The single location two-hander Blue Film is the kind of low budget, high stakes drama that compensates for its smallness in scale by asking big, provocative questions. Questions like, “How was this not adapted from a stage play?”, and “Do we think Dylan ‘Happiness‘ Baker was the first choice to play the pedophile?”, and “Was the working title Trade, Lies, and Videotape?”

I kid. Blue Film‘s open-ended provocations are all questions of intimacy, spirituality, sexual perversion, and therapeutic rehabilitation. Its stage play nature is not so much a result of its limitations as a story told by two actors talking in a room, but rather a reflection of its commitment to exploring abstract, philosophical subjects through ordinary means. Our two players are a beefy, overcompensating camboy who wears his chest hair & tighty-whities as a kind of emotionally distancing armor (Kieron Moore) and a lonely, elderly client who pays him $50,000 for a one-on-one house visit (Reed Birney). This contracted tryst starts with a Soderberghian interview sequence wherein the camboy is propped up on a couch and interviewed on video camera about his earliest sexual experiences, asking him to access a level of personal vulnerability that he didn’t agree to before arriving to the McMansion locale. The interviewer starts their conversation masked & guarded himself, but eventually reveals his connection to the camboy’s past, from before he reinvented his persona as an online Los Angeles dom. The older client resembles Dylan Baker’s Happiness performance both in his physicality and in his matter-of-fact confession of pedophilic attraction to children. Once his identity and his connection to his rented camboy’s small-town upbringing are revealed, the rest of their night together is spent picking through the rubble of their confused sexual dynamic, desperately searching for something salvageable, functional, and worthy of further exploration.

A more typical movie about an adult sex worker’s unexpected reunion with his hometown’s local pedophile would resolve that conflict with revenge-thriller genre tropes, seeking emotional catharsis in physical violence. Blue Film instead chooses a therapeutic tack, like a darker, gayer version of Good Luck to You, Leo Grande. The geriatric pedophile never physically abused the self-reinvented camboy at a young age, although he did have intimate access to him as a schoolteacher in their secluded hometown. He did lust after the kid, though, and he feels terrible about it. The entire reason he’s staged this nonconsensual reunion is to test his own nature as a decrepit pervert. Was he attracted to the young boy because of his personality or because of his age? If it was the former, he might be able to redeem himself as a functional member of society, but if it was the latter he would have to accept his fate as a worthless lecher of the lowest order. In order to properly assess his compatibility with the now all-growed-up youngster, he asks the camboy to remove several layers of hyper macho social armor: shaving his body hair, dropping his “Aaron Eagle” online persona, and communicating a wider range of emotions than his usual “fuck,” “shit,” “fuckin’ shit” vocabulary allows. The two men also directly assess their compatibility by attempting to have sex, a night-long process of frustrated stops & starts as the uneasy vulnerability of the evening starts to weigh heavily on their respective psyches.

There’s not too much to Blue Film as a visual piece that couldn’t be replicated on the stage. The film opens with its most cinematic imagery in the first couple scenes, most notably in the camboy’s introduction as he performs for digital tips by ordering his “pay pig” clientele to sniff poppers & stroke themselves to his chiseled physique. The first barrier between him and his estranged schoolteacher is a generational one, as expressed by the technological jump from that laptop-framed introduction to the pedophile’s preference for the tripod camcorders of old. Once they take their attraction-repulsion sexual dynamic to the bedroom, the title becomes somewhat literal as their nude bodies are bathed in monochrome blue light, a stage-craft version of moonlight achieved through cinematic artifice. For the most part, though, Blue Film is a movie of ideas rather than one of images. Its initial question of whether therapeutic intimacy with an adult sex worker can cure a pedophile is only the start of what ends up becoming a double-pronged character study. Their mismatched camboy-client dynamic gets much more abstract from there, at one point linking the solitary nature of religious practice with the solitary nature of sexual kink. They pontificate about the spirituality in loneliness and the purity in perversion, which are much loftier subjects than you might expect from the opening laptop-framed performance exclusively communicated in BDSM-themed commands & grunts. The movie does eventually go places; those places just aren’t in any way visual or physical.

-Brandon Ledet