Lit­tle Men

He’s been mak­ing fea­tures for 20 years, but it seemed that with Love is Strange, Mem­phis-born, New York-based writer/​director Ira Sachs reached crit­i­cal mass. Art­house audi­ences real­ly respond­ed to love­ly old gay cou­ple John Lith­gow and Alfred Moli­na as they were sud­den­ly cast adrift on the Man­hat­tan prop­er­ty mar­ket. Yet the film had so much more to offer, not least a tan­ta­lis­ing por­trait of friend­ship between two insep­a­ra­ble teenage boys. Par­ents, need­less to say, jumped to con­clu­sions about their sex­u­al­i­ty, though Sachs, him­self open­ly gay, did not – refus­ing to over-delin­eate the specifics of the abid­ing con­nec­tion between them.

As it hap­pens, all that was but a tri­al run for this lat­est offer­ing, which, if any­thing, deliv­ers an even more diaphanous por­tray­al of for­ma­tive male­ness, fea­tur­ing an ado­les­cent duo whose rela­tion­ship is again tricky to define. More­over, since prop­er­ty val­ues are indeed the inter­na­tion­al lan­guage of the mid­dle class­es, Sachs uses a saga about Brook­lyn gen­tri­fi­ca­tion as a sort of bour­geois lure, con­jur­ing up a sce­nario where nice cou­ple Greg Kin­n­ear (as a strug­gling off-Off-Broad­way actor) and Jen­nifer Ehle (a ther­a­pist who’s the real bread­win­ner) inher­it a flat which comes with a retail unit below – cur­rent­ly occu­pied by a kind­ly Chilean dress­mak­er (Pauli­na Gar­cía) whose rather gen­er­ous lease is about to expire.

Con­flict looms, but that doesn’t stop the two same-age boys from upstairs and down­stairs instant­ly hit­ting it off. Kinnear’s shy, arty son (Theo Taplitz) comes out of his shell around his out­go­ing His­pan­ic neigh­bour (Michael Bar­bi­eri), who in turn val­ues the former’s advice giv­en his aspi­ra­tions to attend a pres­ti­gious per­form­ing arts school.

Some­body some­where will no doubt use the term ​‘bro­mance’ to describe what pass­es between them, but that’s crass­ly wide of the mark. In a seem­ing­ly curi­ous ref­er­ence point, Sachs nicks a plot device from Yasu­jiro Ozu’s silent clas­sic I was Born, But…, hav­ing the two kids here also take a vow of silence in response to sharp­en­ing hos­til­i­ties between the par­ents. In fact, Ozu’s por­trait of naughty scamps at their most care­free is duly rel­e­vant, since Lit­tle Men cap­tures its sub­ject at a point just before they lose an inno­cent recep­tiv­i­ty to all that’s beau­ti­ful in this world and enter the adult realm of sex­u­al anx­i­ety and, well, stuff like bick­er­ing over rental values.

Done bad­ly, all this could play like a tired mid­dle-aged fake take on glo­ri­ous youth, but Sachs sum­mons up a chaste sin­cer­i­ty that’s some­how aching­ly free of cyn­i­cism. He’s cast won­der­ful­ly well, Taplitz’s foal-like fragili­ty play­ing right off against Barbieri’s Tra­vol­ta swag­ger-in-the-mak­ing, and the shots of them glid­ing through the streets on roller blades are almost dream-like in their inten­si­ty, cap­tur­ing a moment that’s soon going to slip through time’s fingers.

A word too for America’s most under­rat­ed actor, Greg Kin­n­ear, who puts in a tow­er­ing per­for­mance as the lov­ing father, so mired in the bot­tom­less dis­ap­point­ment of his own mediocre life, that it indeli­bly taints his advice to his son, who real­ly needs inspir­ing pos­i­tiv­i­ty rather than dire warn­ings. Yes, life is com­pli­cat­ed, love is strange, but what’s so affect­ing about Sachs’s film is its ulti­mate belief that the kids will, some­how, be all right.