The Line of Presentableness

I watched the first episode of the BBC miniseries version of 'The Line of Beauty' last night. It's based on a Booker Prize-winning novel, which I must confess I have not read, and frankly I'm not in a hurry to. While I enjoyed the program, it did make me feel as if someone was trying to make a point rather than tell a story, especially as the story (young middle class man falls under spell of decadent upper class family and thus into trials and tribulations) has been done so many, many times before, from Brideshead Revisited to The Go-Between to The Talented Mr Ripley.

I'm always suspicious of gay-themed productions that are set in the past. Making a story a period piece tends to mean that the makers can make all sorts of clumsy, didactic statements about homophobia, making the characters say and do things that we can all smugly condemn with the benefit of hindsight.

This using-the-past-to-make-a-loaded-point-about-the-present was exacerbated in this instance by the design practice of dressing a period piece to look as little like the period as possible. The designers used every trick in the book to make the supposedly 1983 setting look, at best, temporally ambivalent. You occasionally see a Sloane Ranger scuttling across the background of a scene, but in the foreground it's all low, sleek, modern hair, subdued modern makeup and timeless little black dresses.

Excuse me, it's 1983 and no one has New Romatic hair? None of the girls are wearing jackets with shoulder pads? Even the cars are as unspecific as possible - the main characters have a Range Rover and a VW Golf, two cars which barely looked different in their 1973, 1983 or 1993 iterations.

That said, the program did capture a couple of strong aspects of gay sexuality. The first is the depth to which AIDS has affected gay sex: the characters hook up and get it on without a shadow of a thought about infection or disease. You see it and you want to shout, "WHAT ARE YOU DOING!? ARE YOU PEOPLE INSANE!?" Now that disease (of various kinds) stalks all sexual relationships (gay and straight), this sort of thoughtlessness looks suicidal.

The second is more positive (no pun intended): the program captured the electric thrill of gay sexual possibility. Two people pursuing a secretive, illicit coupling, both walking on the razor's edge, both aware that a hint too much interest, a brush against the back of the hand that comes too early, a divulgence of too much need or a simple issue of time or location will make the opportunity evaporate like morning dew. I'm sure you've all felt it. I know I have - it feels like your blood is sizzling.