> Blue Film: Subversive and riveting film about sex and shame yet to find distributor (director, Elliot Tuttle, laments dilution of queer stories) - SNACK: Music, film, arts and culture magazine for Scotland

    Blue Film: Subversive and riveting film about sex and shame yet to find distributor (director, Elliot Tuttle, laments dilution of queer stories)

    Elliot Tuttle’s Blue Film had its world premiere at last month’s Edinburgh International Film Festival. We’d like to tell you when you’ll be able to see it in cinemas, but this subversive debut is yet to find a distributor.

    Blue Film is pitched as a film about gay sex worker Aaron (Kieron Moore). Aaron is a camboy who agrees to spend the night with Hank (Reed Birney) in exchange for $50,000, only for him to discover that they already know each other. Some may roll their eyes at this lurid premise and its suggestion of a boilerplate blackmail thriller. But after Hank is revealed to be a former teacher of Aaron’s and a convicted paedophile, what threatened to be a film of surface-level provocation evolves into one with real depth, albeit not one for those with sensitive constitutions.

    Clocking in at a lean 82 minutes, Blue Film is powered by the interplay between its two leads. Aaron’s confident camboy persona, that of an arrogant and hypermasculine dom, soon wavers under Hank’s scrutiny. Moore is a startling screen presence in his first feature role while Birney, a Tony-winning thespian with six decades of film and TV experience, brings pathos to a role that would see many actors running for the hills. He strikes a riveting equilibrium where you’re never quite sure if the remorse Hank speaks of is genuine or one of his grooming tactics. Both actors embrace their characters’ complexities, neither seeming the least bit daunted by the challenging material they’ve been given.

    Over the course of the night Aaron and Hank mislead each other through what they choose to conceal or reveal about themselves, and use each other to satisfy sexual fantasies. As Aaron and Hank’s masks slip, frank conversations about sex and shame expose their most intimate vulnerabilities and fears; there are shades of Anatomy of Hell in this sexual and psychological interrogation. Moore and Birney adapt to the unsteady power dynamics between Aaron and Hank with chameleonic verve.

    The fluidity of Blue Film’s power dynamics recalls 2023’s Femme, which also wrestled with uncomfortable links between abuse and desire. Where Femme explored the performance of gender and the trope that homophobes are just gay people in denial, Blue Film’s engagement with paedophilia and its impact in the lives of gay men confronts altogether more taboo subject matter.

    Tuttle seems more than ready for the mantle of provocateur. He spoke to Vanity Fair about the current conservative climate and how it ‘forces the queer community and gay tastemakers to present one view of queerness that is immune to critique, boring, and not in the tradition of being a queer artist.’ This reflex to create queer media that’s palatable and laden with positive representation has led to a wave of tepid and self-censoring work, a flattening of the sharp edges that make queer art so exhilarating to engage with in the first place.

    Tuttle continued: ‘I’m resentful of what is happening to queer storytellers right now… People are hungry for something that is not so limited by what’s tasteful.” Tuttle succeeds in sating this hunger by treating his audience like adults and not diluting his point of view.

    Elsewhere at Edinburgh International Film Festival, Jeremy Thomas introduced Bad Timing (1980), a controversial film he produced for Nicholas Roeg. Thomas recalled the film’s own distributor decrying it as a ‘sick film made by sick people for sick people’, and lamented that a similar film wouldn’t be allowed to be made today.

    We hope Thomas had the chance to see Blue Film while he was in Edinburgh, but more than that we hope Tuttle’s film is picked up for wider distribution. A transgressive two-hander that lands somewhere between Mysterious Skin and May December, the fearlessness of Moore and Birney’s performances deserves to be matched by a distributor brave enough to deliver Blue Film to its audience.