MOVIE REVIEW : ‘Langston’ Dramatizes Black Gay Experience

British film maker Isaac Julien’s elegant meditation on black gay sexuality, “Looking for Langston” (at the Nuart Sunday and Monday), has outraged the estate of Langston Hughes because it depicts the late poet as being homosexual.

The Hughes estate succeeded in preventing the film from being shown at the Los Angeles International Gay and Lesbian Film and Video Festival last July, even though it had aired on the BBC, and forced Julien to remove a fragment of a Hughes poem.

At the beginning of the black-and-white, 42-minute film, the voice of writer Toni Morrison, speaking at the funeral of James Baldwin, is heard saying: “Homosexuality was a sin against the race and had to be kept a secret, even if a widely shared one.”

Set primarily to the words of another poet, Essex Hemphill, and the music of Blackberri, “Looking for Langston” intercuts archival material, mainly of the Harlem Renaissance of the ‘20s, with poetic vignettes dramatizing a range of black gay experience up to the present.

The key setting is a gay nightclub that looks like a corner of an ancient Gothic church where tuxedo-clad men--mostly blacks--pursue each other. Among them is Alex (Ben Ellison), who bears a striking resemblance to the young Hughes and who zeroes in on a tall, spectacularly-muscled man (Matthew Baido). Their subsequent scenes in the nude are as chaste as George Platt Lynes photographs, their bodies sculpted in light and shadow.

Julien treats Hughes as an icon, as a point of departure to consider the oppressed state of black gays through the decades, of their exploitation by white gays, and of the specter of AIDS and of the bitter aftermath of the Harlem Renaissance when black artists and writers “went out of style” with white sophisticates and intellectuals. The film is as much a celebration of James Baldwin as it is of Langston Hughes, and by extension, all creative black people. “Looking for Langston” is exceptionally poignant and imaginative.

That description doesn’t quite fit Sandy Daley’s Warhol-like half-hour “Mapplethorpe: Robert Having His Nipple Pierced” (1970), which, as the title spells out, depicts the late photographer undergoing the procedure while cradled by his lover.

Visually, the film is actually as discreet as “Looking for Langston,” but it is accompanied on the sound track by Patti Smith rambling on and on about her own sex life, sexual attitudes and bodily functions in unrelenting crudeness and even ignorance. Regardless of what point Daley was trying to make by way of contrast, the effect is to suggest a gratuitous misogyny. Both films are Times-rated Mature.