"THE ADULTS IN THE ROOM"
Director: Andy Blubaugh
Trevor's Rating: 5 / 5 Stars

*** EDITOR'S PICK: TREVOR'S 2010 FRAMELINE FAVORITE ***

My luck at Frameline just never seems to end this year. I've laughed. I've cried. And now with the addition of The Adults in the Room, I've had to think. Hard. This is hands down the most creative, challenging, and fascinating film I've seen this year at Frameline -- and perhaps ever. I know, I know -- that's a bit of a strong statement, but it reflects my love for this film. It is nothing short of incredible.

To say that this film deals with controversial subject matter is an understatement. Sex between people classified as minors and those classified as adults is perhaps one of the most heavily policed sexual boundaries. Maybe only incest is regarded with more disdain. Young people are not supposed to be sexual, and when they are with their peers it causes anxiety. When they have sex with people older than them, it causes outright panic.

This film cannot be easily classified. It is part documentary, part feature. Part fiction, part true story. It takes everything you expect about a film and throws it out the window. As such, telling you about it here is something of a challenge. But here goes.

When director Andy Blubaugh was 15, he had an intimate relationship with the father of his classmate. In The Adults in the Room, we get to see Andy grappling with the memory of this relationship. We see him meeting with friends to discuss making the film, his conflicted emotions about the relationship, and his angst over how to represent his lover without painting him as either totally innocent or guilty, so to speak. We see him auditioning actors to play both his younger self and his older lover, and the real discomfort that these actors experience when they realize they're expected to make out on screen. We see him discussing the "character" Andy's motivations with friends and teachers. We even get to see Andy in the classroom, teaching students about film-making (which reads as documentary, but is actually reenacted for the film by volunteers).

Alongside these self-reflexive and incredibly insightful vignettes into the filmmaking process and into Andy's brain, we get pieces of the finished narrative product. The actor cast as the younger Andy was in fact 16, and does in fact make out with his costar. He's pretty incredible and does a great job of conveying conflicted youth on screen. As the director noted during the Q&A, there is a difference between a 20 year-old playing a teenager and an actual 16 year-old on screen. Teenage angst is just about impossible to recreate without seeming farcical or overplayed.

What I especially love about these feature segments is that, because of the inclusion of the documentary-esque portions, the reconstructed artificiality of this story becomes apparent. Often times we take more seriously stories that are based on true stories, but of course what we remember is not actually what happened. It is our reconstructed, reformulated memory of those events. Because we get to see real-life Andy typing and editing the script for the scenes in the feature segments, it becomes impossible for the viewer to consume the story as if it were actually "reality." This of course should not be a way of discrediting the representation of that reality. Indeed, reconstructed memories are how we make sense of our lives and create our identities. They form the foundation of the decisions we make today -- of who we are as people.

I can't also applaud more loudly Andy's carefulness in dealing with this subject matter. He never claims to have the answer, to exculpate his lover or intergenerational relationships generally. He has his experience, and he sticks to it. This is a difficult decision when dealing with an experience that is caught up in such a web of sticky political issues. Representing that experience without making dramatic claims about its political rights and wrongs is no easy task. Put another way, he sticks to what he knows best. What that allows as a viewer is to leave the film asking the political questions, which is exactly what I did. Because he did not give us easy answers, my friends and I were still talking about that film two hours later.

I could keep writing about all the things I loved about the film, but I'd wind up taking away the pleasure that you will undoubtedly have in watching it yourself. I desperately hope this film gets distributed. You need to see it. And I can't wait to see it again! You can follow the film's progress on their website.

Here's a trailer: