* * * (out of 4)
While his contemporary, Todd Haynes, advanced from his early '90s New Queer Cinema entry, Poison, going on to make Safe and Velvet Goldmine, not much has been heard from Tom Kalin. His version of the Leopold and Loeb story, Swoon, opened simultaneously with Poison. Kalin went on to co-produce I Shot Andy Warhol with Christine Vachon and wrote the screenplay for the disastrous Cindy Sherman vehicle, Office Killer, but has not directed another feature to date.
It's a pity. Despite Swoon's shortcomings as a narrative film, Kalin shows remarkable visual prowess, shooting in beautiful, clean black and white. He knows how to eke meaning out of the proximity between two characters in a room, or reveal character in the way someone wears a coat or smokes a cigarette.
The surface ripples with a dangerously polite veneer of artificial charm. One could say the same for the characters of Leopold and Loeb, those overconfident boy geniuses who immersed themselves in a kidnapping, and, ultimately, murder. The tone is strong, but the content of the film feels flimsy because Kalin's primary concern is those surfaces. The set decoration, combining modern technology (push button telephones) with early 20th century commodities (clunky typewriters), is impeccable but seems ill defined, without a soul. Why did Kalin opt to make those choices - out of budgetary restrictions or because it was an inspired idea? It's an interesting stunt, but little more.
While the film lacks coherence, it features some wonderfully poetic glimpses, like the scene where Leopold and Loeb comb each other's hair. There is also an impressive sequence - a series of slides showing faces, and how the shape of their nose can tell you whether they are homosexual, the indent of their brow can reveal them to be moody. The faux-scientific "info-mercials" in the film are amusing and clever, if also arch and smug. The film also earns points for being sexy and sassy, bold for its time in its depiction of passionate encounters between gay men.
It amounts to a film which seems more interesting than good, but I'll take interesting over most of the limp, rote, money driven indie flicks which have been emerging from Sundance in recent years. Those projects seem more concerned with their box office gross than making a quality feature. Tom Kalin has a voice as a filmmaker which has been kept in the dark since Swoon, and though the end results are mixed I'd willingly follow if he took us down another tangled cinematic path somewhere in the 21st Century.
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