Eating Up Food Of Love: Ventura Pons Cooks Up a Storm

by Brandon Judell

If you believe the revised edition of The Gay & Lesbian Literary Heritage, David Leavitt "is one of the brightest stars of the gay literary world today." Consequently, his work is slowly being optioned and transformed into cinema. In 1991, there was the rather entertaining version of The Lost Language of the Cranes starring Brian Cox and Angus MacFadyen. Now, a decade later, Spanish director Ventura Pons, in his first English language effort, has adopted The Page Turner.

Mr. Leavitt, who when we last spoke was residing in Italy, has noted he was influenced by E.M. Forster, Ford Madox Ford and Henry James in the writing of this tale about Paul Porterfield, a grating, closeted youth who's blessed with a stereotypically emotionally needy mother. Paul wants more than anything else to be a concert pianist. One night between lessons, he gets the chance to be a page turner for a world-renowned pianist, Richard Kennington. The pair accidentally meet again in Europe where they have sex. Paul, who wears baggy boxers, immediately falls in love with the older man who has a lover with a dying dog back home in the States. When this canine finally bites the bullet, the lover hires a hustler but doesn't have enough cash in his wallet to pay him. Meanwhile, after a few months pass, Paul's enrolled at Juilliard, Richard's touring Japan, and Mom, realizing her son is a fairy, goes to a parents-of-gays coffee klatch. That's just for starters.


But why this setting? Leavitt responded, "Classical music is one of the few worlds, I guess, in which you still have this phenomenon of older powerful men, more or less, helping younger men in their careers in exchange for sex. That started to fascinate me."

As for the young man desperate for fame in an artistic world, did David base Paul on his own youthful cravings?

"Yes and no," David laughed, "I see myself very much in both. That's an interesting question. No, they're very much a part of me, particularly my younger self, who was a little bit arrogant, a little bit awkward, a bit of a pest, almost to the point where he could be construed as more than a pest. Also almost something a little bit dangerous. On the other hand, Kennington (the older man) is a character who has extremely ambivalent feelings about his own fame and about public life. And in that regard--while I was exaggerating, because public life is only a small part of any writer's life--I've always had such ambivalent feelings about public life and its constraints. I've had a discomfort and shyness about the fame game. So it was very easy for me to project myself into a character like Kennington who has to spend half his life on the road. I see in him aspects of my own ambivalence."

But why was Pons, 57, who makes a film a year, attracted to this work? Did he identify with the aging, successful pianist who beds a virginal groupie?

"No. No. No I don't identify with the pianist," Pons laughs over the telephone. He's calling from his seaside Spanish weekend home which is situated in town Dali once lived in. "No, no. I identify with the mother.

"I'm joking," he continues. "The pianist, though, is someone very far away from me in the sense that this is a man who lives a little bit in the clouds like a god in this artistic world. He is well-known all over the world. He lives a little bit in Tokyo and in Venice. He's traveling around. He has his lover, his manager, back home. And then while he's in Barcelona, he has a little bit of an affair with Paul. They fall in love, but Richard's afraid so he escapes because he really likes to live in the clouds. The clouds are his armor for his world. I don't know, but I doubt that I identify with him."

Maybe because Pons is happily coupled, or as he notes, "I have had a very stable relationship for a longtime which gives me happiness and freedom in my head at the same time.

Is your other half in the film business?
"No, nothing to do with it. Nothing."

I heard that's the best way.

"Well, I don't know if it's the best way, but I have the best other half. You know, it's not important my private life."

Getting the hint, I move on to the number of older men hitting on youth in this story. Wondering aloud, I asked Pons whether when he makes films with gay characters, does he try to be politically correct?

"I tend to treat gays as human beings," Pons insists. "I don't think about being politically correct. It's something that I don't have in my mind. I try to be humanly correct in the sense that I try to build as best as possible my characters. I try to say what is happening to those people with their happinesses and their miseries. For instance in this film, those characters, the pianist and his agent, I don't think they're politically correct, but I think they are very fascinating. I think it was good to portray them."

What's especially fine about Food of Love are the numerous older men who are over 40 who are depicted as living, breathing sexual creatures.

"Yes indeed," Pons exclaims. "Listen! I just don't make films with young gay people because young people are the ones that go to cinema. I do make films with big characters in them to explain the stories that I like. I can make these films because I'm independent and very free. I think if I like a story and the characters need to be 50, I don't make them 30. I try to be very truthful to the stories that I'm explaining. If the characters need to 59 or 60, they will be. If you are truthful to yourself, the people they will recognize your truth in the cinema and in your work."

Amen.