Posted: 01/03/2010

Hollywood Je’Taime

by Sawyer J. Lahr

An LGBT film festival favorite last summer, Hollywood Je’Taime takes broken-hearted French businessman, Jerome (Eric Debets, Serene Hunter) to Los Angeles California. Recently dumped by his twinky younger boyfriend, he blows books a impromptu trip to LA where his money runs dry and his amateur acting pursuits land him a pizza commercial because he looks Italian-enough. It’s an anti-love story about the impossibility of a drug-dealing HIV positive gay man (Chad Allen) and a lost yet bemused foreigner getting accepted and rejected.

Writer/Director Jason Bushman (Serene Hunter, Boy with the Sun in his Eyes) directs Debets in a more mature role with Je’Taime. The title more implies the fantasy of Hollywood than the real deal. Jerome makes friends with drag queens and prostitutes. He makes enemies with bartender for not tipping. His Andrean-Brody resemblence appeals to calloused casting assistants and absolutely inadequate directors trying to make a serious masterpiece of nothing.

Bushman portrays the utterly culture-barren landscape with a sense of personal resentment. LA and Americans are shown unwelcoming and their gruff bigoted ethnocentrism is embarrassing. Debets embodies a true foreigner. Allen attracts and repulses with his well worn false pride and guilt that wears at him worse than his illness.

Not for a minute was the films melancholy tone surprising - just painfully appropriate - laborious rides on public transit to the beach, scuzzy motels, anonymous sex, divey gay bars, barely working actors, and broken dreams. The bright lights and fame that attracted Jerome to LA is of old Hollywood. It lives on as an obscure other worldly place impenetrable without an “in” or a connection. The escape only exists on screen, and in the imagination. There isn’t any room for a dream where stars are bred.

Sawyer J. Lahr is Chief Editor of the forthcoming online publication, Go Over the Rainbow. He also writes a monthly film column for Mindful Metropolis, a conscious living magazine in Chicago, IL.

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