Film review: The Boys in The Band (1975) ****
A charming flat, a group of friends, a birthday and the weight of each existence
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| Directed by: William Friedkin |
Happy birthday, subconscious moral punisher
Michael, a Roman Catholic, recovering alcoholic and sporadically employed writer, is preparing to throw a birthday party for one of his friends, Harold. Another friend, Donald, who describes himself as a loser who has moved out of town, arrives and helps Michael prepare. Alan, Michael's former college friend (presumably heterosexual), calls with an urgent need to see Michael, who reluctantly agrees and invites him to come.
Among his other invited friends are Emory, an extravagant stereotypical interior designer, Hank, a teacher who will soon be divorced, and Larry, a fashion photographer, are a couple but fighting monogamy. And also Bernard, who is a lovely black bookstore clerk There are so many latent problems among friends that all it takes is the arrival of a strange element for these regrets and resentments to begin to leak.
The idea is to imprison them, to create a climate of claustrophobia, which is built with acute precision, even taking the precaution of making it rain in the city, which forces all nine characters to come out from the balcony, from the open air, and to share the same tiny space. The hectic pace of the first hour of the film is broken by the arrival of birthday boy Harold.
Everyone brings their fears to the surface, except the birthday boy, who watches others fall little by little while he smokes a suspicious cigarette, drinks cautiously and punctuates the acts of the characters, as a voice of morality and conscience.
At the same time as everything is said, apparently nothing can be solved. The fact that the story takes place in a single night enhances those relationships, as if that night and opportunity could not be postponed. In the end, there is only the brief sense of support or the understanding that everything there is momentary, that tomorrow will be a new day and the frustrations may not carry the same weight as today.
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