Sublet (dir. Eytan Fox, 2020)

Israeli director Eytan Fox’s latest film, Sublet, which is currently screening in film festivals prior to its theatrical release here in the United States this summer, captures the soul of Tel Aviv. That kind of intimate encounter is achieved both through cinematographic details, like panoramic shots of curved tidal pools rolling onto the beaches of Tel Aviv by day and by night, as well as through the central gay characters, Michael and Tomer, at the heart of this gorgeous two-hander. As viewers, we experience the city both through the fresh perspective of professional tourist Michael (John Benjamin Hickey, in a perfectly calibrated performance) and the more familiar perspective of Israeli native Tomer (Niv Nissim, who hits all the requisite notes of sexiness, jaded youthful humor, and depth). The movie opens with Michael, a 50-something New York Times travel writer, landing in Tel Aviv for an assignment over a five-day visit. When he arrives at Tomer’s apartment to sublet it for the week, the 20-something filmmaking student has totally forgotten that his subletter would be arriving that day, setting up a standard odd-couple scenario that turns out to be so much more than that. Sublet is the finest and most delicate May/December semi-romance in a far-flung location since Sofia Coppola’s 2003 Tokyo-set Oscar winner (for Best Original Screenplay), Lost in Translation.

Later in the movie, when Tomer’s mother (Miki Kam) asks Michael about his impressions of Tel Aviv over a quiet dinner at her home in the kibbutz near the end of his stay, he replies that the city is a unique mixture of intensity and laidback vibes, which is actually a great description of the film itself as well. Because Tomer’s bicycle gets stolen during the film’s early scenes, we experience the city — along with Michael and Tomer’s relationship — on foot at ground level as Tomer becomes a tour guide for Michael, and so the film unfolds with exactly the pace that such a relationship would. What’s special about Sublet as a piece of gay cinema is its cross-generational component. That element is handled in a sensitive manner that’s quite rare in gay movies, achieved through subtle moments that are fairly easy to miss: Michael’s glance of realization when Tomer’s mother mentions that she’d had him with a sperm donor and raised him alone, for instance, or Tomer’s gradual recognition of the hardships that gay men of Michael’s generation have faced over time.

Sublet also isn’t afraid to face more difficult truths about contemporary gay culture and why plenty of younger gay men today can struggle to find stability and contentment. After Tomer invites over a hot guy from a hookup app for a potential threesome midway through the movie, we catch on long-partnered Michael’s face a dismissive glimpse of disappointment as he excuses himself from the scene, despite his clear feelings of desire and physical interest. It’s such a deft momentary expression for an actor to convey, and it reminded me of a comment that I heard the actor/director John Cameron Mitchell make a while back, about how younger gay men have been poorly conditioned by the instant gratification of apps like Grindr, to the extent that any attempts at actually getting to know somebody (or even enjoying the pleasures of foreplay) just get totally omitted these days. Although Tomer claims to like the quickness of those sexual interactions that require “no drama,” Michael senses otherwise and so begins to nudge the younger man gently in another direction.

I was fortunate to see John Benjamin Hickey starring on stage as Henry Wilcox in Matthew Lopez’s epic two-part play The Inheritance on Broadway in late November of 2019, several months prior to the shutdown of theaters prompted by the global Covid-19 pandemic in mid-March of 2020, which occurred just a couple of nights before that play was scheduled to close its Broadway run. Hickey portrays a similar character in Sublet, someone who lived through the AIDS crisis, lost his first boyfriend to the disease, then survived to weather the cultural changes of the ensuing decades, only to end up overseeing the lives and antics of a younger generation of gay men in New York City, providing them with support and good counsel as an older gay man. Eytan Fox relies on Hickey’s gently timeworn facial features to ideal effect here, so that we, too, can feel the span of time that the character has endured, enabling a kind of closeness via Hickey’s performance that winds up feeling more internal, rather than being focused solely on age or the distinctions of external appearance. This is probably the movie’s most distinguishing emotional aspect, and Fox and Hickey both seem to be aware of that.

