When the provocative short feature, Interior. Leather Bar., co-directed by James Franco and Travis Mathews, was shown at the Sundance Film Fest it divided critics.
And I think the same reaction is likely to prevail when the 40-minute film receives theatrical distribution by the counrageous Strand on March 4.
In hindsight, Interior. Leather Bar strikes me as a film that’s more interesting to talk and write about than one to watch, largely because of the intelligent, multi-talented filmmakers, who seem confused about the real goal and effects of their work.
Revisiting (and inspired by) William Friedkin’s 1980 Cruising, a thriller set in the “sleazy” Downtown gay world of the late 1970s, just before the AIDS era, Interior. Leather Bar. is a film within a film about the making of still another film.
Friedkin’s controversial thriller, which starred Al Pacino, was dismissed unfairly by conservative critics of the time, and never had a chance to be ejudged on its own terms. It’s a relief to bserve that over the past three decades Cruising has been reevaluated by a younger, more open-minded generation of critics, engaged in a more detached (and dispassionate) assessment of the picture’s merits and weakanesses.
It’s safe to say that on the surface, Interior. Leather Bar is a chronicle of Franco and Mathews’ efforts to shoot and then present graphically their version of the famous and notorious 40 minutes that were deleted from Cruising for being too explicit to garner the seal of approval of the rating boards. (Without those cuts, the move could not have been shown in theaters).
attracted criticism at the time of its release for its grim portrayal of the gay BDSM scene of the late 1970s, but has earned more respect in recent years for preserving a lost chapter of history. Interior. Leather Bar. also occupies a metatextual hall of mirrors where every image, no matter how distorted, looks an awful lot like James Franco.
Franco detractors will find ample ammunition for their hatred here, from Franco offhandedly referencing one of his Yale professors to numerous scenes of lead actor Val Lauren saying he doesn’t understand the project, but is plunging ahead out of respect for Franco’s artistry.
There’s also a scene of gay extras cooing about how excited the gay community will be by the possibility of explicit gay sex scenes involving James Franco. Franco self-consciously emerges as the hero of his own film, a fearless creative revolutionary striking a major blow for the beauty and purity of explicit gay sex in all its forms—this despite being a huge heterosexual movie star who just starred in an enormous, family-friendly Disney film (Oz The Great And Powerful) that is referenced more than once.
Franco and Mathews want to transform what was once considered a dark period in gay history and assimilation into something empowering, even beautiful. What Friedkin depicted as a gloomy dungeon of debauchery and self-degradation, Franco and Mathews want to portray as a garden of sensual delights. But Franco and Mathews’ ambitions go beyond that, imagining and embracing an even bolder, more incendiary vision of the BDSM scene than Friedkin was able to smuggle onscreen back in the prehistoric days of 1980.
As Franco states early in the film, he isn’t particularly interested in accurately re-creating the reality of those lost scenes, which constitute only a small percentage of Leather Bar’s hourlong running time. Rather, he’s interested in what the filming of those sequences says about the fluidity of human sexuality and how it relates to the existential condition of the actor, an enduring source of fascination for Franco. The film is obsessed with charting the places where acting ends and reality begins, and all the other places where they overlap.
In the Al Pacino role of the undercover cop who travels deep inside the BDSM scene in search of a murderer, Franco and Mathews have cast Val Lauren (who earlier this year played Sal Mineo for Franco in the biopic Sal), a heterosexual actor who announces up front that he doesn’t comprehend or like the project. Interior. Leather Bar. foregrounds Lauren’s discomfort. It plays up his concern that by appearing in a film with naked penises explicitly being sucked and caressed, he’s transgressing a personal and professional boundary.
What ultimately separates pornography from art? Is it simply a technical matter of penetration, or are there larger aesthetic and philosophical issues at play? Does un-simulated hardcore sex have a place outside pornography? How far has society evolved since Cruising, and does playing gay still have the stigma it once did? Interior. Leather Bar. addresses all of those questions and raises many more in its searching, inward-looking exploration of the complicated intersection of sexuality and performance, but it ultimately ends with a bit of a shrug. Lauren isn’t the only one who can’t figure out exactly what the film is trying to do or say, or whether there’s value in its eagerness to experiment and take chances without a grand thesis in mind.
Interior. Leather Bar.’s intriguing curiosity provides ample food for thought, in part because it’s the rare film that devotes much of its running time to its own principals discussing what, if anything, the film ultimately means.
A supremely masturbatory endeavor that prominently features naked men actually masturbating, Interior. Leather Bar is obsessed with itself and with its co-creator, but its fascination is understandable and even justified. Despite the title, the film’s real setting and subject is the interior of James Franco’s brain, and as always, it’s a fascinating, pretentious, messy, and often maddening place to be.
