Keep the Lights On (2012)

***/****
starring Thure Lindhardt, Zachary Booth, Julianne Nicholson, Paprika Steen
written and directed by Ira Sachs

by Angelo Muredda Life imitated art when Ira Sachs's Keep
the Lights On won the Teddy for best feature at the 2012 Berlinale.
In the film, the same honour–albeit in the documentary category–goes to Erik
(Thure Lindhardt) for his long-gestating profile of queer photographer and
filmmaker Avery Willard, a project Sachs himself realized this year,
concurrently with his fictional surrogate. Despite the intimate overlaps
between Sachs's life and his most affecting movie to date, knowing the writer-director's background going in is hardly a prerequisite to falling for Keep the Lights On's
honest charms. Sachs lets his biography seep into the material, effectively
colouring it blue.

Like Andrew Haigh's Weekend, Keep the Lights On burrows into the
hermetically-sealed world of two lovers, evoking its New York City milieu and
upstate cottage country only when they come up for air. While that film kept up
that intense focus by narrowing the timeline, Sachs follows Erik's relationship
with publishing attorney Paul (Zachary Booth) from their golden days in the
late-1990s to the present. Once Paul begins to show troubling signs of a
serious drug addiction, what follows is an engaging hybrid of the
star-crossed romance, the queer coming-of-age drama, and the illness movie, with
Erik eventually serving as a doting caretaker to his increasingly vacant-eyed
partner.

There's an undeniable power to Sachs's approach, which is to hit those
seemingly familiar narrative beats through Erik's incremental growth as both an
artist and a companion to someone who's slipping away. An early scene that
finds him cycling through phone-sex partners with very particular tastes,
slipping into the register that the new voice on the line most desires, is as
savvy and economical as character introductions get. Without any traditional
exposition, we learn that Erik's pleasure comes from his chameleonic
adaptation to whatever the other person in a given situation needs. There's
much at stake, then, in Paul's gradual dependence on something outside of their
relationship, and the implicit threat that Erik will then have to carry on
without his lover to define him. In that respect, Lindhardt, whose face is as
weary as it is boyish, makes a fine canvas for Sachs's portrait of an anxious
man who needs other people to activate him.

There's an ethnographic sort of interest to picking up with the couple
after absences of several years, but the film's opaqueness about the passing of
time can feel like an affectation–more a gravitas-effect than a consistent
structuring principle. Though Sachs's sense of character errs on the side of
idiosyncrasy (one of Erik's hook-ups beams, "I've got an English degree, I'm
not some stupid faggot"), his portrait of the couple's surrounding community is
oddly static and vague across these temporal jumps. We get little sense, for
instance, of how either the publishing or the independent filmmaking worlds change
over this tumultuous period, which saw both industries' distribution models
radically transformed.

Missed opportunities aside,
Sachs's innate knowledge of this world resonates through his strong choices,
including the tender soundtrack of old Arthur Russell songs. Sachs more than
ably fills the gap between Woody Allen's hyper-stylized visions of the
Manhattan intelligentsia and Lena Dunham's glances at memoir-writing
twentysomethings, and he does it through his attention to the social codes and mating habits–frankly depicted–of this creative class as it enters its
thirties. What's most impressive, though, is the raw, clear-eyed depiction of
the central romance, a universal yarn of love, loss, and self-help that's
nevertheless grounded in the particulars of Erik's experience. Moving as Keep the Lights On is, the main takeaway is a sobering one: that a shared period with another
person can be a fundamentally isolating, individualistic experience–the time
in which we become the person we'll be next.