It’s of interest then, after this unfailingly faithful first scene, that Culpepper opts for invention: where in his source it’s only said that “All night they had laughed until there were no more funny stories left”, the film finds Fergus terse in taking on his siblings’ interest in his life up in Dublin. “She was always asking if you were happy,” one says of their late mother. “As if any of us would know,” another follows. In his slow track from a back-to-camera seated angle on Fergus facing this enquiry to a mid-shot profile with eyebrows arched and tumbler tipped, Culpepper introduces into his telling a trepidation absent in Tóibín’s, an implied unease in how this character fits within these community structures and the impositions they make upon his own sense of self.
That’s a concern too for Tóibín, certainly, but the way in which his Fergus relates to his sexuality is notably more assured than the film iteration; consider the first instance in which his homosexuality is explicitly invoked:
“He was glad that he had spent enough time among straight people to know that the dancer had taken
Ecstasy; he was happy and was smiling to show this. It was not a come-on, even though it could seem like one; there was no sexual content in what he was doing.”
Establishing thus the idea of straight as other, Tóibín invites the reader to a queer perspective, making of the subsequent sex scene a foreshadowed fulfillment. Culpepper’s changes and the manner in which he frames Fergus, connoting but never codifying a queer gaze, renders it all the more ecstatic exception. His film is furtive where Tóibín’s prose is precise; if the story on the page seems intent on interrogating where exactly queer characters fit within an Irish narrative, its screen equivalent seems satisfied to see they fit at all.
Perhaps that’s because, historically, they haven’t, and if Culpepper’s treatment of this intersection of identities can feel less advanced in its approach, that’s chiefly because Irish cinema has left these ideas under-explored to begin with, laid fewer foundations on which to build. It’s reflective less of complacency on Culpepper’s part than the vast gulf between queer Irish representation in these media: where Tóibín’s bracing writing is striking in its digital detail, Culpepper’s comparably restrained rendition is no less so in its erotic innuendo. To have two men share a kiss in Irish film is novelty enough: to see their bare flesh pressed together as grunts and gasps suggest more intimacies underwater feels every bit as exciting in its way as the language’s explicitness. Whether by design or default, 3 Friends eventually evidences the stilted sexuality of Irish cinema, and in so doing serves to progress it. “He felt then,” Tóibín writes toward the close of his tale, “that he could walk a hundred miles if he had somewhere to go, some clear destination.” This fascinating film is at once an expression of that sentiment for an Irish queer cinema and, in the end, a sense of direction.
COLUMN
CinÉireann / May 2018 21