Swoon
by Tom Kalin
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DVD Cover Information
Actor: Craig Chester, Daniel Schlachet, Michael Kirby, Michael Stumm, Ron VawterDirector: Tom Kalin
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Original Language)
Format: Closed-captioned, Color, Director's Cut, DVD-Video, NTSC
Picture Format: 1.33:1
Running Time: 95 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2004-08-24
Audience Rating: R (Restricted)
Studio: Strand Releasing
Movie Reviews of Swoon
Movie Review: Beauty and the beasts
Summary: 4 Stars
Tom Kalin's 1992 film is a landmark of what Ruby Rich famously called "the new Queer Cinema," and though it's filled with flaws, it's so gorgeous and haunting that it stays with you long after you've forgotten other films that are objectively better. Like ROPE or COMPULSION before it, SWOON seems to dramatize what was known for decades as the Crime of the Century, the morder of fourteen year-old Bobby Franks by two brilliant and wealthy Chicago college students, Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, who wanted to prove they could commit the perfect crime. Other version of the story have made the homoerotic nature of the relationship between Leopold and Loeb only implied: here Kalin makes it the absolute center of the story, and the film is as much about how frustrated two beautiful and gifted young gay men are when they cannot express their sexuality openly but have the money and the leisure to do almost anything else.
Certain sequences of the film are absolutely heartstopping in their beauty, in particular the beautifully photographed opening sequence of the pair's friends photographed against a hazy sky. There's a great deal of pleasure to be had in Kalin's ingenuity in creating 1920s sets and costumes and props to make the whole thing look authentic (though his trick of using anachronistic contemporary props--such as a push-button payphone--looks to be mostly a dodge he passes off as an hommage ? Derek Jarman because he couldn't figure out how to get authentic props).
The problems with the film are that in the end it's a bit empty-headed. The analogy between gay men and criminals is done in a very heavy-handed manner, particularly at the end when Kalin has a montage of photos of "criminal types" that are clearly all his friends in real life. Moreover, the film seems to treat Leopold and Loeb as if they were mere martyrs to homophobia; very little is made of how much Bobby Franks and his parents suffered from their crime. (Bobby is hardly seen in the film at all, and when he is he's usually not photographed directly face-on.) It's one thing for Derek Jarman to present Edward II as being martyred on account of his sexuality; but Leopold and Loeb? Despite this, I recommend seeing the film if only for its cinematography and for the excellent performance of Craig Chester as Nathaniel Leopold.
Summary of Swoon
Swoon was the rage of the 1992 film festival circuit, as well as part of a wave of gay-themed films that used independent channels to reach the mainstream audience. Written and directed by Tom Kalin and with a cast of mostly unknowns, the movie looks back at the Leopold-Loeb thrill-killing of 1924. Shooting in black and white and using impressionistic imagery, Kalin creates a hallucinatory mix of dream and drama, while giving the story a homosexual perspective that makes it seem new. Where earlier films (such as Hitchcock's Rope and Richard Fleischer's Compulsion) only hinted that these characters might be gay, Kalin takes it as a given and examines the pair's treatment by the police and press based on their sexuality. Might be too arty for some tastes, but others find it intriguingly challenging. --Marshall FineDrama DVD Video
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