jarabaa
London/UK
This review may contain spoilers
This is a short film about two male actors in a play who appear to become lovers in 'real life'. It poses many interesting questions which simply need to be ... thought about. As can be seen from many comments below, people seem to bring their own concerns and wishes to their interpretation of what happens in the film. Some think it's about a powerful gay love affair between an older man and a younger man who both happen to be actors in play which calls for them to be intimate. Others think it is about "method acting" - the acting technique developed in the main by Konstantin Stanislavski, Lee Strasberg and Stella Adler 70/80 years ago - and the interesting notion that it could somehow force or trick the actors to adopt (in their everyday non-acting reality) the actions and desires of their characters on stage. Which is it here? Do the two men really fall for each other? Or do they merely enact a passion which is instilled in them through some sort of brainwashing brought about by the method acting technique? The film is clever and short and skates over the territory in a series of rather brief scenes which hint at both possibilities. And so the question is left open.
However, it's interesting to see how some commentators are very keen to insist that there is no "real homosexuality" here. This is something we hear all the time, not least from and about actors in gay love stories and 'BL' series in the Far East: they're not "really" gay, they're "just acting". These claims are so universal that you wonder if any gay character is ever played by a real gay actor - or whether any gay actors exist at all. And so "Method" plays with that disquiet. One of the characters even says he isn't gay - he just likes the other actor, who happens to be gay. The problem is that we are not living in an open, equal world where people are free to live "without labels". Far from it. As we see very clearly in the film. Whatever is going on between them, the two men are not allowed to explore it. Instead, we actually see them torn apart violently, assaulted by various other people, and accused of "perversion". And so we're shown that it's impossible to penetrate through to any "reality" - unless actors who really are gay are finally free one day to ... be gay. And that's not the case, not in Hollywood (where not one single leading actor has ever openly declared himself to be gay) or in Korea. Additionally, certain actors who have come out as gay publicly have later expressed their regret and misgivings about their openness, pointing to various ways in which their careers have suffered as a result. So the point of "Method" is to make us wonder, feel intrigued and provoked, alight on one interpretation or the other, - and argue with each other.
Simply because there is so much homophobia revealed (see below) in the "it's all about method acting, they aren't really gay, they don't really love each other" thesis, and the passion with which people argue for it, I'm inclined to take the other view - that they do recognise within themselves the potential to love another man and that fear and convention combine to crush them in the end. This is also somewhere in between, and I would suggest that a lot of real life is "somewhere in between". That is, method acting isn't such an overpoweringly influential technique that it bamboozles helpless straight actors into "turning gay" - which is nothing other than the language of heterosexual purity corrupted by homosexual "perversion". Instead, method acting is a powerful dramatic tool focusing on the reality of an unreal character which may also, in the case of these 2 specific men living subject to the constraints of a homophobic world, propel them into realising an erotic potential which is genuinely there - in their characters and in their relationship. But ultimately Korean society has no place for gay men and as we see at the end, the older actor is vanquished, his homosexual potential extinguished, and he is meekly led by the hand back into a silent world of heterosexual "normality". And so maybe this is an ingenious little film, rather bitter, rather sad. I wonder how many ... yes ... gay men who are not able to be out in Korea were involved in making it?
However, it's interesting to see how some commentators are very keen to insist that there is no "real homosexuality" here. This is something we hear all the time, not least from and about actors in gay love stories and 'BL' series in the Far East: they're not "really" gay, they're "just acting". These claims are so universal that you wonder if any gay character is ever played by a real gay actor - or whether any gay actors exist at all. And so "Method" plays with that disquiet. One of the characters even says he isn't gay - he just likes the other actor, who happens to be gay. The problem is that we are not living in an open, equal world where people are free to live "without labels". Far from it. As we see very clearly in the film. Whatever is going on between them, the two men are not allowed to explore it. Instead, we actually see them torn apart violently, assaulted by various other people, and accused of "perversion". And so we're shown that it's impossible to penetrate through to any "reality" - unless actors who really are gay are finally free one day to ... be gay. And that's not the case, not in Hollywood (where not one single leading actor has ever openly declared himself to be gay) or in Korea. Additionally, certain actors who have come out as gay publicly have later expressed their regret and misgivings about their openness, pointing to various ways in which their careers have suffered as a result. So the point of "Method" is to make us wonder, feel intrigued and provoked, alight on one interpretation or the other, - and argue with each other.
Simply because there is so much homophobia revealed (see below) in the "it's all about method acting, they aren't really gay, they don't really love each other" thesis, and the passion with which people argue for it, I'm inclined to take the other view - that they do recognise within themselves the potential to love another man and that fear and convention combine to crush them in the end. This is also somewhere in between, and I would suggest that a lot of real life is "somewhere in between". That is, method acting isn't such an overpoweringly influential technique that it bamboozles helpless straight actors into "turning gay" - which is nothing other than the language of heterosexual purity corrupted by homosexual "perversion". Instead, method acting is a powerful dramatic tool focusing on the reality of an unreal character which may also, in the case of these 2 specific men living subject to the constraints of a homophobic world, propel them into realising an erotic potential which is genuinely there - in their characters and in their relationship. But ultimately Korean society has no place for gay men and as we see at the end, the older actor is vanquished, his homosexual potential extinguished, and he is meekly led by the hand back into a silent world of heterosexual "normality". And so maybe this is an ingenious little film, rather bitter, rather sad. I wonder how many ... yes ... gay men who are not able to be out in Korea were involved in making it?
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