MOVIE REVIEW : ‘Together Alone’: A Tete-a-Tete Among Strangers

P.J. Castellaneta’s “Together Alone” (at the Nuart) offers a classic encounter. Two people meet in a bar, find they are mutually attracted, have sex--and then go about the business of getting to know each other. That the two people happen to be men, and that this happens to be the age of AIDS adds meaning and urgency to a situation that nevertheless transcends sexual orientation because Castellaneta’s two men are first of all human beings drawn in the round.

Bryan (Todd Stites), pleasant-looking, blond and clearly gay, is not in the habit of picking up men in bars, but the man (Terry Curry) he takes home to his apartment is something special: handsome, masculine, intelligent and sensitive. After watching the two men leaving the bar together, Castellaneta cuts to them awakening from a nap after sex. Bryan almost immediately gets post-coital jitters when he learns that the man lying comfortably beside him is not named Bill, as he had believed, but Brian. If Brian didn’t tell him his real name then would he tell him the truth about his HIV status? Bryan hadn’t asked that question, however, before they engaged in unsafe sex.

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The specter of AIDS that has so long loomed over the gay community acts like the pebble tossed in the still pond. The debate, which is forgivably, even necessarily preachy, that ensues between the two men over responsibility in regard to safe sex gradually gives way to mutual confession about painful first loves. As strangers the two men confide feelings, hopes and dreams to each other that they never would dare confide to those closest to them. Bryan and Brian are, perhaps without either realizing it, becoming friends.

It’s been said of “Together Alone” that it’s “one of the most honest, realistic and intimate conversations between two gay men to appear on screen.” The praise is deserved yet not entirely accurate, for in time we learn that Brian is bisexual. And the portrait of a bisexual that “Together Alone” offers may well be the most illuminating ever committed to film, as Brian reveals the complexities of his love of straight family life along with his need for men.

“Together Alone” sounds like a two-character play, and one can easily imagine it onstage, but Castellaneta wrote it for the screen. Abetted by a flexible and resourceful cameraman, David Dechant, and two talented and dedicated actors, Castellaneta sustains interest throughout, even through a couple of wearying, didactic passages. Winner of best picture awards at both Los Angeles’ and San Francisco’s gay and lesbian film festivals, “Together Alone” (Times-rated Mature for adult situations, blunt language) amazingly cost only $7,000 to make.