MQFF REVIEW: Burning Blue (2013, Dir. DMW Greer)

Two hot American fighter pilots bunking on the same aircraft carrier set aside their bravado and start a romantic relationship. Problem is one of the cops has a wife and the other has a girlfriend. Shit gets real when one of them touches the other's hair during a furlough foursome. Cue sexy angst.

(And, yes, I stole that blurb from my Free Fall post since this is basically the same film.)

I'm not quite sure what possessed director DMW Greer to be so coy in adapting his play 'Burning Blue' for the big screen. Back in 1995, when the work premiered in London, there may have been some argument for keeping the more sexual aspects of this "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" drama somewhat clandestine. But now, almost twenty years later, surely he could have signalled the men's love with something a little more than a brush of a hair, especially if that encounter is going to see both their lives ripped apart.

I mean, for fuck's sake, they've not even touched cocks and they start shedding wives and girlfriends and crying over each other.

And that's not even Burning Blue's biggest issue.

The top of that long list is the fact that the story already feels like it has already passed into insignificance. I don't mean to say that homophobia in the military is not a going concern (as the end titles fairly point out, DADT and other residual homophobia still blights the system) but, given that is the case, surely there are more immediate stories that could have been filmed. Or at least, Greer could have put it out there a little more forcibly that we weren't dealing with a contemporary story. I don't think I was clued into that fact until Bill Clinton was referred to as the president about an hour into the film.

That may well have been my slip up, but there are so many holes in Burning Blue that makes me suspect that it wasn't. The whole set-up holds less water than an episode of J*A*G. Anything too difficult or expensive to film is forced offscreen, or worse, covered with stock footage and atrocious green screen effects. When the actors are onscreen, they seldom appear to be anything more than young men playing dress-ups, and the melodrama-heavy screenplay does nothing to dispel that feeling.

All in all, this is material pushed beyond its worth, a film maker pushed beyond his capacity and a production pushed beyond its means.

Not one I can recommend.

★☆

Trailer:

Burning Blue screened as part of the 2014 Melbourne Queer Film Festival.