Saturday, April 21, 2012
DANCER
Today's gay film was the Phillipine
A 15 year old boy/man visits a gay dancer bar on a quiet afternoon and arranges to "date" one of the beautiful boy/man dancers.
The boy is middle class the dancer is not. He is a prostitute with a little gilding on the scene.
Nevertheless, a kind of affection ensues (the dancer does not collect his money) and the boy gets a good dose of social science along with a quite beautiful sexual experience. His first. The best it could be.
He asks the dancer to take him home afterward and gets to see the kind of poverty that drives a beautiful young man into the skin trade.
A delicate mix of homoerotic, very sweet, and a bit of social consciousness is well told and safe to watch in that nothing bad happens. It has already happened with the arbitrary circumstances that "chose" each boy to have a different life experience.
Optimistically, we can see that the boundaries can be crossed by affection and even a kind of love. Or pessimistically, we can see that the die is cast and each will end up in their own caste at the end.
Any mild hope that these kids will ever get together is pretty well dashed. It is just too difficult.
This is a wise film and the proceedings are quite enjoyable.
The cast is made up of "real" drag queens, macho dancers, assorted bar denizens and the like. It feels like the real thing because it is.
I will give this a 4 out of Netflix5.
