Keep the Lights On
Directed by Ira Sachs
Alarum Pictures
Keep the Lights On opens on paintings of nude men propelled across the screen, visually evoking the infinite appetite of desire, its forward drive pushing gay men toward new sexual encounters, friendships, and men to fall in love with. Standing in for Sachs is Erik (Thure Lindhardt), a documentary filmmaker whose life is first glimpsed circa 1996 in a sparse New York apartment as he’s working the sex phone lines. He stokes up as he sells himself through the handset—“uncut, 6.5, top.” Dialing through possible matches, Erik is clearly sex-ually frustrated. His big, searching eyes and toothy smile seem like they have only just learned that validation is possible. So he is—and we are—relieved when he makes a connection with Paul (Zachery Booth); there’s an obvious chemistry between the two men on screen, despite the fact that Paul is still closeted with a girlfriend.
Erik’s sexual insatiability and Paul’s sexual shame make for a potent combination, but soon after moving in together, Paul reveals another secret. His crack cocaine addiction comes out one night before the new couple has sex, as Paul’s nail-bitten fingers load the pipe while Erik looks on. Unlike Clegg’s memoir detailing his own addiction (Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man), Sachs never sensationalizes the drug habit. But neither does he moralize about it. On the contrary, there is an honest and shared understanding between the two gay men who grew up with the same barriers and who both function in New York’s drug-pervaded gay world.
Less honest is the way in which Erik refuses to recognize how his own relation to Paul mirrors Paul’s addiction. At times obsessive, dependent, and insecure, Erik ignores the damage he is doing to himself just to keep trying for that infinite satisfaction he thinks their relationship could hold. He only gives up on it when he realizes that his boyfriend truly is addicted to something else, not to him. Lindhardt portrays Erik with a deep empathy, making him a fascinating and sympathetic character. He’s acutely aware of life’s limitations, of class differences, and he has a stable sense of morality. That’s all the more reason why his attempts at intervening in Paul’s life have such pathos: he doesn’t realize that what he accuses his boyfriend of, he is stricken with, too.
Before long, it’s 2000 and the tedium of lived familiarity has grown around the couple. Erik is working on a documentary film about Avery Willard, the underground gay filmmaker and artist. Paul, feeling ever distant, relies increasingly on crack to escape and cope. Time is marked by dinners with friends, work banter, or holidays out of town, while the relationship becomes increasingly strained until the couple reaches its emotional breaking point. Paul disappears on a days-long crack bender, and Erik tracks him to an expensive hotel room. He has been up for days, paranoid and guilt-ridden. He tries to get Erik to leave before the hustler he has hired arrives. In a final, painful climax, Erik holds Paul’s hand while the hustler roughly fucks him. The two are in effect committing suicide as a couple, overdosing on their mutually exclusive addictions.
Throughout, Sachs speaks to the sacrifices gay men endure for companionship, for sex, for love, or for validation from each other: the phone sex lines, the narcissism, the drug abuse. In a community of men who had first to emerge from hiding, certain coping mechanisms required to deal with the closet were invented—and are still around in the light of day. Paul’s first emotional act in the film is to reveal his shame—his closetedness—and Erik claims at one point to have been “hiding things since I was thirteen.” Paul’s crack habit is yet one more thing to compartmentalize. But the structure of the film tells another story: both Paul’s final bender and Erik’s tracking him down are addictive acts. By attempting (and failing) to subordinate drug abuse to companionship, Sachs takes a surprising and unsettling stand against the innocence of connection and the constant, obsessive drive to encounter it again and again in our love lives.
Keep the Lights On will no doubt be compared to Andrew Haigh’s Weekend. Both are stylish, tightly crafted meditations on the inner workings of a modern gay relationship. Along with new films such as Beyond the Walls (France) and I Want Your Love (USA), a new post-queer wave of films focusing on gay male relationships is breaking, unapologetic in the examination of the dynamics of gay male love. It’s also easy to see how Jacques Nolot, a master of atmospheric, brutal self-examination, influenced the film. Sachs, who has long been a gay activist, champions the gay filmmaking tradition. By including iconic homos—the late Arthur Russell, whose music helps give the film its time-capsule quality, and Avery Willard as the subject of Erik’s documentary—Sachs extends our tribal continuum.
As part of this new wave of filmmaking, Keep the Lights On eschews references to the kinds of gay political issues that a viewer might expect, but this gives him the space to meditate on the connection between the two men. Sachs has more than enough bona fides in gay activism to merit an exemption from addressing those issues in his film. In doing so, he helps forge a different kind of gay filmmaking, which reflects on its characters as people, not political figures. For that reason, Keep the Lights On is a rare must-see film: an intelligent American gay-themed drama about the complexities of a relationship, the sacrifices addicts and lovers make, and the corrosive damage of the closet.
