Today, Aaron Eagle, a Los Angeles camboy, is ready to rake in some cash after a demanding gym workout. Walking about his barren room, his hairy chest, mussed-up tresses, tattooed limbs, and musky armpits are all on display to seduce us, his online clientele, whom he addresses as “Faggots.”
After seating himself, he instructs us to inhale our poppers before he ascends so all we can now view is his lower chest and crotch.
Grabbing his member through some well-worn cotton while spouting some believably dominant hustler lingo, the cocksure Mr. Eagle sneers: “I know you fuckers want to see what’s under these fucken tighty whities.”
When his online tip jar fills up, we’ll see more, the master seductor promises with the skill of a backstreet Casanova.
However, after some more delicious put-downs, knowing we are groveling for further degradation, Master Eagle upends our expectations by apprising us that one of his fans is paying him $50,000 that very night for some face-to-crotch action.
(Jump cut)
Knock! Knock! The $50,000 john opens his door wearing a three-holed ski mask. Unperturbed, Eagle walks in and asks an inconsequential question but receives no reply.
“Not going to talk,” the john insists after handing over half the cash. The rest will be received in the morning.
Not a bad way to start up one of the year’s more unsettling films, one that Vanity Fair exclaimed was a “genuinely shocking queer drama” while Variety deemed it “a provocative chamber piece.”
Take two superb actors: the not-yet-thirty Kieron Moore (Vampire Academy; Boots) and the Broadway veteran Reed Birney (The Humans; Casa Valentina). Add rather superb direction and a harrowing screenplay by Elliot Tuttle, throw in a sprinkling of salt on some open wounds, stir the pot over a low heat, and just stand back a little as the components begin to boil.
In the living room, seated across from each other, the still sky-masked john starts questioning the hustler about his past. Just what transforms a lad into a camboy, and does he like his career choice?
Eagle: “There are thousands of people who just want me to sneak into their house and fuck them up.” He adores that adulation until . . . .
Blue Film is a seductive two-hander where two liars unmask each other both physically and emotionally, but what’s their connection?
Aaron isn’t Aaron, and the disguised john, Hank Grant, turns out to be his former middle-school English teacher who had been sentenced to seven years for inappropriate behavior with another of his students. Now released, Hank’s bagging in a grocery store and seeking spiritual guidance with a local priest when not ogling online his truly favorite student, the love of his life, camboy Aaron, whose real moniker is Alex McConnell.
Well, without his priest’s complete disapproval, Hank has flown to the West Coast to “chat” with the former teen who had constantly been assigned to detention under his watchful eye. Ah, the good old days!
“I was attracted to more than your physicality. . . . Every class was an act of self-flagellation. . . . I imagined us all being together all of these years. . . . I stopped drinking when I went back to the church. . . . I wonder if there is purity in perversion. If it makes me enlightened in some way?” Hank ponders.
“Why are you in love with me? . . . How often did you think of raping me? . . . My sex is not worthless,” Alex retorts to the perv’s utterances. Hank counters that he prefers being labeled a sodomite, which carries with it a rather pleasant historical context.
What starts out as a transaction and then drifts into an Edward Albee-style verbal battle ultimately becomes one of the great award-worthy character transformations in modern queer cinema. With the aid of a razor, Alex’s hirsute manhood is scraped away into an unnerving boyhood. A young man’s taunting eyes become innocent orbs ready to be preyed upon. Kieron Moore is unforgettable here, as is Blue Movie, a celluloid provocation that has been rejected by many a film festival no doubt for its dicey subject matter and explicitness.
More important, with the addition of home footage of tots running to and fro scattered throughout the film, Tuttle never allows the victimizer to become the victim. When Birney’s finely nuanced Hank intones: “I’m tempted to think of my perversity as spiritual, spiritual because I can’t comprehend any other reason why God would have created me this way,” you just might want to lock him up for another seven years. Make that eight.
(BLUE FILM is now available to rent/buy on digital platforms such as Apple TV, Prime Video, and Fandango at Home.)