DVD review: In Their Room by Travis Mathews

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Home is where the heart is – and various other body parts, as well as the wardrobe and the poster and the bed, the playlist and the smartphone and the camera.

In Their Room is a series of three experimental shorts by the filmmaker Travis Mathews, who’s probably best known for Interior. Leather Bar (the full stop is part of the title), his 2013 collaboration with James Franco, a kind of pseudo-documentary that was purportedly about the attempt to recreate 40 minutes of lost hardcore footage exorcised from Cruising but really about straight guys trying to get over their ickiness with regard to kinky gay sex, which was shown in a good amount of detail.

That film developed out of Mathews’s first feature, 2012’s I Want Your Love, which was a naturalistic look at young queer life in contemporary San Francisco – a lo-fi investigation of everyday sociability, neurosis, intimacy and sex that sits interesting alongside titles such as Andrew Haigh’s Weekend and Ira Sachs’s Keep the Lights On (as I argued in the Guardian when these films were made in 2012).

I Want Your Love was notable among these titles for its explicit sex scenes, which were both harder than those found in mainstream movies, in the sense of showing penetration and ejaculation, and softer, in the sense that they revealed more about their subjects’ character and emotions than your average blandly clichéd lurve scene.

I Want Your Love itself developed out of In Their Room, a project in which Mathews took his camera into the bedrooms of young queer men – initially in San Francisco in May 2009, then in Berlin in November 2010, then in London in April 2012 – to observe them in their most private spaces, working, resting, playing and having sex, and listen to them talk about desire, intimacy, attraction, alienation and aspiration. Each film featured seven or eight subjects.

Watching all three together, as this new Peccadillo release allows, is an intriguing experience. In Their Room is a snapshot of young queer life in these world cities at an intriguing historical moment: after the financial crash but before hyperdevelopment really got its claws in; at a time of rapid progress for LGBTQ rights but of uncertainty about whether not being straight is enough to build a community around.

It’s also the period in which online socialising moved from novelty to default, and being photographed and filmed for public consumption became part of daily life for many people. They suit home viewing very well indeed.

The films offer a pretty clear experimental arc of bold beginning, overambitious expansion and assured refinement. The San Francisco entry, 20 minutes long and compiled from shorter, initially standalone pieces, sets the tone. These guys are sexy but in a way that tilts decisively towards hipster rather than buff: they have body hair and body fat, piercings and tattoos, vinyl LPs and high heels and, crucially, articulacy and (mostly) criticality.

They drink coffee and smoke and speak on their phones. They talk about their taste in music and sex – rimming, cuddling, fucking or not. They dance, get hard, wank and ultimately one – Jesse, for whom Mathews would create the lead role in I Want Your Love – cums. (Brontez, the most charismatic cast member of I Want Your Love, is the subject of one of the standalone San Francisco pieces that didn’t make it into the 20-minute edit but are included as bonus features.)

It’s hard to suggest the sexual content is pornographic (not that there’s anything wrong with that) because it’s so strongly offset by the distinctive individual characteristics of the people in question. The project is nothing if not an exercise in the communication of subjectivity through ambience – they can’t be objects or blank screens when we’re so unambiguously in spaces they control and through which they express their identities.

Yet there’s still a titillating tension at work here – the boys are in their rooms, but they’re talking to us through Mathews, whose presence isn’t acknowledged but can’t be ignored. They’re home but not truly alone.

And it’s hard (though not impossible) to imagine that anyone signing up for the project would be devoid of some kind of exhibitionistic if not narcissistic leaning and there’s a frisson of ego in the air, a curious kind of look-at-me vulnerability at work. I don’t think that’s a bad thing, not least because it seems true to the general tenor of social experience these days.

In Their Room Berlin runs to an hour, makes numerous formal departures from its predecessor and strikes me as the least satisfying of the series. It shares the basic virtues of the enterprise but there’s more going on and less to hold on to, and at an hour it feels too long. The spaces are larger, the light flatter, bleaker.

There are a similar number of guys but the focus moves from solitariness – albeit a knowingly observed performance of solitariness – to being together but in ways that feel more self-conscious, less confident. Instead of details of psychologically specific interiority against a distinctively domestic setting, the film opens with broad pontification about emotion in a city against flashes of exterior settings: traffic, public transport, hustle and bustle.

Things are busier inside as well. We see numerous subjects in conversation with one another as well as alone, and the conversation focuses more determinedly on dating, sex in public, relationships. People shower and show off on cam. A couple, Torsten and Micha, lie in bed chatting, bickering, planning their day, laughing, flirting, moving on to something harder. We see more flesh more quickly but there are more close-ups, more of a feeling of fetishisation.

The latter half of the film follows a single encounter between two guys, Toby and Luc, after they meet on the hook-up site Gay Romeo. They’re both kinda hot – one bookish and self-assured, the other rougher and more conflicted – and we see them chat, smoke, kiss, suck, inspect each other’s tattoos, moles and scars, go for a pee, get penetrated or not… The exchange that feels conceptually strained within the supposedly observational context of In Their Room – how, for instance, can we follow both ahead of their meeting unless it’s a set-up? – and it frankly drags on a bit.

But there’s potency and affirmation in its documentation of the slack and strained and silly moments that are as much a part of a casual hook-up as the sex. They tell us things about these people as subjects not objects and in that sense seem to be a necessary stepping-stone to the more successful exploration of such terrain within the overtly fictionalised format used in I Want Your Love.

The London film feels like a happy synthesis of its predecessors. The format is essentially that of the San Francisco film – eight people in their room, their stories intercut – but executed with greater assurance, presumably not least because it has been conceived as such from the start.

There’s an enhanced confidence to the balance of the compositions and the rhythm of the editing, and exterior shots feel more expressively integrated. The cohesion of the whole is helped substantially by Santiago Latorre’s beautiful score; it runs over the wordless three-minute montage that closes the film and is the most affecting part of the whole series. And there’s a bit more variety to the sensibilities and bodies on show in this final entry – John aka Jeannie Dee, an older subject who has had a stroke and wears drag, singlehandedly offers a window into realms of experience lacking elsewhere.

One of the most striking elements of In Their Room London is the sudden pervasiveness of the smartphone – the next progression from the laptops on view throughout In Their Room Berlin as an expression of the potential for always-on communication. Even if there isn’t a filmmaker recording us, these days it sometimes feels like we’re never alone in our rooms.