This documentary is nearly twenty years old now, and it follows a gay couple as they navigate the stressful and exciting journey of their first pregnancy through surrogacy. You get to see it all— the hope, the nerves, and the dramatic hurdles they have to clear along the way. Back in the day, this was probably a massive deal, but since I’ve known a few gay couples who’ve gone through this exact process, some parts felt a bit dated to me. I liked bits and pieces of it, but I also felt like the film stays pretty surface-level. It doesn't really dive into the deep, complicated reality of life after the baby actually arrives. If only raising a kid were actually as simple as this movie makes it look! Erik and Mark have been together in New York for ten years, and since they feel solid in their relationship, they decide they’re ready to raise a child. They start the hunt for a surrogate and eventually connect with Wen, a wife and mom from Maine who agrees to carry the baby for a standard...
Duffer is an aimless young man who enjoys the company of two lovers, but likes to be on his own sometimes, spending time down by the riverside under the bridge, reading, watching the world go by, that sort of thing. HIs male lover is an older man, who physically abuses him because that is how he gets pleasure but according to Duffer, he also loves him very much. It's times like these he get to his female lover, where he visits her at her place, have casual sex and they chat. Duffer excuses the actions by his abusive lover by claiming that while he feels victimised, he can console himself with the thought that Louis-Jack is gaining pleasure from this, which in his mixed up mindset constitutes a good and helpful thing. This gets ever more bizarre as the elder buggers the younger in the hope that they will produce an "infant", apparently jealous of women and their ability to do what men cannot, although Duffer doesn't have the heart to break it to him that is unlikely to change any time soon. And then the film just keeps getting weirder and weirder.
The film ha son direct dialogues and conversations and is mostly told to us in the form of a running commentary of what is meant to be going on provided by Duffer, but accompanied by interruptions from the voices of both his older abusive lover and the female. This is a very experimental film , trying to push boundaries in the way it tells story and also in the innovative ways that the older lover come sup with to abuse Duffer, but despite this, the film failed to hold my attention. We are not sure of the lover is real, or is just a figment of imagination from Duffer's troubled mind. In fact both him and the female lover could simply be a twin idee fixe representing Duffer's slowly loosening grip on sanity and stability. In the end we're never sure if the whole thing is simply the last crazed reflections of a psychotic episode as the film concludes with the image of a prone Duffer on the riverside. Duffer is a unique view of London and a weird study of the moral, gender, social and political obfuscations of the times. A bizarre study of desires, want and obsession with an awkwardly placed narration, this film definitely did not do anything for me, except just get familiar with yet another experimental narration style. (3/10)
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