Niv Nissim’s performance as the younger and somewhat disenchanted Tomer is equally profound on many levels, believably inhabiting a character who doesn’t want to be tied down to strict definitions of sexuality or long-term monogamous relationships, nor even obligatory “happy endings.” He’s happier having more fleeting encounters with a wide variety of people, sexually and otherwise, while making art through unconventional horror films with the help of his young actor friends in Tel Aviv. (One of his student films that he shares with Michael was perhaps a little too clearly inspired by Rosemary’s Baby.) Tomer's predilections provide an important contrast to Michael’s own relationship with his partner David (Peter Spears) back in New York, with whom he face-times on his cell phone and laptop at a couple of strategic points in the movie. They argue and discuss, in particular, whether they should pursue having a child via a surrogate again, after their first attempt to do so went tragically wrong, as we find out during a deeply moving and matter-of-fact scene late in the film.

Where the movie goes from that point in its final act is better left unsaid, simply in terms of the audience’s emotional payoff. And while the film’s central pair of characters do move on and resolve their issues on a number of levels, where exactly Michael and Tomer will go in the wake of their encounter remains open-ended, even if it’s clear that the encounter has changed both of them in key ways as they return again to the familiar grooves of their individual separate lives. I’ve seen and loved all of Etyan Fox’s films, which collectively provide an essential document of gay Israeli life over the past three decades, but at this particular point in my own life as a gay man at age 47, Sublet is his movie that’s meant the most to me on an immediate emotional level, and also the one that I’ve related to most closely. I watched the film twice over the past couple of months, and both times I was moved to tears by the exact same scene. It’s obviously the scene that the director intended to make his audience cry, as a result of all that’s been expertly held back by the actors up to that moment, and then all that’s finally allowed to reveal itself more fully in the brightness of an airport’s waiting area, a space of anonymity and transit.

Pretty in Pink (dir. Howard Deutch, 1986)

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about Pretty in Pink, written by the late John Hughes, which came out exactly 35 years ago now, as hard as that is to believe. This week I attended a virtual live Q&A event with Andrew McCarthy, whose new memoir Brat: An ’80s Story was just released. I was glad to have the chance to ask him a couple of questions during the event, to which he gave great answers. His answer to my question about his character Blane in Pretty in Pink ended the Q&A session. I was curious about a comment he’d made regarding how Molly Ringwald, who plays Andie in the film, had argued after the auditions that he was the right actor for the role, the kind of guy whom she’d fall for herself, whereas John Hughes questioned whether McCarthy seemed too shy and reserved when compared with typical leading men. It’s this gendered dichotomy that interests me most about the movie, especially its questioning of masculinity and masculine roles, at least as they stood back in the mid-1980s, right when I was wrapping up junior high and heading into my high school years.

I asked Andrew McCarthy specifically about what it felt like to be seen as a kind of template or role model for younger men back in the ’80s, and his response to my question was at first slightly perplexed. “Did it really happen like that? Is that how people saw me?” he wondered in reply, recalling how frequently he’d been told back then that he needed to lift weights and beef up to transform himself into a standard matinee idol. What’s interesting is how that’s essentially the only masculine type that existed in Hollywood films. Any male performer who seemed too sweet or too sensitive bordered on something not quite masculine enough at that point in time. Andie’s lifelong friend and other suitor in the film, Duckie (portrayed so memorably by Jon Cryer), leans a bit further in that less macho direction: offbeat, artistic, even somewhat self-consciously effeminate, when he’s not lip-synching to Otis Redding’s “Try a Little Tenderness” and pretending to be butch. Molly Ringwald has gone on the record as saying that she assumed in retrospect that Duckie’s character was actually gay.

