Savage Beauty

If you remember reading B. Ruby Rich in the park or staring at the blue postcard issued as part of the BBC’s cross-channel broadcast of Derek Jarman’s Blue, then you must be a veteran of New Queer Cinema, the most romantically radical film movement of the early ‘90s.

What times. Just as the Sundance Film Festival was establishing itself as place for hip young things to be, a vanguard of feisty politicised queer filmmakers became the toast of the Utah mountains. In 1991, Todd Haynes’ Poison took home Grand Jury Prize for Best Film; the following year saw the inclusion of Gregg Araki’s The Living End and Christopher Munch’s The Hours and Times.
Back then, interested parties identified Tom Kalin, the writer-director-producer-gay activist behind Swoon as the Boy Most Likely To Succeed. Like Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope and Richard Fleischer’s Compulsion, Swoon recounts the notorious 1924 Leopold and Loeb murder case. But while these earlier films danced around the murderous pair’s homosexuality, Mr. Kalin’s surreal, stylised account made it the central theme.  
Sitting tidily in the lobby of the Conrad Hotel, the director sounds like he has finally got to grips with the heady period around the film’s release.
“It was a brutal time,” he recalls. “So much of what happened in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s was about AIDS.  But that one moment was, as a filmmaker, such a delightful moment to live through. There was a lot of formal experimentation. And more than that, coming after all these AIDS movies-of-the-week with their martyrdom, it was time to say, ‘We’re people. We don’t all have to be good.’ So you end up with films like The Living End. For other filmmakers AIDS could be a metaphor to explore identity.”
Where did it all go wrong I wonder? Was it entirely cannibalised by the mainstream then spat back into our faces as chunks of Will And Grace?
“I’m afraid so,” he nods. “It just became such a part of mainstream culture that queer cinema was no longer a necessity. But there is an upside. You could argue that it became redundant because it achieved its aims. I think that film has changed as well. In retrospect we didn’t have a clue what we were doing. We were unknowns making movies for $250,000. You couldn’t do it now. I’m not even sure how we did it back then.”
Kalin should know. Though he has kept busy with experimental art installations and his Professorship at Colombia University, it has taken him 15 years for his sophomore feature to make it to a cinema near you. Savage Grace, a torrid drama starring Julianne Moore at her most brittle, takes its inspiration from another True Life Murder, the 1972 Barbara Daly Baekeland case.
“Both films are based on true stories involving a symbiotic relationship between two people, involving sexual obsession and murder,” he says. “Now I do like real life murder stories, as does my producer, and people think it’s my oeuvre, but, honestly, it’s not. These are apparently the only films people want to finance me to direct.”