A Frontmezzjunkies TIFF film review: Ira Sachs and David Turpin turn to the artists, lovers, and chosen families living in the shadow of AIDS.
By Ross
The AIDS crisis of the late 1980s hangs over both Ira Sachs’s “The Man I Love” and David Turpin’s “Ancestors,” two queer films that drew me into communities where the need for love, connection, and a place to belong carries an extraordinary emotional weight. Both are set in worlds where illness and loss are never far away, yet the people at their centres continue to search for purpose, intimacy, and a reason to keep creating lives of their own. Sachs turns his attention to Jimmy George, a magnetic downtown Manhattan performance artist whose appetite for adoration places enormous demands on the people who love him. Turpin follows Beau, a young Irishman in London whose unexpected bond with a vulnerable young man named Tiny opens up feelings he has spent much of his life keeping at a distance. One film draws us into the complicated orbit of an artist who needs to be loved, while the other follows a friendship whose emotional depth neither man is able to fully embrace.
In “The Man I Love,” Rami Malek (“Bohemian Rhapsody”) plays Jimmy George, an amateur performance artist battling AIDS, whose recent recovery from a near-fatal bout of pneumonia has given him a renewed determination to devote his energy to one more creative pursuit. Keeping the illness at bay with AZT, Jimmy is caught between the urgency of making art and the primal need to be seen, to command a room and draw the gaze of those around him. He possesses a dark charisma and a flamboyant narcissism, with a gift for self-expression that he seems unable to turn into any clear sense of artistic purpose. When someone asks, “Are you the famous Jimmy?”, the question captures the reputation he has cultivated among artists and actors, and his need for adoration. Malek makes this difficult, capricious man formidably captivating, giving his volatile charm a fragile underside that helps explain why people continue to gravitate toward him, even when his need for adoration threatens to consume them.
The devastatingly good Tom Sturridge is quietly magnificent as Dennis, Jimmy’s devoted partner and caregiver, who knows the punishing demands of loving a man whose appetite for attention never seems satisfied. Rebecca Hall brings a knowing tenderness to Jimmy’s sister Brenda, while Luther Ford (“The Crown“), as Vincent, a new neighbour who falls under Jimmy’s spell, arrives with the open-hearted confidence of someone who believes that fascination might lead to something lasting. That confidence suffers a brutal reckoning when Dennis confronts Vincent face to face and tells him what loving Jimmy really means. As Dennis lays bare the reality of life in Jimmy’s orbit, we watch Vincent’s certainty falter and crack. The humiliation of discovering how little his adoration can change the terms of the relationship is written across his face. It is a devastating encounter between two men who understand Jimmy in different ways, exposing the emotional cost of loving someone who seems unable to recognize how much others give him, or how much he asks them to endure.
Sachs (“Passages“), who also wrote and directed the film, builds this intricate and sometimes perplexing portrait through loose, vignette-like scenes, dinner-table conversations, impromptu performances, and extended theatre rehearsals. The creative process becomes central to the community’s daily life, offering a shared purpose and a reason to keep making things in the shadow of AIDS. Cinematographer Josée Deshaies gives the 35mm images a rich, colour-drenched warmth that draws us into the rooms and faces of this downtown world, as the visual texture gradually becomes more sterile and detached as Jimmy’s health declines.
Sachs refuses to turn Jimmy into a saint because he is ill, allowing his selfishness, capriciousness, and insatiable appetite for attention to remain firmly in view. Nor does he reduce the people around Jimmy to witnesses to his suffering. Yet the film’s deliberately loose construction occasionally leaves me at a distance from its central character, wondering whether I even like this man. Vincent becomes my emotional entry point, with Dennis close behind, because both come to understand that no amount of love or devotion will satisfy Jimmy’s need to be adored. Watching them absorb that painful truth gives the film some of its most affecting moments, while the shared act of creating offers genuine joy and defiance in the shadow of AIDS.
