Mike McCahill 

Keep the Lights On – review

Moodpiece specialist Ira Sachs has directed perhaps the most lived-in film of 2012, says Mike McCahill
  
  

Keep the Lights on
Hard-gained experience … Keep the Lights on. Photograph: PR

With 2005's Forty Shades of Blue and 2007's Married Life, Ira Sachs announced himself as a director of thoughtful, character-driven moodpieces. His latest is an uncommonly sensitive and mature drama about the on-off romance that unfolds over a decade between Erik (Thure Lindhardt), a Danish film-maker working in New York, and Paul (Zachary Booth), a volatile literary agent nursing a crack habit. The sex is great; it's the emotions, registered in piercing, lingering closeups, that neither can handle. The realisation the two head towards isn't easy, but it's faultlessly, heart-on-the-sleeve honest, and the leads make poetry out of Sachs's point: how memorable and formative even our unsuccessful encounters can be. Every frame pulses with hard-gained experience: it may be the most lived-in film of 2012, and certainly counts among the most moving.

 

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