A Home at the End of the World (2004)

The most frustrating, exhilarating and disquieting gay film I have seen… so far.Bobby is marked by death and ends up a young teenager with no family at all. He is adopted by the family of his best friend, Jonathan, with whom he had had some physical contact like most boys do. Their closeness can grow little by little but the two young men are so different that there is a chasm between their desire for mutual love.Bobby remains with his adoptive family and becomes a baker. Jonathan moves to New York to study at first but on the wrong motivation actually. His main character is that of a shy person who runs away as soon as someone has the slightest ever glimpse on his deeper and private life he wants to keep a secret. He is phenomenally in love with Bobby but cannot admit it in public. He ran when his own mother discovered the two of them on the point of kissing and a little bit more in their car. The mother would not even have protested but Jonathan got scared.When Bobby's adoptive family decides to move to Arizona in their older age Bobby asks Jonathan if he can join him in New York. Jonathan adores the idea and invites him over and there Bobby discovers Clare, the woman Jonathan is in love with and who is in love with him. Her only dream, after her divorce, is to get a child. So they start a ménage-à-trois and it could work well provided Jonathan accepted the idea of having a love relation with Bobby under Clare's accepting eye.The rest will be your discovery as for the details.But the film is very surprising and very sad in many ways. Clare will eventually leave with the daughter Rebecca one day insistently asking the father of the child if he wants to come along. He refuses to stay with the other man and finally realize, alone together, their life long love affair under no scrutinizing eye at all.That's absolutely fascinating: the shyness, the modesty, the shame and the shamelessness, the desire and the fear, the need to escape and the attraction in that gay couple that could live their passion along with Clare but one of the two cannot relax enough to do that. It is sorrowful to see how the woman and mother of the child accepts without actually saying so to move away with the child to let the two men free to live there love. And we are definitely saddened by the fact that this gay love affair that everyone accepts cannot be lived through without the two men being deprived of their own child, the woman they both love and who loves them both.Saddening and so beautiful for these two men to live in the dream and promise that one day the daughter will come back to inherit their beautiful house, their land and their business though that would be after an event they don't even identify but is highly probably death. For the meantime let them redecorate the girl's room for when she comes as an adult.You can't even cry on such a film. It is pure torture of the heart, the mind and anything reasonable in you. And that's the beauty of it.Dr Jacques COULARDEAU

I really have to read the back of the DVD box 'cause I wandered into a gay movie again.Being that this is a movie about a persecuted group of people, I have to say that I'm a tree huggin' liberal. I'm for equality down the line.But this was really pretentious. Done well, without a doubt. Good direction, acting and writing.But I really didn't like these people. Very dysfunctional. We're all dysfunctional, but really? If you're having sex with your best friend as a teenager, straight or not, and you expect to be just friends after that, then you have to reassess your common sense. Not to mention basing the rest of your life on that common sense.I get confused by these movies. They don't show gay men in a good light. Gay men can be gay men if they like. There are a lot of annoying straight people. I guess there are annoying gay men, too. But it doesn't work well when your heroes in a movie are annoying. Give it a try with action movies, the sexuality of the heroes are cursory at best. Let's try it with gay men, as an exercise.

A Home at the End of the World (2004)This is such an idealistic and yet realistic tale, set in real places, with real joys and tragedies, it will certainly get under your skin. I can see that some might find it maudlin, or there might be a sense of playing loose with the rules, but for me there are no rules when it comes to being as good as you can be, and there is a long distance from deeply felt to maudlin. This is deeply felt.And very well acted and written. All of the principles are disarming at times, they are so convincing. And it really is a big beautiful world when you do your best to make the most of it. Don't miss this one, and keep an open mind. It grows as it goes, and the earlier fragments gel and the story streamlines and solidifies, but it really needs those earlier pieces to give it depth, and to set it in time.

This movie disturbed me. The relationship with these two guys was dangerous and heart wrenching.The gay guy truly loved this other guy. But Colin used him and teased him when he wanted too.Then when they finally grow up and they move in together. Colin starts up with using him and teasing him - you know with the dancing and kissing and touching - something the gay man wanted from Colin for the longest time - then what does Colin do - fall in love with the weired fag hag they are living with. Then Colin does the unthinkable and sleeps with said fag hag - just as the gay man is coming home. Brilliant. Well of course the end result of the movie turned out exactly the way I thought it would. I'm not going to tell you here - but. At the end - I said out loud - so everyone could hear me - I said "Typical". And I got a lot of head nods and "MM-MMHM's" from the other movie goers.Typical ending, just like all of the other gay themed movies I have seen. The gay person is either beat to death, dies of a disease - or winds up alone, like always.