After Louie

seen at the London Flare Festival on 17 March 2017

Vincent Gagliostro directs Alan Cumming and Zachary Booth in a film about an artist whose work has been blocked for some twenty years by his loss of many friends during the AIDS crisis in New York. He is preparing a video project about one lover in particular, the poet William Wilson, even though his agent and many friends feel that his time would be better spent on painting.

One night Sam (Cumming) takes up with the much younger Braeden (Booth), but creates a barrier between them by paying him for his 'services'. However, the two continue to meet, and the film broadens out in interesting ways to encompass Braeden's relations with his boyfriend, and also to examine Sam's interactions with some of his longstanding friends and his now very elderly arts teacher.


Gagliostro's stated aim was to make a portrait of survivors of the AIDS generation and their coming to terms with the many losses of partners and friends, and with the very different attitudes and experiences of a younger generation of gay men. Sam is trying to build a tribute to the poert William, but others who knew him have some reservations, encapsulated in the comment that William was not Sam's property. But even as he works on this project, he has the opinion common to many survivors of traumatic experiences that those who follow simply cannot understand the past since they did not live through it. Braeden taxes him with this problem in an impassioned speech both acknowledging the pain but pointing out that it has to be sufficient that the next generations can empathise but must also move on.

The film raises a number of important points about loyalty to friends, to memory, to past struggles and positions adopted in the fight for recognition and acceptance (there's a particularly tense argument between Sam and one of his oldest friends when the latter announces that he and his partner have married).

Alan Cumming and Zachary Booth both give very nuanced performances, vital to the success of the film since the camera focusses on Sam in particular many times to establish his reactions, while the character of Braeden has to be established quickly as far more than the opportunist that Sam initially takes him for. At times I felt some of the other actors, especially the older characters, were too theatrical, although they were not exactly camp. Maybe the point is that gay men of that generation simply were theatrical in the New York milieu - a member of the audience in the following Q&A session remarked that the film was very authentically New York.