DVD Review - Postcards From London

In Boy Culture (2007), Q. Allan Brocka's second directorial feature, there is an opening joke about the fact that so many gay movies have been made about male prostitutes or male sex workers, sometimes called hustlers or rent boys. This film, written and directed by Steve McLean in his second directorial feature, also references the fact that so many gay films exist about hustlers or rent boys. Specifically, he mentions My Own Private Idaho (1991), probably the most well-known film on the subject by Gus Van Sant. McLean's previous feature Postcards From America (1995), which he did nearly 25 years ago, even touched upon similar subject matter. After almost a quarter-century, the question is what's new that McLean is saying about this queer cinema cliché. Another or an alternate question is how strong is the story that McLean has attached to this cliché. The answer to both questions is possibly "not much."

Harris Dickinson (The Darkest Minds and Beach Rats) stars as Jim, a teenage boy who leaves his parents' small town or rural place and becomes homeless on the streets of the titular city. He ends up in an area known as Soho. His sexuality is never made explicitly clear but one assumes that he is gay. Therefore, it might not be a coincidence that he landed in Soho, an area that has a significant, if not large LGBT population. Soho has also been traditionally a place where one could find a lot of hustlers and rent boys. Soho used to be known as a "red-light district," or a place for tons of adult theaters and sex clubs where prostitution is more easily facilitated. When Jim gets robbed and has no where to sleep or eat, he's pulled into prostitution to survive.

One night in a bar, he meets four guys who call themselves "raconteurs." They're sex workers, but they say that it's not just about intercourse for them and their clients. It's about intellectual and uplifting, post-coital conversation. First, they only cater to older and rich, male clients who are high end and have strong interests in high end things like classical art. Therefore, the guys study and make themselves experts in great historical figures in art and science like Caravaggio or Francis Bacon, figures who were believed to be homosexual.

This idea of having a specific and high-end clientale was handled in Boy Culture. The idea though was used as a way of exploring the characters of both the rent boy and the client. Brocka's film delved more into the whys and whats of both characters engaging in this arrangement. Here, McLean gives us a bare minimum of that kind of character exploration. The most we learn is that Jim is a sensitive boy who can't separate himself from having emotional attachment to the men he encounters or how talkative he can be with his clients, despite most of them preferring he shut up. It's not clear if the original premise of the raconteurs was a fallacy, hyperbole or if Jim just happened to get clients who don't care about that intellectual and uplifting, post-coital conversation. McLean though never reconciles this contradiction.

It doesn't matter because the movie switches gears after Jim tries to become a raconteur and he begins to study classical art. He soon realizes that he has a condition called Stendahl Syndrome. It's not an officially recognized mental disorder, but an Italian psychiatrist did start making note of cases in Florence, Italy in the late 1970's. The condition causes sufferers to become distressed, dizzy and even faint at the sight of certain pieces of art. The condition has even caused hallucinations. After Jim starts fainting and hallucinating at the sight of classical art, the other raconteurs tell him he has Stendahl Syndrome.

Even though this condition then takes up a large chunk of this movie's time, McLean's film is not really about the condition in terms of understanding it or a person dealing with it. The film seems like it might be about that because Jim encounters an art dealer named Paul, played by Leemore Marrett Jr., who believes Jim can turn his condition from a sickness to a profitable tool. Paul hires Jim to authenticate art because for some reason, Jim's condition only works on authentic pieces of art or art that's somehow great or overwhelming in its value or vision.

There's only one issue. Why would Paul trust this condition over more scientifically secure methods and how does Paul verify that Jim's condition even works? What would even prevent Jim from faking his condition in order to get money from Paul? These obvious, rational and even ethical questions don't seem to concern McLean's film. What kind of damage is Stendahl Syndrome doing to Jim's overall or long-term health doesn't appear to be a question here either. This condition only comes off as a stepping stone to make Jim conclude that he's tired of looking at other people's beauty. He wants to make beauty or art of his own.

Unfortunately, McLean doesn't seed this idea at all prior to the ending. Arguably, his interest in art could be justification for him wanting to be an artist himself, but we never see Jim at once even pick up a paintbrush throughout this whole film. Then, all of a sudden at the end, we're meant to accept him wanting to become an artist himself. Everyone tells him how beautiful he is and he's first propped up to be a kind of model who could pose for pictures or walk a fashion runway, but instead he's maneuvered toward becoming a sex worker. At one point, Jim becomes a muse for a middle-age painter that feels reminiscent of Gods and Monsters (1998), Vacationland (2006) or the more recent Final Portrait (2018), but it never really goes anywhere substantially in McLean's script.

Despite how intelligent Jim is, this movie never effectively gives us a strong sense of his inner life. He feels more like an object of desire than a three-dimensional person. This in itself could be an interesting angle on which the film does somewhat comment but not to a satisfying degree. The conclusion at the end also goes to the idea of friendship. When Jim goes to work for Paul, he distances himself from the raconteurs. His distance from them is never truly felt though. McLean at times uses cinematic techniques and tricks akin to Danny Boyle's Trainspotting (1996). Whereas Boyle developed the characters and made the audience feel the bond or the friendship between the boys, McLean fails to do so here. The raconteurs come across as just caricatures than people with whom we care. It perhaps doesn't help that McLean didn't shoot on the actual streets of Soho but instead inside an obvious sound-stage or insulated set.

Not Rated but contains male nudity.
Running Time: 1 hr. and 29 mins.