A Night With Old Guys in Bed

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The Fantasia Film Festival wrapped at the beginning of August, and while the program had its stand-outs (ChaO, All You Need Is Kill, Queens of the Dead, Maya, donne-moi un titre, Holy Night: Demon Hunters, etc…), this year was a lot quieter for me. I only saw one film: a rom-com.

The fact that it was listed at all was unusual enough to get my attention. See, Fantasia is primarily a genre film festival, with lots of works on the fringes of the medium. There are plenty of horror films, thrillers, gonzo schlock-fests, capital-W Weird works, and great selections from other countries that don’t often get wider North American screenings, especially from China, Japan, and Korea. They screen a lot of animation too! Perfect Blue had its world premiere at Fantasia in 1997, even before its general release in Japan. But something they’ve rarely ever screened, if at all, is a textbook romantic comedy.

That movie is called Old Guys in Bed. Directed by Jean-Pierre Bergeron, a Québécois actor with a long filmography of English and French language roles, he made his first short film, Alone with Mr. Carter, in 2011 and then went on to develop his first ful-length feature, Old Guys in Bed. At the age of 70. Seventy! Not only that, but after the release of Alone with Mr. Carter, Jean-Pierre Bergeron came out publicly as gay.

I say all that because it’s clear from having seen the film that it genuinely cares about the characters. There’s real love there, and it comes from a place of wanting to see something personal represented honestly on-screen. The film wants to offer a perspective that’s often overlooked in romantic comedies generally; love among older gay couples where there is a more marked age difference. That’s not something we really get to see in film! And Old Guys in Bed, while it tries to explain to its audience what Paul (the main character) finds so attractive in older men, is also straightforward by rom-com standards.

Because rom-coms still operate within a fairly well-defined genre space! Old Guys in Bed isn’t out there to try to reinvent the genre, but it does do a good job of understanding the structure enough to know what audiences expect scene-to-scene; the Meet, the Flirting, the Falling-in-Love, the Betrayal, the Low Point, the Realization, the Make-up… hell, it’s all there, including the quirky friends and family, and the additional minor romance plot that runs in parallel. Using that foundation and reapplying it to a couple that’s not often portrayed in this space is a fantastic way to draw attention to the subjects at its centre and to reexamine the genre’s structure through a fresh perspective. It’s great!

And yet the only thing is, well… all that’s only part of why I love this movie.

By most standards, it’s not a bad movie, but it’s also not a great movie. It’s okay! It does its job of being a rom-com! It’s someone’s first full-length feature! It’s not a major release with big names attached! And honestly, a lot of what I find charming, someone else might find grating.

Hmm. How do I put this? It occupies that awkward zone where a movie like The Room might sit, but the comparison feels wrong to me. For one, it doesn’t center the film’s genuine love for its characters, and for another, The Room, as initially conceived and produced, was meant to be a serious work. It ended up a comedy by accident, an identity it embraced over time. Now, what happens if it was always intended to be a comedy? What happens when it becomes harder to draw a line between the parts that are meant to be funny and those that aren’t? What happens when, despite itself, it still ends up being a comedy?

“Let's go check out Youtube!”

More than The Room, the movie it had me thinking about most as a comparison was 2014’s They Came Together. Old Guys in Bed isn’t nearly as absurd as They Came Together, but both films are expressing something similar about romantic comedies. Both films say, “Hey, as long as we follow the rules, this can be about anything!” They understand that, for rom-coms, the content of each individual scene on a micro-level isn’t nearly as important as the macro-level plot structure. Which can lead to, for example, a scene where Paul Rudd and Amy Poehler’s characters bond over a shared love of fiction books because the thing that they bond over isn’t as important as the broader beat the story needs to hit at this particular point in the grander plot. The filmmakers know, as fans of the genre, that audiences care more about that too. There’s a deep love for the tropes and clichés they pull from, and an earnestness in letting people have a good time, as performers and viewers. And Old Guys in Bed is on the exact same wavelength.

“Do you like fiction?” “Like it? I… try love it!” “That’s crazy!” “I-I’ve never met anyeone else who likes fiction.”

This isn’t a movie that’s winning awards. It’s not a movie that’s topping Best Of lists. It’s not even a movie that might break a 3 out of 5 rating. From the handful of folks who bothered to review it on Letterboxd, it’s a little all over the place. But with the right group of friends, and the right mindset going into this, you’ll have a movie that’s going to be a fun time! The kind you can screen at home with a bunch of friends and have a good laugh.

And at the end of the day, we can judge it all we want, but they went out and made a movie. They did the damn thing! A big chunk of the people in attendance at the screening were people who worked on the movie! They all got a chance to see the finished work for the first time and then go up on stage to be recognized for their contributions and to celebrate with their coworkers.

That’s worth something, especially for a movie that wants to shine a light on a community that doesn’t get its fair share of screen-time or that might not be taken as seriously. Its aim is noble and its efforts are earnest. And I don’t care to be a part of an audience that sees it as something to kick around, despite its misses (which it does have, in parts of the script, editing, and some characters).

And at the same time, I don’t want to share this around as a “it’s so bad it’s good” kind of media object because that kind of sentiment sucks! We can like things that are okay. We can appreciate a work’s intent over the ways in which it succeeds or fails at following through on its vision. We can engage with works that other people might shrug off, and still let it affect us and change us. We’re all amateurs, in the purest sense of the word.

So I’ll just say this: Old Guys in Bed is an enjoyable romantic comedy. I had a good time watching it. I think you will too.