Sachs and Lithgow said the film was not intended to advocate on behalf of same-sex marriage, but Lithgow said he hoped it would be seen in Russia, which he did not cite by name while leaving no doubt about his meaning. “People who have been committed to each other for 40 years should not be completely different just because they’ve been in a same-sex union,” Lithgow said.
John Lithgow, who stars as one of the married men, told a festival news conference that the movie isn’t so much about gay people and same-sex marriage as it is a study of a “cranky old marriage, like my own”.
In American director Ira Sachs’ “Love Is Strange”, screened in Berlin, two men who have been in a relationship for four decades take advantage of liberalised laws to get married - and promptly lose their New York apartment. Since Ang Lee’s classic 2004 gay cowboy movie “Brokeback Mountain”, or perhaps the even earlier French film “La Cage Aux Folles”, gay-themed movies and characters have become increasingly mainstream.īut the offerings at the 64th Berlin International Film Festival, known officially as the Berlinale, illustrate a sharp divide between how the subject is treated in societies where homosexuality is no longer taboo, and places where the sight of a man kissing a man or a woman necking with another woman generates hostility, or sometimes violence.
He said he wanted to show that the local man growing up in a deeply religious rural environment, finding that he is attracted to men, “has no set of tools on how to deal with this homophobia and this is actually the motive of the murder”.