I saw the world premiere of 'Eden's Curve' at the London L&G Film Festival on 6 April & was hooked. The film has a lush distinctive visual style all its own which stays in the memory long after you walk out of the movie theatre. Apparently based on real-life events in a backwoods Virginia University in the early 70s, it succeeds in conveying the spirit & look of the time with exactitude (think a grainier more sepia-tinted version of "The Ice Storm"), Ang Lee meets Jim Jarmusch.
Framed around a bisexual menage-a-trois & a young man's coming-of-age, the film is actually "about" much wider themes of identity, commitment & the limits of romanticism. Sam Levine is excellent as the lead character, a blank page waiting to be written on. Viewed from Europe though, the "real" subject of the film is the Virginia landscape, how the enormity & relative emptiness of America provoke a conflict between 'pioneer' independence & bourgeois conformity unimaginable on this side of the pond.
This is a film about mood & longing, more than about narrative or even characterisation. That means it deserves a wider audience & a good US distribution deal. It would be a tragedy if work of this quality doesn't get seen beyond the "gay film festival circuit", valuable though that is. Go See!
