Swoon was the rage of the 1992 film festival circuit, as well as part of a wave of gay-themed films that used independent channels to reach the mainstream audience. Written and directed by Tom Kalin and with a cast of mostly unknowns, the movie looks back at the Leopold-Loeb thrill-killing of 1924. Shooting in black and white and using impressionistic imagery, Kalin creates a hallucinatory mix of dream and drama, while giving the story a homosexual perspective that makes it seem new. Where earlier films (such as Hitchcock's Rope and Richard Fleischer's Compulsion) only hinted that these characters might be gay, Kalin takes it as a given and examines the pair's treatment by the police and press based on their sexuality. Might be too arty for some tastes, but others find it intriguingly challenging. --Marshall Fine
2.
Two gay lovers, estranged from society, concoct a bizarre plot: the deliberate murder of an innocent. Ultimately the young men are arrested and tried for the killing.
Based on the infamous Leopold and Loeb murder trial, "Swoon" presents these lovers as victims -- like the small boy they slaughter, the two appear as sacrificial lambs.
This interesting study on the hate that hate breeds goes beyond the shocking crime and into the self-loathing in the killers' minds.
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