This explains to me why I felt such an affinity for the movie as a teenager, and why I retain such deep associations with the film today. I was already pretty certain that I was gay at that point in time, but it was the ’80s in Cincinnati, Ohio, so my social options for open self-expression were still limited. Cinema, notably the sort that winds up feeling nostalgic years later, provides an avenue for considering other available forms of selfhood, and I think back then I’d convinced myself that Blane and Duckie, vying for Andie’s affections, were for me two sensible and accessible versions of (potentially straight) early manhood. Since I couldn’t yet fully imagine myself to be what I actually was, I let the movie’s fantasy overwrite my own visions of myself for a couple of hours whenever I watched the film, while simply admiring the well-told story of a heterosexual romance in John Hughes’ screenplay. I think John Hughes was probably closest to Duckie himself, and his teen comedies almost always placed the issue of class status near the heart of the drama. It’s no coincidence that Pretty in Pink’s opening shot is literally of a street sweeper driving down the road on the wrong side of the tracks.

James Spader’s character, Steff, the hilariously condescending, obscenely rich asshole best friend of Blane, is another type of male template in the film, and he’s no less fun to watch for being totally revolting, swishing around their high school in his crisp linen suits and sport jackets. There’s also a fairly obvious level on which John Hughes clearly implied (and the actors intelligently conveyed) that Steff isn’t only competing with Blane for Andie’s romantic attentions out of sexual jealousy. In the homosocial sense, Steff is also afraid of losing Blane to Andie, when even only as a best friend, he really wants to have more of Blane all to himself. James Spader is smart enough an actor to wink at the audience about that aspect of his character between the lines of dialogue that he so tantalizingly delivers throughout the movie.

So what was it about watching Andie and Blane go out on their first date, much to the frustration of Duckie, that so appealed to teenage me? I believe the answer to that question is also a clue to what’s given John Hughes’ teen movies their enduring status in American culture; he was able like no other writer/director to dignify what it feels like to be seen as who you are, in the very act of becoming yourself, by the first person with whom you fall in love. Many critics have pointed out that John Hughes took teenagers seriously and got what it feels like to be misunderstood in adolescence, and therefore they argue that’s the reason why his movies have lasted, though I think the truth is perhaps even more reflective than that. I think that feeling of finally being “seen” as oneself is successfully conveyed in John Hughes’ films because he was a perceptive enough screenwriter to actually be the one who’s doing the seeing, thereby allowing viewers of his films to see themselves and their own struggles in clearer focus.

And that’s how Andrew McCarthy actually ended up answering my question about whether he’d become a kind of archetype for young guys back in the ’80s. He said that he’s realized as he’s gotten older that he was very lucky to be an avatar for people’s own youth through his first several film roles, the key that continues to grant them some kind of access to their earlier selves. All three performers in the movie’s central love triangle — Andrew McCarthy, Molly Ringwald, and Jon Cryer — seem to know just how well-rounded their characters are and how carefully John Hughes crafted them in his script. Each actor infuses his or her respective character with their own personality in ways that make them continue to be indelible nearly four decades later. I can’t imagine their effect on popular culture waning anytime soon.

One of my favorite scenes out of many in the film is the movie’s dramatic climax, when Andie screams at Blane in an empty hallway of their high school after he’s given her the cold shoulder due to peer pressure from his wealthy friends. The set-up is theatrical, with the audience aware that both Duckie and Steff are watching from the edges of the scene as Andie and Blane fight it out in public, a Shakespearean device that I’m sure John Hughes was knowingly using. The unbridled bitterness of that scene, and of Duckie’s earlier falling out with Andie, only makes their reunion at the prom in the movie’s finale all the more moving and fulfilling for viewers. Duckie’s gentlemanly final bow as Andie’s steadfast friend, encouraging her to go to Blane and embrace the romance that the film wants her to have, ultimately represented the kind of guy who seemed worth striving to be back in my high school days. I remain grateful to John Hughes and the actors for giving young men back then — gay or bi or straight — a sketch of an ideal to aim for.