All Of Us Strangers
I saw All Of Us Strangers, or a sad, sad story about a sad, sad man who lives in a sad, sad city. That it would be sad came as no particular surprise. I hadn’t seen a trailer or read anything about the film, but I got the gist from the promotional stills, from the casting choices, and the title. I also figured out the ending quite early on, because I’m very, very clever, so I didn’t cry at the climactic scene, but I managed to feel stuff throughout nevertheless. I felt sad, for Andrew Scott’s character, and for myself. Yes, I sat in my reclined cinema seat drinking my Tango mixed Ice Blast and felt extremely, glamorously sorry for myself, as is my wont.
The sadness, the unrelenting sadness… Lovely. There are some responses to it by queer writers in the Guardian, including one from Peter Tatchell who calls it a ‘brutally honest’ portrayal of pain, which I think is a strange assessment. It’s not honest at all! This once-upon-a-time ass fairytale about a guy who lives in an otherwise completely empty high rise building, who gets the train to visit the ghosts of his dead parents? Fantasy! Pure cinema!
It doesn’t much matter that the life Adam is living is unrealistic: he isn’t real. Is it too much to ask of an audience that they can distinguish between fiction and reality? That this film that happens to be about a gay character needn’t tackle every theme of contemporary queerness and/or reflect the audience’s experiences of queerness back at them? Surely we can make the short psychological leap between the unoccupied building that he is shown as inhabiting and the loneliness that this represents? As cinema is the closest thing to dreaming, mightn’t we allow this space the relaxed laws of our own restless nights? A disintegrating grasp on reality that speaks to longing, to grief, to isolation? Isn’t this a ghost story?