Love and Death On Long Island

The life of the respected writer and widower Giles De’Ath (John Hurt) is shaped by books. He works at a British university where little has changed in the last century. His housekeeper is therefore pretty shocked when one day she finds out that the stuffy professor has acquired a TV and a video recorder. De’Ath has become fascinated – to his own amazement too – by the American teenage star Ronnie Bostock (played by Jason Priestley, known from Beverly Hills 90210). From that day on he spends most of his time watching pulp films like ‘Hotpants College II’ and he soon turns into an expert on American youth culture. He leaves for Long Island, where the papers say that Ronnie lives. There he moves into a motel and is determined to find the object of his desires. In view of the not-entirely platonic obsession of the older man for male youth and new-era dynamism, it is no surprise that Love and Death on Long Island has been compared with Visconti’s Death in Venice. Nevertheless, Kwietnowski’s film is eventually more about a confrontation between two cultures, about the power of cinema and what feelings film can rouse. The leading role looks made to measure for John Hurt.