Eden's Curve

This movie had so much going for it, I guess, if you saw it in a theatre. But the DVD is a challenge. The sound quality is so poor, even with my stereo surround equipment, that total scenes are inaudible, just mumbling. The blackouts between scenes are too long, making you feel that the movie has stopped. Then occasionally, you get to see a complete scene, well-lighted, and audible and you discover that the acting is quite good and the script is more than passable. It's unfair to rate this film by the lack of quality in the transfer from screen to DVD video. It's a mess...and it shouldn't be! Wait for another Gay Film Festival and hopefully someone will revive it. But if you're seeing it for the first time at home...forget it and rent "Latter Days", "The Man I Love", or "The Trip" instead.

Eden's Curve premiered at the London Lesbian & Gay Film Festival on 6 April 2003. I felt fortunate to be in the audience - also with director Anne Misawa, producer Jerry Meadors and four cast members present.

The story is principally that of Peter (Sam Levine), a 17 year old studying at an all male university in Virginia in the early 1970s. Peter embarks on a fraught relationship with his room-mate Joe (Trevor Lissauer) and Joe's girlfriend Bess (Amber Taylor); but as tender love turns to jealousy and rage, Peter is forced out of his fraternity (despite the protestations of Billy, played with a delightful amorality by Bryan Carroll) and eventually into the arms of Peter's poetry tutor, Ian (Julio Perillan in a stand out performance).

The film has an ethereal quality - I kept thinking of various 4AD album covers seemingly sprung to life on the big screen. A little gem and well worth a look.

Ugh! If that camera shook anymore I would have had to stay in bed for a couple of days to recuperate. The sleek camera angles they tried to use turned out to be nothing more then a burden to my EYES!! To many, they used them to many times. My partner actually looked to check when it was made because the acting came right out of a bad 70's porn movie. Joe was supposed to be the tortured soul, he tortured me. Either the actors were way over the top-"Billy" or way under-"Ian and Peter". The end of the movie made me wonder why they even finished it in the first place. I'm sure the director was going somewhere deep with this movie but that person forgot their glasses during shooting.

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!

I watched this, but wish that I hadn't. If I want to see the cruel realities of life I can go by skid row or take public transport. This movie was well made, but depressing. If you are looking for something that makes your day more uplifting - then this is not for you.