This is my feeling about Holding the Man. An Australian
film about love. A very, very moving;
very, very sad and very, very cruel film.
As I just came back to Sydney , I checked my
local cinema for what’s on. Interesting that I went to a cinema only once when
in was Gdansk . I must have had
better things to do? Maybe I just had a better selection on TV than I have here
and this is why I went to see a film in the cinema only once in the three
months I was there. It was Irrational Man. I was
disappointed with the film.
Holding the Man was definitely not disappointing
but very difficult to take for a sensitive person like myself (lol). This is
about homosexual love, very beautiful and shown with sensitivity and also full technical
details. This was confronting, too much information sort of a thing. After an
initial shock I was accepting the scenes without prude reactions. The boys who grew into men
really loved each other. This was a beautiful, giving and forgiving love. I
almost wonder if anything that close and true can happen in a heterosexual
relationship.
The film is based on a book and the book is
based on life of the author Timothy Conigrave. As the love affair started
early, when the boys were at school, later on, the author of the book wanted to
learn more about life and experience more than monogamy with his lover. This
lead to a short lived break up in the relationship. Tragedy happened, Tim
contracted AIDS. From the first scene of
the film we know that both of the men will die before the story finishes, I was
prepared for tragedy but at the end I could not take the explicitness and
cruelty of medical procedures and the suffering of the two loving each other
men. I left the cinema before the film finished. This has not happened to me
before and I am now wondering: am I too sensitive or is the film so good?
I have not missed much of the film and the
scenes are still flashing in my mind. I can not get rid of them even though I would
very much like to. I am not sure if I am recommending the film of warning
against that. Both at the same time.
The film is very well acted by all and Ryan Corr
playing Timothy Conigrave in my opinion is absolutely exceptional. I have seen
him few times on television. He also played The Water Diviner. There is
something in his face that is particularly expressive and when he plays sadness,
one really gets moved. He matches well tragic characters of Dostoyevsky; he
would play many of them very convincingly.