Glue (2018)

GLUE is a portrait of Gary, a cross-dressing narcoleptic. Gary has recently come off the mood-enhancing drugs used to treat his narcolepsy. For the first time in ten years, he is without the drugs that made him entirely confident, drugs that suppressed his feelings of doubt, his conceptions of risk. He describes on screen how doubt crashes back into his life, making social interaction terrifying. This underpins Gary's fractured sense of self; it is the cause of his defiance and his vulnerability. Gary is both his own critic and his own defence, against the conglomeration of social voices (parents, friends, ex-lovers, naysayers) which he has internalised as condemning conscience. We meet Gary's close friend and confidante Sondra, heavily pregnant, rubbing olive oil onto her bump as she listens to an answering machine message from Gary: "If anyone from any of the state entities gets in contact, I'd appreciate if you pass on the message that I'm deceased". Gary's glib speech about death is incongruous with the undeniable biological reality of Sondra's pregnant belly. As the film continues, we realise that theirs is a strange, tender and perverse intimacy - a platonic but powerful romance. The arriving baby seems to ask a question of Gary and his selfhood - as if reproduction threatens his conception of himself as an original. The 'real' world of Gary and Sondra's relationship is intercut with surreal set-pieces to camera - dreams or playgrounds for Gary's multiple interior voices. Often, more than one Gary appears in these scenarios. The multiple Garys argue, disagree, speak over each other, and tell each other to shut up. The voice of doubt or self-judgement seems to dominate - a fluent stream of insults which is often comically crestfallen, perversely pleasurable in its linguistic gymnastics. Gary's shifty diatribes-fractured and unreliable-crackle at break-neck speed in a polyphony of voices, from the narcissistic to the self-deprecating. Time and identity are dislocated, hovering between places real and imagined: Gary's flat in Brussels, a disintegrating country house in Ireland, the floating train in Wuppertal, his own grave, a maternity ward. Gary himself is linguistically pyrotechnic, quick-witted, and provocative, but it is in the pauses, hesitations, slow time and the intimate space of filmmaking that we discover a portrait which is tender and brutally touching.