“When you live with people, you know them better than you care for.”

George and Ben are an older gay couple in New York who, after 39 years together, decide to tie the knot and get married. No sooner have they cemented their happiness than Ben looses his job as a music teacher at a Catholic school. They're ok with him being gay man, not ok with him being a publicly married gay man. Unable to manage the mortgage, the men are forced to sell up and elect to split up until they can find somewhere else to live: Ben stays on the couch with friends, George moves in with his nephew.

So starts Ira Sachs quiet meditation on relationships, seen through the prism of a couple forced apart by circumstance. It's also about where it stops for in the course of the next eighty minutes, Love Is Strange seems to go nowhere particularly interesting, nowhere profound, nowhere at all really. Rather than a rich evocation of long term love, mostly this is a series of vignettes that reflect the inconvenience of having, or being, an unwanted guest. Feeling most of the pain is Kate (Marisa Tomeii – The Wrestler), a writer whose peaceful working space is shattered by chatty Uncle George.

At 50, Sachs (an openly gay director) is clearly being drawn to matters personal and this marks a reasonable extension of his 2007 film Married Life which also probed (though more causticly) relationships under fire. With the excellent John Lithgow (Rise of the Planet of the Apes) and Alfred Molina (An Education) in the lead roles, he has at his command a rich resource, the pair have a confident presence and a terrific chemistry. Unfortunately, and here the film's greatest weakness, the plot requires they spend little screen time together forcing Tomeii and a thin support cast to pick up the slack.

After a lack-lustre first act, Sachs' compounds the film's ambling nature by padding nearly every scene and in turn constantly undoes any dramatic tension he begins to assemble. It often seems there's barely enough material here for a one hour tele-play, much less a feature film. And that shouldn’t be the case. There are many threads worthy of examination: the strain Ben and George place on their friends, the family dysfunction that is ignited plus the fiery question mark that's dropped above George's teenage nephew-in-law. Yet the most interesting of all, the heart-wrenching pain caused when a couple of 40 years are forced to separate, is barely touched upon.

Once saddled with unexplained plot holes and the director's studious style, the potential of Love Is Strange runs out faster than rainbow flags at Fair Day. Given the context of Sachs' love story and the thematic opportunities he sets up, this is such a disappointment from an often frustrating director. Again he's created an exasperating film where you want to care for his characters so much more than he gives you reason to do so. There are precious few films made about older people, even less about older gay people. Sadly, this is a squandered opportunity to bring something to either discussion.

// COLIN FRASER

Previewed on DVD, 26 February 2015