User Reviews

If ever there was a paean to self-involved narcissism and the culture of surface appearances, it is writer/director/producer/star Peter Berlin's 1974 love letter to his own body, That Boy. The film is ostensibly about a recently blind young gay man's obsession with a German scene queen called Helmut (a homage to Mr. Berger or the head of a dick, or both?), his surprise friendship with the Teutonic totty and the fantasies which he weaves around his mind re sexual relations with the purported "hunk." There's a heavy-handed and cod-poetic narration consisting mostly of adorations and wishful thinking aimed at young(ish) Helmut, which certainly raise the eyebrow as one thinks of the performer/auteur playing the role writing these protestations of love and lust to himself.

The film is a slightly uneasy amalgam of avant-garde 1960s cinema (Anger, Warhol/Morrissey), body-builder magazine photography and then then-bourgeoning hardcore movie aesthetic. As in Anger, montage sequences are cut to music (classical and rock), and the sex scenes feel more like experiments with impressionistic editing than attempts to show us the narrative of a bout of erotic play. The hardcore is rather reticent for a golden age of porn feature, with lots of shots of male organs, glimpses of fellatio and a distinct lack of meat shots. This latter leads me to believe that the anal sex portrayed is simulated. Through all of this, Berlin performs his own (homo)sexual being, which makes the film ideal material for study from a cultural studies POV.

The film, as a product of its author's narcissism, certainly captures something of gay culture's obsession with youth, fitness and physical beauty; Helmut is notorious because he is both the coolest and the hottest body on the scene – we see passers-by spellbound as he walks the gay ghetto streets, queens growing bitter when he won't give them sex and the lucky few he does allow to get to grips with him genuflecting as if at the altar of a god. Yet behind this aestheticism of the body lies a deep anxiety, which the film builds into its portrait: Helmut loves the blind boy because they can talk and they bond, but most importantly because the boy will never be able to see Helmut age – Berlin's final narration in the film has him confessing "there is a joy in knowing no matter what happens, no matter what events may occur, he will always hold me in his memory as I am now, as I was for him in these fine days." The film's style is half amateurish/half arty, but there are intriguing visual ideas. The sequence where a stills photographer shoots Helmut has our hero unwrapped like a birthday present, layer after layer of fetishistic undergarment coming off before finally revealing the desired flesh. The end is a miracle of staging: Helmut and the blind boy walk down the streets, arm in arm, love's young dream passing a wooden shack on which someone has painted a rainbow; a solitary bitter queen leans against the rainbow and watches them, enviously as they disappear together. This idealized couple are admitted as being a mere fantasy of loneliness, and the nascent gay culture is seen as a series of fantasies based around appearance, dreams of sex and love inhabiting a ghetto-mentality.

Despite (or perhaps because of) the monumental egotism of its actor/auteur, Berlin's film does paint an extremely ambiguous portrait of American gay life in the mid-1970s; sex is celebrated and valorized, but people appear lost in fantasies and illusions whilst at the same time anxious that the flesh whose appearance they set so much store by will inevitably degrade.