Sachs: Love Is Strange (2014)

The latest film from Ira Sachs is about a New York gay couple in their sixties, who finally decide to get married after forty-three years of being together. As soon as they do, however, George (Alfred Molina) is fired from his job at a Catholic high school, forcing him and Ben (John Lithgow) to sell their apartment and move in with separate friends, where they remain for most of the movie. In its timeliness, it’s hard not to read it as the first post-DOMA film about gay life – but, then again, it’s also worth remembering that DOMA was repealed at the hands of a similarly placed couple, a couple who had nominally been married only quite recently, but had in fact been living as a married couple for close to half a century. As a result, there’s not as much novelty to the marriage as might be expected – the ceremony feels more like an anniversary party, a warm, fond memory of something that happened in the distant past, while the whole film is suffused with a calm, restrained classicism, as if to remind us that this vision of married life is an old story, one that’s been told many times before. In some ways, that recalls the warmest, least frenetic moments in Woody Allen – there’s the same sense of eternal return, the feeling that this relationship is playing out in countless other apartments, restaurants and bars across the city, which doubles as a compassionate confidant, a balm for even the most challenging or complicated lovers. And it’s clear that Sachs wants to paint a certain portrait of New York’s gay heritage, a tribute to all the lives loved and lost by gay New Yorkers, but doesn’t want to enslave his characters to it either, which makes for quite a robust, irreverent tribute to an older gay generation that’s not often that visible onscreen. In fact, the only thing that really threatens Ben and George’s relationship is getting married in the first place, since it means acting as if they haven’t been married all along. Still, they both manage to bounce back from it, if not without a little melancholy along the way  – in this comedy of remarriage, gay marriage can withstand pretty much anything, even the legalisation of gay marriage.