Review of The Man I Love

The cover art for the DVD and the film’s trailers did not prepare me for either the quality or the depth of this moving film.  I expected a piece of fluff decorated with very pretty male scenery and little else. 

Indeed, the scenery was pleasant, but it was overshadowed (or at least matched) by the lives of complex characters and important themes that are present wherever humans live and love.  The movie examines the universal urge to pursue the unattainable and unavailable without regard to others who may be impacted.  It looks deeply at the fluidity of desire and sexual identity.  It shows sex without love and love without sex and the impact of sex and love uniting.

And it accomplishes all of this with humor and intense drama set in a work of cinema that is wonderfully lacking self-consciousness.  It offers an evening of thought provoking pleasure and pain, with the realization that one can never experience one without having experienced the other.

Genre: Gay themed drama

Director: Stephane Giusti

Language: English sub-titles

Availability: DVD

99Gay-Men.us Rating: ****

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