Strapped (2010)

Strapped (2010)

Director: Joseph Graham
Scenario: Joseph Graham
Genre: Drama
Country: USA
Year: 2010
Duration: 95 min

Actors: Ben Bonenfant, Artem Mishin, Michael Carlisi, Carlo D'Amore, Katherine Celio, Michael Klinger, Raphael Barker, Michael Vega

 

Description:

by David Lamble

San Francisco filmmaker Joseph Graham's Strapped (Strand DVD) embeds us with a boyish hustler who spends a melancholy rainy night gliding between apartments in a haunted queer building. The Hustler, who tries on new first names as smoothly as he sheds his regulation red hoodie, jeans and T-shirt, offers a full-service bar of erotic favors for happy-hour prices – but no kissing, please.

Graham crafts a creepy ambiance in a succession of shabby spaces the denizens call home, which the Hustler appropriates as his stages. Somewhere between an old codger's leaky penthouse and the dark bowels of the laundry room, we suspect that someone could turn up dead. Sure enough, the Hustler is ambushed in the laundry room by a married guy, a backdoor bandit who quickly turns violent. Rescue comes from an elderly leather guy, Sam (former Colt model Paul Gerrior).

Graham wants us to forget every canard about beastly rent-boys being either scheming sociopaths or delusional losers whose path to destruction is guaranteed by the curtain. Strapped 's boy, called Adam in the script, plays his clients skillfully, only hinting at baser motives. Adam is a sensual Candide who strives never to reprise his tricks.

A movie rule of thumb holds if the hero is having too good a time too early, he's due a comeuppance. Graham and his sultry lead, film newcomer Ben Bonenfant, keep us guessing as to whether Adam will elude all who mean him harm. Or will the merry rent-boy someday turn into a gigolo version of Falstaff, who was 40 when he mused that every man "has the face he deserves."

Kudos to a first-rate production crew, especially director of photography Matthew Boyd for keeping us on edge with a shadowy lighting scheme that could serve a queer vampire tale as well as a quirky bedroom farce. Strapped allows us to care for a plucky boy who thinks he'll never be kissed.

On the record

Writer/director Joseph Graham spent a peripatetic childhood – Texas, California, Missouri – with many of his happier memories playing out in St. Louis, where he recalls trips to Cardinal baseball games with his grandfather. Now happily situated with a boyfriend in the city of St. Francis, Graham is enjoying the fruits of a second hardscrabble indie-film shoot while looking forward to the debut of another movie project, Beautiful Something.

Sprawled out on my black office couch, Graham riffed on the transformational magic of finding the right boy for the first kiss, while his theatre-trained actors shivered during 12 cold nights in a San Francisco warehouse.

"I remember my first kiss, and how it rocked my toes: under a bridge in St. Louis, what a kisser! I wanted the audience to experience that cosmic kiss as the Hustler did, so I was careful during all the other sex scenes to keep the performers separated, you never see them in the same shot during sex. So when we get to the kiss, not only do we have two performers in the shot for the first time, but we have this wonderful music, in-camera and post-camera lighting effects – we almost went a little overboard – but I really wanted the audience to feel this, and the character says, 'Nobody's ever kissed me like this before!'

"The older man, Sam, was written specifically for Paul Gerrior, who I had done plays with. What a voice! What a kindness he brings. Paul was a Colt model in the 70s, and even at 72, he has this great virility to him, not in a threatening or lecherous daddy way, but a kind, wise way. All but two of these actors were straight. It took a good deal of courage and trust on all our parts to move forward.

"I had about 600 people respond to an open call for the Hustler. Half quickly left when they saw what the material was, half of the remainder simply weren't right physically, and then I tested about 60 people. I needed an actor who could be a chameleon. A good friend contacted me from the Colorado Shakespeare Company, where he was performing with a young actor, Ben Bonenfant. I'll never forget the first thing Ben said. 'I read the script, and I got to tell you that it scares me.' Then he added, 'That makes me want to do it.' That's when I knew I was talking to a real actor."