Interior. Leather Bar.
Directed by James Franco and Travis Mathews
Written by Travis Mathews
Rabbit Bandini Productions
WHY did James Franco, rich and famous Hollywood actor/dilettante, want to make a graphic film about the gay leather subculture? That’s what everyone on screen is asking in the resulting sixty-minute film, Interior. Leather Bar., co-directed, written, and edited by gay filmmaker Travis Mathews. A lot of viewers will ask the same question, but nothing in the film will answer it.
Ostensibly, Franco wanted to recreate forty minutes of explicit sex that William Friedkin cut from his controversial 1980 movie Cruising in order to secure an R rating, but little screen time is devoted to replacing Friedkin’s allegedly lost, undoubtedly melodramatic kink-fest. Instead, Interior mostly shows how Franco and Mathews set about shooting those scenes, and the scenes that show them shooting those scenes.
Stepping into the Al Pacino role is repeat Franco collaborator Val Lauren, who stars in the Cruising recreation, the quasi-documentary about shooting the leather scenes, and several brief shots that acknowledge how even the documentary portions are at least partly staged, as in much reality television, to give the filmmakers the visuals and narrative that they want. In one scene, Lauren sits gazing at a script until Mathews calls “cut.” Then he puts down the sheaf of papers while the crew appears to move on but remains visible in a long shot, and a few moments later he picks the script up, apparently reading for real—unless the directors are telling him to pretend-read again. How is the audience to know what’s real in this hall of mirrors, where only the fellatio is indisputably genuine? Yes, there is fellatio, and a tumescent penis occasionally fills the screen for a brief moment, but viewers seeking titillation will be as disappointed as those seeking explanations. (Franco keeps his clothes on, appearing only as a quixotic auteur, delivering deliberately vague direction and half-baked explanations.) The film’s glimpses of sex and leather worship are sandwiched between lengthy conversations about how sex and leather worship make some people uncomfortable. Most uncomfortable, at least initially, is Val Lauren, who tells Franco outright that he doesn’t understand this project and isn’t comfortable with all the man-on-man action. But gradually, as he spends a day in a hot Southern California warehouse surrounded by sweaty men in leather and jockstraps, Lauren comes to find it all less disturbing. In a Q&A following a screening at the Boston LGBT Film Festival, Mathews said he intended Lauren’s narrative arc to mirror that of Pacino’s in Cruising, to move from discomfort to some sort of acceptance. Lauren manifests the change in his manner and expressions, and in one seemingly genuine moment he acknowledges the obvious connection between two real-life lovers who have just had sex in front of him. But what is the point? Franco couldn’t expect large numbers of uptight straight viewers to watch this film and share that experience—could he? Is he just trying to get his buddy to be more blasé about kinky gay sex? At times this film feels like a pretentious episode of Punk’d. Whether it’s that or something more substantial, it has next to nothing to do with Cruising. There is no narrative arc to the leather scenes that could meaningfully contribute to the Friedkin film, and the endless conversations offer no insights. Franco might have made a film about the leather scene on any other pretext, or on none at all. All his film really shares with Cruising is that neither lives up to its hype. Jeremy C. Fox is a news reporter and freelance writer living in Boston.
