LGBT films have become very varied over time, just like any other genre of film. Romantic, frivolous, men and women coming out, however hard or easy, and thrillers with some having echoes of the great days of Film Noir. ' Complete Strangers ' seems to me to fall into the extreme Noir category and I imagined Barbara Stanwyck in this one with of course certain changes in the script. It could have worked but for me it didn't. The dialogue for a start needed a definite rewrite, and the acting from all of the cast well below average. Basically without giving away too many spoilers it revolves around a youngish man living in luxury in Budapest and like all good/bad characters out of Film Noir he has a past which he cannot recall. He walks through the beautiful streets and the less beautiful, but emptily rich apartments with a lost soul look on his face. Young and youngish men try to help him, but when he looks into mirrors or has dreams he sees himself as a sort of Jekyll and Hyde. He has terrible dreams and the viewer sees quite clearly that there must be a revelation. And of course there is in a moody forest/mountain setting and I will say no more about the plot. Personally I found it tiresome and long and I feel Pau Maso, the director should have chosen someone else for the lead role of the moody young man. Directors should in my opinion stick with directing and I can only think of Rainer Werner Fassbinder who succeeded in doing both. And the film is too long, lingering on certain scenes where it should have moved on. I mentioned the dialogue, which was inferior enough, and most of the cast delivered it as if they were on Valium. At times it is very moralistic about pornography, but the morality of that was undercut by painfully unerotic films. It certainly made homosexual acts to be decidedly unappealing and there is a moral in that if you can find it. The irony of all this is that it is filmed in Hungary, which is a very ' moral ' country, and this made me feel more disturbed than the twists and turns of the plot. I give it a 3 for the Negulesco concentration on fine shots of Budapest and mountainous forest scenes.
Review of Complete Strangers
