This devastatingly heartbreaking true story of two young Australian men Timothy Conigrave and his ‘husband’ John Caleo is so good that it needs to be told twice. Well, actually three times if you also count the award-winning play that ended up being staged all around the world. Conigrave wrote his memoir that both movies and the play are based upon that focused mainly on his 15 year relationship with Caleo, after his partner had died of Aids and he himself was fast approaching his own impending death from the disease. When it was published posthumously in 1995 it became an enormous best seller, and was acknowledged as a seminal account of the whole AIDS pandemic.
Holding The Man is the dramatized version of Conigrave’s book that bore the same name, whilst Remembering The Man is a documentary that covers very similar ground but also features a wealth of archival material – including still photographs, student films, television footage and home movies – as well as interviews with Conigrave and Caleo’s friends, carers and colleagues.
The two men met as teenage pupils at Xavier Jesuit High School in Melbourne back in 1976. They couldn’t be more different as Caleo was a football jock and Conigrave was a theater buff, and although they were in the same class together it took them ages before Conigrave had the courage to even talk to the object of his desire. A few of their female schoolmates threw a dinner party for them and then contrived to get the two boys to kiss each other. After that there was no looking back for them, and they became an inseparable ‘item’.
Even though the Jesuit priests who taught at their school were completely OK with the boy’s relationship, both sets of parents were appalled when they suddenly found out. Caleo’s more conservative father took it one step further by threatening to sue Conigrave if he continued to ‘corrupt’ his son. To their credit the boys showed remarkable courage and strength of purpose and refused to give each other up, which was no mean feat in these rather unenlightened times. In their circle of friends, they were the only ones who were gay, but it never stopped them from being totally accepted as a couple from the very start.
After graduating from High School, Caleo always the more serious of the two, went to University to study to be a chiropractor, whilst Conigrave, who was much more outgoing, chanced his arm at being an actor. Then at one point seeing their gay friends in the big city enjoying the fruits of the new sexual liberation, Conigrave told a very reluctant Caleo that he wanted to take a break from their relationship so that he would be able to date other men.
However it wasn’t long before they ended up back together living in Sydney, and once again they were blissfully happy. It is now the 1980s’ and with the emergence of the first waves of he AIDS epidemic, Conigrave gets involved in Griffin Theater Group producing a performance piece called Soft Targets based on oral testimonies taken from people who are infected and who are fighting the disease. At one point he is challenged by one of the interviewees that he couldn’t possibly understand the crisis himself when he was actually unaware of his own status. Undaunted he and Caleo go to get tested but then are totally shocked to discover that they are both HIV positive. What makes it tougher to sink in, is the fact that Conigrave had just a few other sexual partners when he was ‘single’, and Caleo had only one.
For the next five years the pair had relatively few symptoms, but in the Fall of 1991 Caleo’s health rapidly deteriorated and in a matter of months he was dead. Conigrave died three years later just after finishing writing ‘Holding The Man’. He was 34 years old.
Both movies make for essential but very tough viewing for people who lived through and survived that era when their friends and loved ones did not, and also for younger generations who still have difficulty relating to this recent history which they mistakingly consider is something that they needn’t concern themselves about. They remind us too well that nice middle-class boys like these had enough difficulty in coming to terms with their own sexuality and had to deal with the potential censorship of their peers, and the outright hostility of their parents. Caleo’s parents may have lightened up on their objections to their son’s relationship over the years, but that still didn’t stop the father haggling over his son’s Will before he had even died, and then totally excluding Conigrave from the whole very public mourning process as if he had never existed. Sadly occurrences that happened all too frequently in those days
Neither movie shirks from the fact that these deaths were not only untimely robbing these young men of their lives, but also in those early days of the AIDS pandemic the opportunistic diseases that ravaged patients gave them excruciatingly painful deaths. They were not helped by the fact that for the most part these were very young people who never gave up the will to live and so fought back which simply prolonged their agony.
Neither versions of the telling of the story try to make either Conigrave or Caleo appear as Saints, … and the documentary adds a little more light on their complexity by letting slip that Conigrave had also experimented by having sex with a couple of women too at sometime. However what is very clear is that theirs was a very passionate and profoundly deep romance that both sustained and completed them. Even as he neared the end, Caleo was seemingly unconcerned with the quality of life that his rapidly deteriorating heath allowed him, as long as Conigrave was still there with him by his side.
It is unnecessary and almost impossible to decide if either of these movies are superior to the other. ‘Holding The Man’s’ screenplay was written by Tommy Murphy who had also adapted the memoir into the stage play, and it was directed by Neil Armfield. It has the advantage of some really superb performances particularly from the two young leads Ryan Corr and Craig Stott, and also from the very impressive list of adult actors that included such luminaries as Anthony LaPaglia, Kerry Fox, Guy Pearce, and Geoffrey Rush. ‘Remembering The Man’ on the other hand was mainly narrated by Conigrave himself, as after he was diagnosed he took part as an oral witness, but this time he was the interviewee. Both sets of the boy’s parents co-operated with the documentary filmmakers Nickolas Bird, and Eleanor Sharpe over the 5 years it took to to make their film, but none of them actually appeared on screen.
This beautiful and poignant story will certainly move you to tears in which ever form you watch it …. if you view them back to back to back as queerguru did, you will probably completely run out of kleenexes. This however would not be what Conigrave would want from us as he always imbued as much laughter and fun into every situation he could as that was his particular way of dealing with the unimaginable tough parts of life. When his friends piled out of his Memorial Service where not greeted with a long sad dirge, but the music of Depeche Mode singing Just Can’t Get Enough. It’s a great visual to end on.
Labels: 2016, Australian, documentary, drama, romance
