Olivia and the child they now have.  Jake sees Benji too but fixes his eyes elsewhere and nothing gets said.  Benji doesn’t mind now.  He’s sitting across the aisle with a new partner:  Kieran (Liam Boyle), whom Benji initially picked up with the idea of quick sex, soon made it clear he was interested in friendship of a more nuanced kind – something he and Benji now look to have developed.  Whether or not this last plane sequence is real, it’s unrealistically neat but it’s also, as a summing up of Benji’s story, emotionally true.

    The cast’s CVs seem unusual for a film festival offering, LGBTQIA+ or otherwise.  They’re actors usually seen on television, rarely in starring roles, often in soaps:  over the years, Saira Choudry, David Tag and Tyler Conti have all done substantial stints in Hollyoaks – so has Liam Byrne in Emmerdale.  Lloyd Eyre-Morgan’s varied list of directing credits on IMDb are in cinema as well as TV, but they include a fair bit of EastEnders.  Eyre-Morgan’s acting credits are much fewer, which makes his portrait of Benji more remarkable, never mind that he’s drawing on personal experience (see below) to play the role.  All the other actors mentioned in this paragraph do well, along with Jacob Partali, Kerry Howard and Olly Rhodes (the teenage Benji).  David Tag is outstanding as alarmingly conflicted Jake:  one minute, he’s accompanying himself on a guitar to a wimpy song that he’s composed; the next, he’s a scathing, yelling tyrant.  I don’t know if Lloyd Eyre-Morgan and Neil Ely, and their fellow producer Paul Mortlock (who was also Departures‘ cinematographer) were able to afford an intimacy co-ordinator on their low-budget enterprise.  Perhaps they got by on trust built up with the actors concerned – Lloyd Eyre-Morgan’s own extensive involvement in the sex scenes must surely have helped with that.  (Another echo of Anora there.)  However they did it, the directors’ achievement in getting such natural performances, especially David Tag’s, is no mean feat.

    ‘This film is inspired by all the d**kheads that f**ked us over,’ announces text at the start of Departures, ‘You know who you are’.  This and the graphics, which certainly make the opening part of the narrative distinctive, seem to express also the directors’ anxiety not to lose your attention for a moment.  (They lost mine a few times but only because Benji goes to strobe-lit clubs.)  As the story gathers momentum, the graphic decoration eases off.  Rather in the same way, early sex scenes are scored to Classic FM-type numbers, including a jokey (predictable) burst of the ‘Hallelujah Chorus’; once the film gains more confidence, this is replaced by modern pop and rock that feels more individual.  In one bit in Amsterdam, Benji, Jake-less for the weekend, seeks out sex elsewhere in the city – a grim episode that’s untypically protracted.  For the most part, Benji’s sex encounters are quickies in more ways than one – their comic-sketch quality chimes with Benji’s desperate promiscuity, and his humour.  His potty-mouth wit is a weapon – aimed at himself, as well as other people – and an armour.  Departures is clearly designed as an if-you-didn’t-laugh-you’d-cry story and succeeds on those terms.  It’s often very funny.

    29 March 2025

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