arts & entertainment

A 'Post-Gay' Film

In Love Is Strange, a longtime gay
couple's hardships stem more from their finances than from their gay identities.

Naomi Pfefferman
I Jewish Journal of Greater L.A.

I

n Ira Sachs' new film, Love Is Strange,

George (Alfred Molina), a choir
director at a Catholic school, and Ben
(John Lithgow), a painter, take advantage
of New York's gay marriage laws and joy-
fully tie the knot.
Their happiness becomes short-lived,
however, when George — who has never
hidden his homosexuality — is promptly
fired by the parochial school for legally
marrying his partner. Suddenly short on
cash, the couple are forced to sell their
apartment and to live apart for the first
time in 39 years, crashing separately in
crowded households of friends and rela-
tives.
Yet their love continues to grow as
they struggle to find new housing and
to once more live together, even as they
deal with the consequences their situa-
tion has for all their loved ones.
For Sachs, 48, who is both gay and
Jewish, Love Is Strange represents a pro-
found departure from his previous work.
"All my past films tended to be about
the nature of love to destroy everyone
involved," Sachs, who lives in Manhattan,
said in a telephone interview.

His 2005 drama, Forty Shades of Blue,
for example, spotlights a restless young
Russian who chafes within her relation-
ship to a much older, narcissistic wom-
anizer.
And Sachs' semi-autobiographical
2012 film, Keep the Lights On, tells of
the highly dysfunctional relationship
between a documentary filmmaker and a
previously closeted, drug-addicted pub-
lishing attorney.
The movie is a fictionalized account of
Sachs' own long-term relationship with
Bill Clegg, a literary agent who chroni-
cled his battle with crack cocaine in his
memoir Portrait of an Addict as a Young
Man, according to the New York Times
and other news reports.
In our interview, Sachs politely
declined to discuss his ex, as they've
promised each other to keep their past
private, he said. He would say that the
shame some of his characters endure
regarding their sexual orientation comes
directly from his own experience.
"Growing up in Memphis, I was never
called a 'faggot:" he said. "But I encoun-
tered an enormous amount of cultural
repression and homophobia while I was
closeted and afterward.
"I came out of the closet at 16, but that

didn't mean I left behind all of those bad
feelings!"
The change came as Sachs — who
described himself as "a great believer
in the talking cure" — embarked on a
17-year journey through psychoanalysis;
the therapy taught him not only "to like
myself:' he said, but also to engage in
a more open and direct way with Boris
Torres, the Ecuador-born painter he fell
in love with after his past relationship
failed.
Sachs and Torres wed in 2012 just a
week before the birth of their twins, a
boy and a girl who are now 2. They live
in Greenwich Village, next door to the
twins' mother, who along with Torres has
agreed to raise their children as Jews.
The result of all this marital bliss was
Love Is Strange, Sachs said.
"I aspired to make a film as someone
who can, for the first time, imagine a
long and blossoming love," explained
the director, who co-wrote the film with
Mauricio Zacharias.
"The movie is about love at the end of
life, and I wanted to imagine what my
young marriage might look like in many
years to come:'
The film was also inspired, in part,
by a news article Sachs and Zacharias

From Stage To Screen

After 70-plus plays, Israel
Horovitz calls for 'Action!'

Michael Fox
Special to the Jewish News

A

robust 75, award-winning play-
wright, theater director and
screenwriter Israel Horovitz isn't
in the market for a new career. Too bad,
because his moving directorial film debut,
My Old Lady, is a rewarding, beautifully
acted story of adults overcoming loneli-
ness and bitterness.
"[The late, great Jewish director] Sidney
Lumet once said to me about directing,
`Get the best actors you can on the face of
the Earth, and then get out of their way,"'
Horovitz says. "And that was, in a sense, a
directing style for me:'
Adapted by Horovitz from his stage
play, My Old Lady begins with a rather
unlikable New York Jew named Mathias
Gold (Kevin Kline) primed to claim the
Paris apartment left him by his perpetu-
ally despised and recently deceased father.
Mathias thinks his luck has finally turned,

122 September 18 • 2014

Maggie Smith and Kevin Klein in My Old Lady

and that he's landed on Easy Street after
a lifelong stretch of failed marriages and
unpublished novels.
Alas, the apartment is a viager, which
means the elderly Englishwoman (Maggie

read some years ago about a choir direc-
tor at a Catholic school who was fired
after marrying his longtime partner.
Nevertheless, Sachs said he was con-
cerned less with homophobia than with
depicting what he calls "the normalcy
of gayness" onscreen — which could be
regarded as radical in its own way.
Out magazine called Love Is Strange a
"post-gay landmark in cinema!'
Sachs, for his part, said, "We've seen
very few couples like Ben and George
in American films. The films that have
made their mark broadly and com-
mercially in our culture are movies like
Brokeback Mountain and Milk, which
describe the struggle to be who you are
as a gay person.
"This film is different in that it pro-
vides another image of gay people, per-
haps a more ordinary one. Telling a story
about a gay couple who've been together
for almost 40 years is culturally signifi-
cant. Ben and George are presented in a
full, human way and can't be limited by
being distinguished as marginalized or
less-than:"
In his life outside filmmaking, Sachs
has been more of an overt activist. After
graduating from Yale and moving to New
York in 1988, he became a member of

Smith) residing there with her unmar-
ried daughter (Kristin Scott Thomas)
retains tenancy until her death. Mathias'
actual inheritance, in the meantime, is the
monthly payment contractually owed to

the old lady. You don't need to imagine his
frustration and anger, for Mathias makes
no effort to hide it.
My Old Lady spills many poignant
secrets that expose the characters' long-
concealed connection and the scars
from the past they still bear. It makes for
powerful drama, even though Horovitz
excised a chunk of the original play deal-
ing with the treatment of Jews during the
Nazi Occupation of Paris.
"As I boiled it down to what I thought
the real theme of the film was, the real
spine, it wasn't that:' says Horovitz. "It was
about Mathias, his relationship with his
father and his ultimate forgiveness of his
father. [Mathias] doesn't renounce being
Jewish; he doesn't hide being Jewish. It's
just not what the movie's about"
Horovitz is the author of more than
70 produced plays, including such
Jewish-themed works as Park Your Car
in Harvard Yard and Lebensraum. He
also penned the screenplay for Sunshine,