Hold­ing the Man

The title is a ref­er­ence to a rule in Aus­tralian foot­ball that for­bids tack­ling an oppo­nent who is not in pos­ses­sion of the ball. There’s plen­ty of scenes in this film of male bod­ies col­lid­ing with ath­let­ic vigour, though also with the kind of ten­der­ness which may seem for­eign to the blokey phys­i­cal­i­ty that comes with con­tact sports. It’s a smart joke about a soci­ety that fierce­ly reg­u­lates the nature of roman­tic rela­tion­ships, but it’s also the fun­ni­est thing about this oth­er­wise very straight­for­ward gay love story.

Adapt­ed from a mem­oir by writer, actor and activist Tim Con­i­grave, the film starts in the ​’70s and sails head­long into the AIDS epi­dem­ic of the ​’80s. Tim (Ryan Corr) and John (Craig Stott) find each oth­er in the cau­tious claus­tro­pho­bia of school, they drift apart in the wider world of col­lege and gay clubs, and then find a renewed love when one of them is diag­nosed with the dis­ease. It’s a fair­ly neat divi­sion into three acts, though through­out there are chrono­log­i­cal jumps to sun­nier scenes of Tim writ­ing his mem­oir, as well as the bio­log­i­cal death sen­tence that casts a trag­ic shad­ow over the remain­der of the film.

A lot can hap­pen in 15 years, and there’s some sat­is­fy­ing, eco­nom­i­cal sto­ry­telling here. But when packed into the frame of this epic struc­ture, it can be frus­trat­ing­ly con­densed. Espe­cial­ly with the wider polit­i­cal con­text only hint­ed at, what would have felt real and vital for the char­ac­ters is only briefly sketched out for the viewer.

There are, how­ev­er, some moments that shock the sto­ry out of its speedy progress. In one scene, Tim inter­views an HIV pos­i­tive man as research for a play. The man is already fad­ing away, his mind erod­ed into delir­i­um by tox­o­plas­mo­sis, one of the infec­tions against which AIDS leaves a body defence­less. It’s scari­er than the wards of ema­ci­at­ed patients; it’s the con­fu­sion of a man whose world is being bro­ken down around him by some­thing total­ly incom­pre­hen­si­ble and indif­fer­ent to love.