Gerontophilia

Bruce LaBruce (The Raspberry Reich," "Otto; or, Up With Dead People") is back with another sure-to-be controversial take on love and sexuality. This time, LaBruce is working from a screenplay co-written with novelist Daniel Allen Cox; the subject matter is less outr and the style is less flamboyant, but the are multiple hot buttons embedded in the story, and LaBruce delights in pushing them.

Lake (Pier-Gabriel Lajoie), a young man of about twenty, is having a hard time staying focused on his girlfriend, Desiree (Katie Boland), who laces their make-out sessions with lists of revolutionary feminists. Slowly, Lake comes to realize it's not Desiree's literary and political obsessions that are the problem, but his own wall-sized poster of Gandhi in his later years... or, rather, what that poster represents: A growing attraction to elderly men. When he takes a job in the nursing home where his mother, Marie (Marie-Hlne Thibault) works, Lake is like a kid in a candy shop, and his favorite new treat is a gentlemen named Melvyn Peabody (Walter Borden).

The abuse and drug-reliant warehousing of seniors, the plight of LGBT elders in often-homophobic institutions, and social suspicion of relationships between people of significantly differing ages all factor into this film, but LaBruce doesn't want to make a polemic of it. Nor does he care to make a porn film; there is nothing hardcore about "Gerontophilia," probably because the subject matter in itself carries enough of a charge to galvanize audiences. And though the love affair is sweet, with many moments of tenderness, LaBruce veers away from syrup: Jealousy, confusion, lust, and passion all combine to create an intelligent, socially critical film a la "Harold and Maude."