A small town boy, 18 year old Jim arrives to London looking for adventures. He has an angel face and perfectly sculpted body. He soon meets four international young male escorts who call themselves "raconteurs" who take Jim under their wing. According to them, their speciality is in the post-sex intellectual conversation, when older educated rich men crave for intimacy. The talks most often involved literature, arts, paintings and painters. Jim commits to his course of study, reading books about painting and sculpture, until he's ready to start entertaining clients. Jim starts working but soon relaizes that he has a problem. When Jim stares at a great work of art, he goes into spasms of awe and then faints. Upon awakening, he finds himself actually in the painting which caused the convulsion. And this starts affecting his clients. Even when he picks up a job as a full time muse for a painter who has been looking for one, it is not treated. The raconteurs take Jim to an eccentric doctor who diagnoses him with the rare condition known as Stendhal Syndrome. Pretty soon, Jim starts using this to his advantage against his will to detect art forgeries.
The film has way too many reference to art, paintings and famous painters. Sometimes you feel that you are getting a sort of crash course in art. As mentioned above, the feature feels far more theatrical than cinematic with its sumptuous sets and costumes. Some of the best scenes in the film are when Jim imagines himself in a painting and the painting is recreated by the actors against a plain backdrop. It feels truly beautiful, even though I don't know shit about art and paintings. Jim and the other escorts are really truly beautiful and act well but the film gets too pretentious after a while. The discussions about painters and their history go one for a tad bit too long. The makers intention , I think, is not to show how young men are exploited into prostitution. Rather it explores how beauty has been used and exploited over the centuries. It was good to see Jim ( last seen in Beach Rats) give his all for the role.
And hence, despite gorgeous faces, a thin plotline and a frivolous approach towards making the film makes this film not for everyone. Its more of a personal film from a director about the artists who have mattered to him in life. (4.5/10)
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