Keep the Lights On

Time Out says
‘Keep the Lights On’ opens with a guy-on-guy phone-sex hook-up in 1998 Manhattan, and its direct, intimate attitude to examining couplings continues from there as it studies a troubled, eight-year, on-off gay relationship. Erik (Thure Lindhardt) is a filmmaker and a dreamy soul, while his partner, Paul (Zachary Booth, playing an alter ego of a former partner of writer-director Ira Sachs), is a publisher with barely disguised edges and hang-ups that soon make themselves known. Physically, the two connect, but Paul’s drug habit comes with a fear of commitment and an instinct to cheat or disappear.
The way Sachs examines a relationship over a few years recalls Bergman’s ‘Scenes from a Marriage’ (1973), while the fictionalisation of his life, with deliberate distancing decisions (such as Erik being Dutch; Sachs is from Memphis) brings to mind the work of Mia Hansen-Løve. This is a cool, interior work (emotionally and literally – Sachs delights in half-lit, moody rooms), and we share the distance Erik experiences between him and Paul, who remains a mystery. This is a painful drama, but its pain is more studied than emotive, and it demands that we think just as much as it makes us feel.
Details
Release details
Cast and crew
Zachary Booth
Julianne Nicholson