Andrew Haigh

Too often, filmmakers treat age as a character trait in and of itself. The elderly are depicted rarely in cinema, and, the few times that they are shown, their seniority often dominates their characterization to the point where anything else about them gets occluded. Some notable exceptions are Michael Haneke’s Amour and David Lynch’s The Straight Story, but films such as these are outnumbered by the bland Best Exotic Marigold Hotel films and their ilk. Most frequently, films mark their aged subjects as “old” and show little interest in them beyond that.

45 Years Written by Andrew Haigh Directed by Andrew Haigh UK, 2015 From director Andrew Haigh (Weekend, HBO’s Looking) comes 45 Years, a film framed around the isolating nature of enduring romantic love and how closely we tie our sense of self to an idealized notion of becoming one with a partner. Kate and Geoff Mercer …

In Looking’s first season, the show’s creators opted against showing much explicit sex or nudity on screen. While its HBO brethren Girls and Game of Thrones pull no punches in their depiction of naked (mainly female) flesh, Looking mostly opts to cut away from its characters at their most intimate moments. Some have accused the show of soft-balling its gay content in order to make comfortable a large mainstream audience that isn’t tuning in anyway. Looking Top to Bottom changes course and lets it all hang out, showing gay male nudity in both sexual and non-sexual contexts. This neither enhances nor detracts from this particular episode, but it’s a tonal shift worth noting, and adds one more tool (pun intended) to the show’s arsenal.

The second season of Looking began last week with a strong episode focused on the friendship between Patrick, Dom, and Augustin. The second episode, “Looking for Results,” switches gears a little bit, concentrating on Patrick’s relationship with Kevin, a worrisome sign for someone who felt Patrick’s romantic entanglements were given too much emphasis in the first season. But Looking is a much more confident show now, able to focus on secondary characters without losing sight of its central trio. The result is a totally entertaining half hour of television and a sign that Looking is beginning to know exactly what kind of show it wants to be.

Looking is back for a second season on HBO after its uneven but promising initial run last year. A lot of the criticism directed towards the show’s first season was unfair, particularly the complaint that it focused solely on a group of upwardly mobile, educated, mostly white, young gay men from San Francisco at the expense of less affluent, more diverse LGBT communities everywhere. This is a totally valid grievance that should be directed at HBO and Hollywood in general. Shows about older, poorer people of color rarely make it to series, especially on pay cable. But Looking is a story about these specific characters and was never trying to be representative of any larger community. To ask anything more of any one show is unrealistic. My biggest problems with the first season were that it lacked much of an arc, the stakes for the characters remained low, and the initial premise (the friendship between the three leads) was largely unexplored in favor of following their divergent romantic exploits. By the end of the season, I didn’t really know much about Patrick, Augustín, or Dom, and knew nothing about why they were friends with each other.

Looking’s sixth episode, “Looking in the Mirror”, is a very pleasant surprise. There’s an energy and vitality in this half hour that had been missing from the show up until now. Maybe it’s because almost all the characters finally interact with one another, or maybe it’s because the editing and dialogue are paced less leisurely than usual. But a theme Looking has been exploring – going after what you want rather than what you should want – comes into focus and propels the stories forward in an exciting way.

Well, “Looking at Your Browser History” sure gives more ammo to those who find this show boring. There are absolutely no crazy orgies, and even a bathhouse sex scene happens completely off screen. In fact, this episode veers almost completely away from sex and dating, concerning itself with the career and job anxieties of its main characters. Patrick is mortified (yet again) when the cute British guy he clumsily flirts with at a work party might become his new boss. Agustín unwisely insults his boss, a middle-aged artist who makes chair sculptures, and gets fired. Dom wants to poach a chef at Zuni Café for his not yet existent Portuguese chicken-centric restaurant, but has no money or investors to actually get his dream off the ground.

If Patrick was a little awkward on his date last week, in this episode he takes his nervous, spazzy outbursts to cringe-inducing, questionably racist new lows. Remember Richie, the sexy Latin doorman Patrick brushed off on MUNI? Patrick decides to date him, but only as a “fuck buddy” instead of a potential “boyfriend”.

The first scene in the pilot of Looking is a clever fake-out. Two guys anonymously hooking up in a park is the most clichéd signifier of gay male sexuality out there. Here it is for the hundredth time – the awkward fumbling, the perfunctory kissing, the premature interruption. But it turns out that Patrick, the recipient of this sad outdoor handjob, has wandered into the woods as a sort of joke. He and his friends wonder if gay dudes still do stuff like that, and he decides to find out. The characters in HBO’s new half-hour are both self-conscious of the old stereotypes and confident enough to be unembarrassed when they occasionally fall into them.