How straight is straight sexually and emotionally ? Or To be or not to be ? After a viewing this rather distant in the past film of sexual ambiguity I was left with a feeling that I had watched a semi-comic film that had rather shaky answers to both of these questions. Jonathan Bray plays the straight man who accidentally meets up with a gay man on a blind date called Kelly. Bray thinks he is going to meet a woman, and finds to his gay panic that he has landed himself on the wrong side of his sexual orientation. Panic subsides when he realises he likes the man, and for most of the duration of the film he verbally fights off anyone who comes to the conclusion that he is gay and not straight. Witty lines flow quite nicely, and the film has a lot of smiles and laughs to offer and the acting was mostly good. I wondered at the beginning if mister straight was gay after all and I will give no spoilers except to say that rather heavy handed signals in the dialogue led to a rather obvious conclusion. A twist at the end concerning mister straight man's brother came as a surprise, if a rather a stereotypical one. In fact there are quite a few stereotypes of gay men in this film and to a certain extent I thought mister straight was rather condescendingly nice to them. Two scenes I rather liked. The inevitable shower scene so often used in gay films is shown before the film even starts, and it is mister straight under the shower looking the perfect dream of sexual desire. This will throw some viewers off course as he is handsome and imaginatively for the viewer ' available,' and the second scene is a rather nasty homophobic attack that undermines the comic premise in the film that most people are gay friendly. I quite enjoyed my own accidental viewing of this gay film of the past, but came away with the feeling that a sequel to the film may have added something more, and something better for the satisfaction of a lot of gay viewers.
Review of Coffee Date