Leaving Sachs’s downtown New York artists behind, “Ancestors” takes us into late-1980s London, where David Turpin explores the fragile connections that people pushed to society’s margins build in order to survive. Éanna Hardwicke (NT’s Playboy of the Western World) plays Beau, an Irish expat who works in a neighbourhood café, shares a quiet life with his friend Shell, played beautifully by Jessica Reynolds, and keeps his personal encounters at a careful distance. Hardwicke makes Beau’s reserve quietly mesmerising, allowing us to sense the feelings he struggles to acknowledge even before he can find the words to express them. Into this carefully guarded world comes Jack Wolfe’s Tiny, a lost boy who arrives at the café door in need of care and somewhere safe to stay.
Run by Rupert Everett’s Maurice, the café is a refuge for people who need shelter from the world outside, a place where the excluded can find recognition and begin to form connections of their own. Maurice recognizes Tiny’s vulnerability when he sees him wandering the streets and gives him work. The black-and-white photographs of glamorous Hollywood stars covering the walls offer a gallery of escapist images to a community that knows how badly it needs its goddesses. “We need our Goddesses,” the film tells us, capturing the importance of beauty, glamour, and shared cultural touchstones in a world where belonging cannot always be found beyond the café walls. Everett brings an incredible warmth and lived-in understanding to Maurice, while Christina Hendricks appears as Gloria, a golden-age Hollywood actress who comes to life as a surreal presence within the film’s exploration of grief and longing. Hendricks is transfixing in the role, although Gloria’s place in the story ultimately feels inconsequential, her striking presence offering an intriguing detour without fully deepening the film’s central relationships.
Tiny is a lost boy wandering the streets in search of somewhere safe to land, and when Beau offers him a place to sleep, a bond begins to form that neither man seems entirely prepared to accept. Wolfe (Donmar’s Next to Normal) gives Tiny a truly touching vulnerability, capturing the loneliness beneath his need for shelter and the quiet hope of someone who longs to matter to another person. His performance never lets that longing become merely pitiable; Tiny has a presence and a need for connection that make Beau’s growing attachment feel urgent. What moves me most about their relationship is the absence of sexual expectation. These are two lonely men discovering the possibility of being important to someone, and Beau’s struggle to express affection makes that discovery all the more affecting. He can be tender and withdrawn within moments, frightened by the depth of his own feelings even in the simple act of a much-needed hug, as we witness Tiny becoming someone he cannot bear to lose.
Their bond is captured in the words “Brothers, not by blood,” a declaration of chosen family that gives the film much of its emotional force. When Tiny disappears, Beau’s search becomes tangled with guilt and regret, as he wonders whether he gave his friend enough reason to stay. Turpin (“The Winter Lake“), who wrote and directed the film, moves between gritty realism and dreamlike passages, allowing memory and loss to shape the world Beau travels through. Patrick Jordan’s cinematography evokes old Polaroid photographs, giving the images a tactile, haunted quality that suits a story in which the past seems close enough to touch. At times, the film drifts into a dreamlike fog, particularly as it moves toward a more conventional final act and the narrative begins to lose some of its hold. The final scene, however, catches us again, restoring the emotional force of Beau’s journey and giving the film’s reflections on love, loss, and the connections that carry us forward a renewed resonance.
What connects these two films is their attention to the people who carry the weight of another person’s vulnerability, and to the communities that allow those bonds to survive across generations. In “The Man I Love,” Dennis and Vincent struggle to love someone whose need for attention threatens to consume the relationships around him. In “Ancestors,” Beau discovers that caring for Tiny has opened a part of himself he has spent years trying to keep safe. Sachs finds joy and salvation in the act of creating, even when the artist at the centre of that world can be destructive, while Turpin turns toward chosen family and the legacy passed between generations. Both films resist reducing the AIDS crisis to a single kind of story. Their characters are complicated, sometimes difficult to reach, and still hungry for affection, intimacy, and a reason to keep going. The closing thought of “Ancestors,” “No survivors, only descendants,” reaches beyond its own story to honour those who were lost and those who loved and cared for them. Together, these films gave me some much-needed permission to remember all those I lost during those horrific years, and space to think about the communities my loved ones built in the shadow of loss. They also brought me back to the fragile, necessary ways people hold one another close, not just out of fear or need, but through care and love.
