Love Is Strange: Stranger Still

Love is Strange is an intermittently wonderful new film about an ageing Manhattan couple who get hitched almost 40 years into their relationship, only for their suddenly straitened circumstances to force them to live apart for the first time. It’s a gentle and perceptive comedy-drama, so it’s rather a shock to find that the US ratings board, the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), has given it an R rating.

Short of the dreaded NC-17, which prohibits anyone under that age from seeing a film, this is the severest classification a movie can receive in the US. The R denotes that a picture contains material unsuitable for the under-17s, but stops short of banning that audience. Children can still be accompanied to an R movie by an adult, as I first discovered when I watched the violent horror-comedy Scream 2 in New York accompanied by the sound of a child several rows behind me begging his mother for more Reese’s Pieces.

The MPAA’s ratings website insists that several instances of profanity in Love Is Strange have earned the film its rating. But a likelier reason must be that its main characters are both men. They are played by two seasoned performers, John Lithgow and Alfred Molina. These actors are not required to enjoy anything more passionate on screen than a peck on the cheek and a cosy (but fully clothed) cuddle. But it is precisely the undemonstrative normality of their relationship that seems to have inflamed the notoriously prickly and conservative ratings board...

A thoughtful piece by Ryan Gilbey, the New Statesman's (very good) film critic, in the Guardian on the Love Is Strange US ratings hoo-ha.

We could at least admire the MPAA’s honesty if it admitted that Love is Strange has been guilty of “excessive normalising of a loving homosexual relationship with no punishment or prolonged unhappiness for either party”. Mainstream cinema has tended to like its gay characters either tormented (Brokeback Mountain), comical (The Birdcage), dead (Milk) or dying (Philadelphia). The couple in Love is Strange fall into none of those categories. Except for an instance of homophobia that forces one of them into unemployment, their sexuality passes without mention. It is only the MPAA that has made it an issue. The BBFC has gone for the slightly softer option of a 15 rating, again because of a few instances of strong language, though this also feels a tad harsh. I don’t recall the air turning blue when I saw Love is Strange at the Berlin Film Festival back in February.

Well, yes and no.

The idea that the MPAA or the BBFC took umbrage at the humdrum normality of the gay relationship in Love Is Strange - ie how closely it approximates to a sexless mundane straight marriage - something argued by several gay journalists, is just plain daft.

An inversion of what is the culturally acceptable invert, if you will.

Conversely, as we've seen with Modern Family, conservatives seem to rather like these de-gayed and rather dull gay men.

Those who desire nothing more than domesticity - which is essentially the plot of Love Is Strange.

Or, as David Cameron famously put it at the 2011 Tory Party Conference; 'I don't support gay marriage despite being a Conservative, I support gay marriage because I'm a Conservative.'

Crying HOMOPHOBIA! here is surely an over-reaction to an over-reaction. 

PS Ryan wrote a hilariously pointless feature in the last Sunday Telegraph about being miffed that he and his boyfriend weren't asked to buy some romantic red roses by a flower-seller while dining in a restaurant at a Croatian holiday resort.

Again, whilst the woman seemingly not considering that they might be a couple could be thought of as a heterosexist assumption, but it's probably pushing it a bit to label it HOMOPHOBIA!