The Man I Love review – Rami Malek needs a lighter touch in Ira Sachs’ 80s Aids drama

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Cannes film festival: Sachs’ film about an HIV-positive actor in the homophobic Reagan-era 80s is well-intended, but Malek’s mannered performance is hard to love This film from writer-director Ira Sachs gives us premium-strength, undiluted Rami Malek – but I have to say that his overripe performance and self-conscious mannerisms here are perhaps even more oppressively insistent for being conveyed relatively quietly in spoken dialogue. And not quietly at all in the singing scenes. Malek is a performer whose style is as distinctive as those of John Malkovich or Jeff Goldblum. But it works best with a light touch in the direction and material. Things never really come together here. The Man I Love is a film about gay culture in 1980s New York, at the height of the reactionary homophobia of Reagan’s America, with HIV-positive men coming to terms with their condition and with the callous bigotry of the political zeitgeist. In one hospital scene, we see the authorities’ icily unsympathetic ...
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Subject review – exploitation, trauma and the ethics of documentary-making

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The subjects of The Staircase, Hoop Dreams, Capturing the Friedmans and others contribute to this thoughtful film about the duty of care film-makers owe those whose stories they tell

If you’ve seen the sensational true crime documentary series The Staircase, you’ll know the story. In 2001, after Kathleen Peterson was found dead at the bottom of the stairs at her home in North Carolina, police suspicion turned to her novelist husband Michael Peterson. When he allowed a documentary team to film what happened next, Peterson said it was because he was worried about getting a fair trial. His adopted daughter, Margaret Ratliff, 20 at the time, grief-stricken and terrified that her dad could be facing the death penalty, agreed to be part of the film. The loss of her privacy in the years since has been devastating, she admits now. “I can’t tell you how painful it is, reliving my mum’s death over and over again.”

This super-thoughtful and sensitive documentary also interviews the “stars” of other well-known documentaries. Arthur Agee was a 14-year-old basketball prodigy from a tough neighbourhood in Chicago when film-makers arrived to shoot Hoop Dreams. Jesse Friedman spent 13 years in jail after he and his father Arnold pleaded guilty in 1998 to sexually abusing children – a conviction put into doubt by the 2003 film Capturing the Friedmans. Mukunda Angulo was raised in a New York apartment isolated from the world by his controlling dad, as detailed in The Wolfpack.

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