Lonesome | Dir Craig Boreham | From 24th Feb | ★ ★ ★ ★ ★
After his successful 2016 film Teenage Kicks, an Australian coming-of-age drama that explored the complexities of a teenager coming to terms with being gay, writer/director Craig Boreham started trawling Grindr and Scruff in search of his next queer cast.
Boreham found Daniel Gabriel on Grindr, and also found an experimental film where Josh Lavery talked about his experience growing up gay in an isolated country town.
The film opens with an image reminiscent of a Western, as Casey (Josh Lavery) walks along a deserted road wearing his cowboy hat. Escaping his small-town scandal with no money and a small backpack, he is hitching rides to Sydney where a hook-up app leads him to a casual sexual encounter with Tib (Daniel Gabriel).
Tib has his own issues but the two of them manage to exist side-by-side for a while. There is not much dialogue, but certainly a lot of action as the young men lose themselves in anonymous sex and try to make connections in the city canyons. There is an unforgettable cameo from former NRL player Ian Roberts, who also featured in Teenage Kicks.
Boreham and his cast don’t shy away from nudity and graphic sex as the two young men dive into sexual experimentation and take risks. The director has said that he wanted to explore gay men’s relationships to sex and using intimacy coordinator Leah Pellinkhof on set helped with that.
“It can be transactional; it can be about relieving boredom or be about connection, or aggression. There’s a lot of different ways gay men use sex and I wanted to explore that. That’s a big part of the tone of the film – I didn’t want to pan away to a tree whenever there was a sex scene, I wanted to stay with it and see those little micro-moments that happen between those interactions.”
Described as “brutal, erotic and tender”, Lonesome will screen at 9pm on Friday 24 February, Saturday 25 February and Sunday 26 February at Luna Leederville with a special pre-recorded introduction by director Craig Boreham and actor Josh Lavery.
See Luna for tickets.
Lezly Herbert
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