A drama about lack of acceptance, a drama about loneliness, a science fiction drama. All in a one and a half hour story told by four actors.
If you make a living from writing, you have to accept loneliness. Without intimacy, there is no way to build a separate world and squeeze it into the framework of single sentences – even a minor interference from an outside intruder can break this construct into pieces. This is Adam (Andrew Scott), the main character Good strangers, locked himself in a small apartment in a deserted London apartment building like a princess in a tower. No one will disturb the peace there – and he needs it to complete the painstakingly created script about his private history as a man excluded by the society of the English province. And then handsome neighbor Harry (Paul Mescal) rings his doorbell and the peace goes to hell.
It’s worth putting a full stop here, because the less you know about Andrew Haigh’s film (A completely different weekend, 45 years) before the screening, the better. The director builds a narrative based on individual scenes, glances, gestures and touches. It intersects reality with dreams, mixes time planes, and jumps from the mid-1980s to the present day. From what it once was to what it could be today. It could, but it doesn’t always happen. Intricate? WITH Good strangers like The sixth sense – after the session, you want to come back to it to arrange the blocks again.
photo: still from the movie “Good Strangers”
I broke out in a rash during the shoot. It was the first rash since I moved out of my family home as a young man. And now, after all these years, I returned there to shoot part of the film there – Andrew Haigh told the Guardian. It is possible that this is an ordinary psychosomatic episode, not closely related to the director’s private experiences. But if you look at his biography, the dots start to connect. Haigh grew up in 1980s Britain as a non-heteronormative teenager. In a society that, on the one hand, worshiped gay and bisexual stars (Freddie Mercury, David Bowie, the musicians of Pet Shop Boys) and, on the other hand, in research conducted in the mid-1980s, nearly 85% of Britons declared their reluctance towards gays and lesbians; It’s good that they exist, as long as they are far from us. The ostracism was fueled by the deadly spiral of AIDS, which is inextricably associated with the LGBT society. Then I felt that the only way out was… to become straight. Yet it was impossible for me. When I looked back on the past while shooting the film, I visualized a childhood I had never experienced – said the director, who is also responsible for the script, in the same interview Good strangers. Only places, scenes and people agree. Apparently some of Adam’s dialogues with his film parents are mirrored one-to-one to conversations in Andrew Haigh’s family.
photo: still from the movie “Good Strangers”
The greatest strength Good strangers is the same thing that the creators of the famous managed to achieve After sun – the ability to read the film in various ways through the prism of your own experiences. Haigh did not make it with a key – for some viewers the dominant story is about social lack of acceptance, others will remember it as a picture about childhood traumas that resonate with greater force later in adult life, and still others will remember it as a voice on loneliness, a disease of civilization. 21st century. This loneliness is two wolves in Adam’s head. He feeds on it while writing, and at the same time it eats him from the inside when he visualizes an alternative reality because he can’t cope with the real one. He cultivates a fake masculinity, but when he does not fall, he is again a child who hides in his parents’ bed. Moreover, the theme of the unworked parent-child relationship is probably the most interesting here, and certainly the most effectively presented. And again – without revealing the script trick that Andrew Haigh came up with. Suffice it to say that science-fiction threads enter this intimate drama about alienation seriously and with full justification, and it won’t be the biggest surprise that the film will bring.
It’s terribly sad to watch this adorable bear Adam, brilliantly played by Andrew Scott, fall apart in front of the audience in an hour and a half. Somewhere in the background the ghosts of parents loom, relying on the text Always On My Mind, the big hit of the Pet Shop Boys, apologize to him for his failed childhood, but ghosts don’t exist – and if so, neither do they apologize. Nothing but to return to the computer in an empty apartment and try to finish writing this story that, to my anger, neither wants to end nor drift towards a happy ending. We warn you, it will be very sad, although, here is also a quote from another current century Good strangers big pop hit, The Power Of Love the band Frankie Goes To Hollywood, cleanse your soul, let love be your goal. Let this last scene also be a light at the end of the tunnel, so that we don’t leave this excellent film completely depressed.