FILM: Postcards From London

It’s always fun to see Outfest films at the Ford, an outdoor theater that is lovely for a summer night screening. This year, we enjoyed Postcards From London, an unconventional story of a young man coming to London with little money but big dreams, and falling in with a group of high-end male escorts who are aficionados of baroque art, and who serve clients who want discreet sex and sophisticated conversation. (“We’re not prostitutes, we’re raconteurs.”) Though the film is mostly dramatic, it has some good comedic breaks, particularly a very amusing scene where the young man is in a hotel room with a client reenacting the martyrdom of Saint Sebastian. The lead is beautifully played by Harris Dickinson, whom we met in last year’s film Beach Rats, which makes for an interesting comparison. While Dickinson gave great performances in both, Beach Rats was full of destructive self-loathing and was painful to watch. Postcards, in contrast, is free of shame for being gay, for enjoying role-playing, or even for doing sex work. The only shame in this film is for those who fail to appreciate great art. The film is stylish and surreal, including flashbacks to the time of Caravaggio, who is the ultimate hero to the “raconteurs”. While there are a few glimpses of the art itself, director Steve McLean doesn’t give the actual paintings as much camera love as one might expect for a film about art lovers (unlike, for example, the way Mike Leigh featured paintings in Mr. Turner). His focus is more on evoking the look and feel of Soho street life and bar life, and though it is done in quite a stylish way, somehow the style struck me as more reminiscent of Stanley Kubrick (think A Clockwork Orange) than the painterly Peter Greenaway. Similar to another great Kubrick film, Postcards ends with some kind of transformative breakthrough, though I couldn’t tell you exactly what happened. In any event, we did enjoy the film.