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Review of Erotic Fire of the Unattainable by Robert Sawyer, a poem and adman
“The film brought to mind MY DINNER WITH ANDRE, as it is a series highly literate, intimate and glib conversations between two people. The story follows days-in-the-life of Gay, a 60-year-old woman, who has found and lost and seeks to recover a semblance of love.
Gay is anything but gay, wry, yes. Alert, charming, and often lovely, she is also a highly negligent, self-absorbed writer, one willing to break her life into pieces to gather material for the book she is writing.
Her compelling, peripatetic presence on the screen; at once lithe and impregnable, details her willingness to sacrifice her happiness to live her book, the better to tell her story.
Hers is not a search for Romantic love at late middle-age, but an interrogation of the confinement that is demanded by love. Our heroine is coy and manipulative but those traits are tactics to ensure her independence and, loneliness be damned.
There are three men in her life. The men, all middle-aged, have made their beds and are willing to share it with Gay, but there's a catch. Each would deny her the central expectation of the beloved, which is, their undivided attention.
They want her to fill a particular slot in in their lives and their demands on Gay are unilateral, controlling, and so ultimately antithetical to her purpose, namely love and independence. What they do offer her is material. Love in this context is transactional above all else.
The life of an artist is nothing less than punishing and THE EROTIC FIRE OF THE UNATTAINABLE makes this simple point, over and over again. I recommend it to all my middle-age friends who still believe that love can be bottled, provided it is the result a relentless regimen of compromise, denial and cognitive dissonance. For those who still hold out for romantic love, it is an excellent tonic.”
Unseen Films, review
Full of lots of literary talk both about books but also between the characters this film is very literary and high brow. We are watching very erudite people talk about their lives, thoughts and the things they find interesting. It feels like a romantic riff on My Dinner With Andre.
Older people are supposed to be wiser. Maybe finally have a little insight into “this thing called love.” And why not? Everyone wants to be desired. Everyone wants to still be touched. Especially a woman who writes about love, who studies it, and uses it as creative fuel.
THE EROTIC FIRE OF THE UNATTAINABLE looks at 3 scenarios in this writer’s life. A man who doesn’t love her as much as she seemingly does him.
Another man who is more willing for love than she is.
A man who looks like he might be right till she gets to know him a bit better.
And then she does what we all do, loves the one she’s with. But all these characters are searching for (and sometimes sabotaging) love. THE EROTIC FIRE OF THE UNATTAINABLE shows ….the beat goes on. And, frankly, it’s a lot of fun (and sometimes a bit sad) that it does.
CAST
Gay Walley has written four books of fiction – STRINGS ATTACHED, THE EROTIC FIRE OF THE UNATTAINABLE, LOST IN MONTREAL and DUET, one produced film (other than this one), THE UNATTAINABLE STORY, and has a play opening in London in April LOVE, GENIUS, AND A WALK. This is her first venture in front of the camera.
Steve Starr’s career has ranged from social commentator, memoirist, futurist, essayist, librettist, political pundit and fantasist. He lives in a tiny de facto sovereign state clandestinely situated between the Hudson River and the East River sharing an invisible frontier with New York City.
