****/****
starring Andrew Scott, Paul Mescal, Jamie Bell, Claire Foy
screenplay by Andrew Haigh, based on the novel by Taichi Yamada
directed by Andrew Haigh
by Walter Chaw What if I could? What if I did and they were there, my parents as I remember them when I was 12, and I was not so fixed in time and grief? When I was a child and needed them even though I thought I didn’t, but now, as the old man who knows I still do. What if I went to the place where I grew up and rang the bell and they answered it, and I could tell them the things I had done that would make them proud of me? And the things I never could tell them because I was afraid they’d reject me again for everything I could’ve helped and everything I couldn’t. I can see them in the living room. I can see them in the kitchen. What if they, knowing how short the time had gotten, could tell me what was in their hearts so I didn’t have to wonder? Was there love there that had hardened? Or had it retreated to an armoured place to protect it from breaking? In Andrew Haigh’s All of Us Strangers, a man tells his new lover how something awful happened to him once, but it’s okay because it was a long time ago. His lover corrects him: “A long time ago” doesn’t matter when you’re talking about terrible things. “Oh,” the man says, and quieter, “oh.”
Adam (Andrew Scott) is a writer living alone in an empty highrise where he spends his days and nights bathed in the glow of a television he pays no attention to. Standing on the street during an automated fire drill, he notices a neighbour in the only other lit window in his building: drunk, sad Harry (Paul Mescal), who approaches Adam in the hallway after the “all clear” and says to him, “I saw you,” but I don’t think he could have. He asks how Adam bears it. “Bears what?” Harry gestures at the empty spaces between and around them in their abandoned city. “I’ll keep the vampires from your door,” Harry says as Adam shuts the door on him, a line from Frankie Goes to Hollywood‘s “Power of Love”–a deep cut but a very fine one, maybe the finest one on their “Welcome to the Pleasuredome” album. Adam used to have a copy of it when he was a kid, bullied and closeted, living in a tiny cottage with his parents. Harry’s using it as code, I suspect, to confirm Adam is gay, and Adam’s shy recognition of the line is code, too, that he’s terribly lonesome and it’s been a long time since someone has known the right things to say to him. Adam doesn’t believe Harry is real. I don’t, either, not after this rejection of a clumsy, drunken advance. I don’t think he said exactly the right words from exactly the right song (the one no one has heard before, though if they had, they would never forget it), and I think the rest of All of Us Strangers is a lonely writer’s fantasy that he could ever live without shame and regret. Harry can’t be real because Harry is who Adam needs. Their courtship is tender, tentative: Harry frank and amorous, Adam shy, out of practice, and embarrassed. Whether he’s real or not, Harry is a projection of buttoned-up Adam’s dormant confidence, his repressed romanticism grown strange from airless periods of neglect.
Harry asks to sleep over, and eventually, Adam relents. Adam dreams he’s back in the neighbourhood of his youth. He knocks on the door of his parents’ home–parents he lost at the age of 12 to a car accident–and his mother (Claire Foy) answers. “It’s you. I can tell by the eyes.” Eyes become an important metaphor in this film about being seen. It’s not more complicated than that, but it does pack an emotional wallop. I’m thinking of a scene where Adam relives the last Christmas his family spent together, only this time with him as an adult and his parents aware that he’s grown to be “queer”–and a writer, and alone. His mother had acted poorly when she learned in his imagination, and she wants to apologize for that. She does it by dressing the tree while singing along to The Pet Shop Boys‘ cover of the Johnny Christopher, Mark James, and Wayne Carson Thompson standard “You Were Always On My Mind,” directing certain lyrics at her boy at her feet by looking at him with Foy’s startling blue eyes.
And I guess I never told you
I am so happy that you’re mine
If I made you feel second-best
I’m so sorry I was blind
There’s the eyes thing again. “You were always on my mind,” she sings to him; it’s the best she can do, and it’s more than she ever did–and now more than she ever could. It’s what Adam needed to hear his dead mother say to him, thus it’s what he has her say to him. After his parents tell him he needs to stop visiting them in his dreams, his father (Jamie Bell) apologizes for never being able to say he loves him when it might have mattered the most. Then he holds him. And when he does, I can smell cigarettes, shaving cream, and the faint hint of sweat I will always associate with my father, who will be dead 20 years this month. What if I knocked at the door to the house where I grew up and I was 12 and also 50, and my father answered and knew it was me? What if he said he was sorry, and in the saying of it, I could finally say it, too? What if he opened the door I couldn’t open so we could close it together when there was still time? Who would I be then? What could I have been?
All of Us Strangers is a love story and a tragedy, a fantasy and a horror film, a drama and a sexy romance–sexy and doomed. Adam and Harry go to a club, where Harry gives Adam something to snort. “Take care of me?” Adam asks him. Harry promises he’ll do his best. But Adam gets lost for a long time before he’s found again, and by then, it’s too late. Adam takes Harry to his childhood home, but the house is dark and locked tight. “Where are we?” Harry wants to know. Adam doesn’t understand why his parents won’t let them in, although he can see them standing there, stock-still and pale, in the dark of a crypt-cold kitchen. Adam should ask why Harry can be there at all. There is a peculiar truism that the smaller the audience for something appears to be–when a piece of art is granular in its details to the extent that it’s fair to ask whether there’s any audience for it beyond the author–the larger the audience actually is. The miracle of being human is the more you flay your chest, lay it bare to muscle, then sinew, then bone, exposing your heart fluttering there in its cage, the more familiar your humiliation becomes. The only universal is the personal. The first shot of All of Us Strangers is Adam alone on a couch, and the last one is, arguably, Adam by himself in bed; where in the former he is bathed in diseased cathode blue, in the latter he is haloed in the golden freedom of a man comfortable living with his ghosts. I’m still haunted by mine and by the thought of what would happen if my mom were there, too, when I came to call. My dad would recognize me. My mom would find me food. What would happen when she asked if I was “okay,” and I could finally tell her, “No”? What if being not-okay would be all right? What now? What then?
