Harris Dickinson, a newcomer, first got attention for his portrayal of the closeted Brooklyn jock in Eliza Hittman's 2017 film "Beach Rats." Dickinson has a pale beautiful face, a semi-blank quality, and the sculpted body of a Greek God. This combination made him captivating in "Beach Rats," which was a tactile exploration of the erotic possibilities of male bodies, the sexual energy inherent in all that tension. Dickinson's surface was a smokescreen, a camouflage, and the same thing happens in "Postcards from London," although here, subtext is obliterated. Hittman's film was all subtext, and Dickinson's particular qualities flourished in that wordless space. Here, it's all text. Everyone talks about Jim's beauty obsessively and he accepts the attention with equanimity. "Postcards from London" is not meant to be a psychological study, and it's not meant to be realistic. But since Jim comes across as a wide-eyed nonentity (no fault of Dickinson's: he plays the role as written), it's hard to know what to think of his intellectual and artistic journey.
The film is pretty coy about sex. This may be part of the point, but it creates a semi-arch mood, tough to take in large doses. One needs only to compare "Postcards from London" to the fever-dream of Rainer Werner Fassbinder's "Querelle," adapted from Jean Genet's novel, to sense some of the problems in McLean's approach. "Postcards from London" wears its influences on its sleeve, and it has "Querelle" written all over it. Fassbinder is name-checked in the film, as is Genet, and there are a couple of scenes in a bar reminiscent of Querelle's entire seedy-glamorous aesthetic, where stylized sailors in white sailor hats pose around a pool table. "Postcards from London" lacks the subversive charge of Fassbinder, not to mention Genet, or any of the other artists mentioned, whose works came out of a potent blend of sex, beauty, suffering and criminality.
Every artist has to struggle to wrest his or her own work free from the influence of other artists. American poet Hart Crane did not feel free to start his own work until he had tackled T.S. Eliot, whose influence was so gigantic it silenced him (Crane confessed to poet Allen Tate, "You see it is such a fearful temptation to imitate him that at times I have been almost distracted.") Oscar Wilde, as a student at Oxford, wrote provocative papers about the men who helped form his tastes—Walter Pater, Algernon Swinburne - before he emerged, eventually, as his own brilliant creation. Oscar Wilde served the same function for many of his contemporaries, who were so bowled over by him they feared the obliteration of their own work. (After meeting Oscar Wilde in Paris, André Gide apologized to Paul Valéry for being out of touch: "Forgive my being silent: After Wilde, I only exist a little.")
Something like this is going on in "Postcards from London." It's a personal film about the artists who matter to McLean (the end credits includes a long list of painters and their works). His attempt to break free from the hold these artists have over his imagination is a work in progress, as evidenced by "Postcards," but there's still a lot here that's thought-provoking.
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