The best scene of “Call Me by Your Name” has nothing to do with fruit, but a frank father-son conversation. Brittle to the point of breaking, Timothée Chalamet sits on the couch, arms crossed, resenting his dad for acknowledging the source of his anguish. “You’re too smart not to know how rare, how special, what you two had was,” Michael Stuhlbarg tells the boy. “I may have come close, but I never had what you two have. … How you live your life is your business.”
Gay men rarely receive that kind of acceptance from anyone, much less their parents, and hearing those words uttered in “Call Me by Your Name” went a long way to heal that wound for many who didn’t get that satisfaction from their own folks. Half a dozen years later, Andrew Haigh’s “All of Us Strangers” feels like a feature-length expansion of that scene — or at least the sentiment it evokes — as a gay man who never had the chance to come out to his parents returns home, surprised to find Mum and Dad waiting for him. They died in a car crash when he was 11, but here they are, curious and caring, greeting him with hugs and unconditional love.
Andrew Scott, an actor familiar to many as the “hot priest” from “Fleabag,” plays Adam, a forlorn soul with dewy brown eyes who could be Mark Ruffalo’s kid brother. Adam reconnects with his dead parents (Claire Foy and Jamie Bell) just as he’s getting to know a promising new boyfriend, Harry (a shaggy Paul Mescal, with mustache). The only other resident in Adam’s modern London apartment tower, Harry shows up at Adam’s door one night with a bottle of whiskey, three-quarters empty. He’s drunk and slightly desperate, and Adam sends him away. But things go better the next time they see each other, when Harry is sober. As the two grow attached, a sense of tragedy emerges around the fact that Adam’s parents will never be able to meet the partner who means so much to their son.
Loosely inspired by Japanese writer Taichi Yamada’s 1987 novel “Strangers,” Haigh’s low-key English-language adaptation is a curious kind of ghost story, at once incredibly tender and profoundly devastating as it slowly reveals its secrets. Best known as the creator of HBO’s landmark LGBT series “Looking,” Haigh takes the hetero source material and reconfigures it around his unapologetically gay protagonist, downplaying the supernatural elements while adding a uniquely queer emotional core.
What Adam experiences as he tells his Mum about his “special friend” is a familiar and potentially triggering fantasy for many gay men, even those whose parents are still living but have closed the door on their kids, unwilling to accept or even hear about their sexuality. No matter what we tell ourselves, it’s a perfectly human quality to crave our parents’ acceptance, and it’s touching to watch Adam get that. Mum has hang-ups, stuck as she is in the late-’80s mindset, when AIDS was a death sentence. Dad is more accepting (and in a strange way, seems to be cruising his son when they first see one another).
The film is calibrated as a cathartic experience, advancing to a series of wrenching goodbyes as its character realizes that whatever magic allowed him this reunion, he can’t spend eternity in its what-might-have-been embrace. Or can he? This isn’t a typical case of “therapy through screenwriting,” in which the act of filmmaking serves to mollify the creator’s childhood traumas. Instead, “All of Us Strangers” is therapy for the audience, or at least that specific segment of us who desperately need to hear our fathers say, “I’m sorry I never came in your room when you were crying.”
Harry serves a similar function in the film, proving to be a tender and considerate lover. “How about I kiss ya?” he asks Adam, taking it slow (though the encounter quickly escalates). This scene, in which male hands caress and undress hairy thighs, and which makes an almost political point of showing explicit proof of the pleasure they’ve shared, recalls Haigh’s remarkable debut feature, “Weekend.” That modest 2011 indie, since released by the Criterion Collection, took place entirely within the bubble of an extended discovery session between two strangers — an intense gay hookup in which sex and conversation suggested how compatible these lovers could be, only to end with them going their separate ways.
Haigh brings the same sense of intimacy to this movie, presenting us with characters who are willing to be vulnerable to partners they barely know. It’s sexy, of course, but also quite moving, as this kind of exposed honesty feels like the foundation for any relationship. Accompanying Adam and Harry through the getting-to-know-each-other stretch is nearly as satisfying as witnessing Adam get the support he needs from his parents. As he goes back for more — taking the train to see his folks, one at a time — a vague sense of conflict creeps into the film, suggesting that he’s clinging to something unhealthy, that he needs to move on. Could his Mum be right: Is homosexuality an inherently lonely kind of life? Or have things really gotten better since she passed, as he insists?
Working with a new team of collaborators (key among them DP Jamie Ramsay and composer Emilie Levienaise-Farrouch, both veterans of last year’s “Living”), Haigh strikes a dreamy liminal tone. “All of Us Strangers” opens with Adam’s face reflected in his apartment window, a haunting motif that continues till the end. Channeling a certain A24-like vibe, the film shares the memory-puzzle aspect of “Aftersun” in particular, so it’s fitting that Haigh cast Mescal, who played the narrator’s father in that film. The entire journey is not based in logic so much as a kind of emotional intuition, and as such, no two viewers will experience it the same way. What strikes some as manipulative will crack open others, as the film offers a kind of connection that’s all too rare, and maybe even impossible.
