"Maybe I didn't treat you quite as good as I should. Maybe I didn't love you quite as often as I could. Little things I should have said and done I never took the time. You were always on my mind. You were always on my mind" - Always On My Mind, The Pet Shop Boys (version)
It's only natural to regret and one thing most of us regret, or will come to regret, in our lives will be the times we didn't tell people how we felt about them, specifically the times we didn't tell people how much we love them. For a lot of humanity, the love that exists between people who are close remains unspoken but there is a tacit acceptance it exists.
When those people are gone, that's when the hurt begins. In Andrew Haigh's excellent new film All Of Us Strangers (based on Taichi Yamada's novel Strangers) we're introduced to screenwriter Adam (Andrew Scott) and Adam's life seems to be dominated by the regret he feels at never being able to say goodbye to his parents, who both died in a car crash when Adam was just twelve years old.
He lives somewhere in North London, in a tower block that appears to be completely isolated except for a younger man called Harry (Paul Mescal, who is currently in the process of putting together an incredible body of work). One night, a whisky drenched Harry knocks on Adam's door and asks him if he fancies a drink - or something more.
Despite Adam being gay, and being interested, he turns Harry down but later on they meet, befriend each other, and enter into a physical and romantic relationship. The love scenes played out between the two of them are tender and feel genuine. Harry's more confident than Adam and he's also younger. Making jokes about watching old episodes of Top Of The Pops that were shown before he was born and listening intently as Adam talks about what it was liking growing up gay in the eighties.
When AIDS was a death sentence and homophobia was far more rife, and openly expressed, than it is now. Harry talks, briefly, about his own complicated family background but more often than not he is the carer for Adam, a man who is perhaps more troubled than we initially realise.
Adam takes a train to Sanderstead, near Croydon, where he grew up. He visits his parents' old house and when he knocks on the door they let him in. Mum (Claire Foy) and Dad (Jamie Bell, yes Billy Elliot all grown up) appear to still be living there and still living in the eighties if the Frank Bough style sweaters, Casio digital watches, and record player are anything to go by.
Stranger still, they greet Adam's return as if he was back from a holiday, or late back from the shops, rather than as a long lost son. Though, soon enough, Adam has to explain to his parents that he's gay (they accept this though his mum can't understand why gay marriage is now allowed - she just can't see the point) and while he's at home with them he reverts back to his childhood. Even, at one point, coming into their room in his pajamas and getting in bed between them.
His mum asks him if being gay is lonely. He replies it's not anymore. She then asks him if he's lonely and he says, quite rightly, that he is - but that it's not because he's gay. He looks at old photos, at his old records (Erasure, Frankie Goes To Hollywood, the clues were there mum and dad), and he reminisces about trips to Croydon's Whitgift Centre but what is going on? Is he dreaming this? Have the ghosts of his parents reappeared? Is he dead too?
As the trips to Sanderstead increase, we wonder if he'll tell Harry about them and if he does how Harry will take it and how that will affect his relationship. Adam passes from the present to the past almost as easily as Nicholas Lyndhurst's character (Gary Sparrow, apparently) in Goodnight Sweetheart but there the similarities end.
All Of Us Strangers is a moving meditation on what it is to love and to lose and though there are funny lines there are far more moving scenes and music underpins many of them. Emilie Leveinaise-Farrouch's soundtrack is supplemented and improved by classic eighties pop from The Fine Young Canmibals, Alison Moyet, The Pet Shop Boys, and Frankie Goes To Hollywood as well as, more surprisingly perhaps, Joe Smooth's Promised Land, a classic from The Ink Spots, Blur's Death Of A Party (one of the most under rated of that band's career, it accompanies a horrifyingly ill advised ketamine trip), and Build by The Housemartins which is a beautiful song whatever the setting and brilliantly used here.
As Adam's journey into the past continues we learn more about his pre-teen years in Sanderstead and what happened to him following the death of his parents. We also start to see how deeply it has, understandably, affected him. Will Adam be able to move on from this terrible tragedy and let new love life into his life? The answer may not be what you expect. An incredible, and deeply human, piece of film making.
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