If I had a time machine I might go back 25 years so I could appreciate House of Boys. Even that would have been too late, as An Early Frost and Buddies had already broken ground by dealing with AIDS in 1985, and had done it better than this 2009 melodrama from Luxembourg (with English dialogue).
Angels in America went on to raise the bar for AIDS dramas impossibly high, and Philadelphia closed out the first decade of the epidemic. If you want to relive those early days, watch one of the above or And the Band Played On, The Normal Heart or David Weissman's new documentary "We Were Here.
House of Boys begins with a blond farm boy skipping through the fields. Seconds later we meet Frank (Layke Anderson), a blond high schooler. They're not the same character, but filmmaker Jean-Claude Schlim is either careless or intentionally deceptive in letting us think it is for the time being. The boy is too old for his hair not to have turned brunet if it was going to (and it was), and too young to have started bleaching it.
Frank is out and proud, standing up to locker room bullies at school and the bullying of his father at home; but the latter finally gets to him and he runs away to Amsterdam with a galpal and her boyfriend. When they move on, leaving Frank homeless, he applies for a job as a dancer at the House of Boys, run by Madame (Udo Kier, in his usual weird mode).
The bar features drag queens (including Madame) and hot male dancers who are available for "private sessions." The guys live upstairs, where Frank gets to room with Jake (Benn Northover), the hottest of the hot. But Jake has a girlfriend and says he's only gay for pay, while Frank lusts after him.
Once Frank starts dancing he's supposed to be hotter than Jake. Anderson's a decent actor but not a great beautyand I've lusted after similar eye candy (Charlie Hunnam, Randy Harrison and Hunter Parrish) so it's not a question of type. Perhaps Schlim felt differently or perhaps he couldn't find the right actor for the role.
No one mentions AIDS for the first 71 minutes, until Jake has to see a doctor (Stephen Fry). Then the specter of "gay cancer" is raised and the name quickly changes to AIDS. Frank has never heard of it, despite living in a gay milieu in a big city in 1984 for months. Everyone else in the house knows about AIDS but no one's bothered to bring it up.
The rest of the movie is one long death watch, as Jake's body is increasingly ravaged by Kaposi's sarcoma lesions and he wastes away in a hospital bed.
Another of Schlim's curious choices is the selection of soundtrack music. While there are some '80s artists (Soft Cell, Spandau Ballet, Jimmy Somerville) there are also threecount 'emthree Roy Orbison songs from the early '60s. Always good to hear, but WTF?
The guilty pleasures scattered through House of Boys' first half hardly compensate for the pain of watching the second half.