Welcome to Screen Gems, our weekend dive into queer and queer-adjacent titles of the past that deserve a watch or a re-watch.
The DL: Operation Hyacinth
In general, real-life terrors tend to scare us a lot more than fictional demons and curses. Today’s Screen Gems selection demonstrates as much.
Operation Hyacinth, the new Polish film streaming on Netflix in the US, takes inspiration from the real-life Polish government initiative of the same name. During the 1980s at the height of the AIDS crisis, the Polish government decided to crack down on homosexual activity in the name of public health. In reality, the officers in charge of the operation used it as a means to gather information on the nation’s queer population, and use it for blackmail purposes.
This fictional story follows a detective named Robert (Tomasz Zietek), an up-and-coming officer with a beautiful fiance. While raiding a public toilet known as a gay cruising ground, he meets Arek (Hubert Milkowski), a young, gay student used to evading police raids. Taken in by Arek’s warmth and self-confidence, Robert decides not to arrest him, but instead to use him as an informant. Around the same time, police discover the body of another gay man stabbed to death in a local park. Robert’s superiors beat another gay man into confessing to the murder, but Robert can’t stand the thought of a killer on the loose. When another gay man turns up murdered, Robert stumbles onto video and photographs of a gay sex party in which both men appear…along with Arek. The investigation forces Robert to dive even further into the Polish gay underground, where he finds his attraction to Arek ever-growing.
Director Piotr Domalewski shoots the film in shadowy browns and greys, conveying both the bleakness of Soviet Bloc Poland and the shadowy nature of Robert’s job. Domalewski also populates the film with lots of mirror and window imagery, underling Robert’s own sexuality crisis…and the idea that everywhere, someone could be watching. Zietek plays Robert as a man terrified of his case, but compulsively drawn further into a dangerous world. We have a feeling that this is the movie William Friedkin set out to make with Cruising–a taut thriller about a man ever-fascinated by gay sexuality and culture…maybe because he finds it a turn-on.
Even if the real-life initiative never existed, Operation Hyacinth would succeed as an engrossing thriller. As a piece of queer history, the movie also looms as a terrifying chapter, and one with particular resonance. Director Domalewski ends the film on an ambiguous note, probably by design. Though Operation Hyacinth concluded in 1987, LGBTQ people are still hunted in a similar fashion around Eastern Europe and Africa today. The United States, the United Kingdom, and other western nations also have their own histories of hunting the queers (see also: the Lavender Scare). We suspect Domalewski knows as much, and wants his audience to know too: if it happened before, it could happen again.
This is one of the best films of 2021.
Streams on Netflix.
Kangol2
I know this series has historical value based on what occurred in Poland in the 1980s, but it also is yet another show in which gay men are being hunted down and killed. I think several of us expressed this when Queerty had reported on it earlier. It would be great to see more shows on streaming platforms that focused on the current, everyday lives of out, gay, bi and trans people across the globe, from the US to Europe to Asia to Africa. They could be scripted series or reality series, but films and TV shows focusing on something other than teens coming out, gay celebs, straight parents mourning their dead gay children or relatives, and LGBTQ people being individually or serially murdered would be welcome.
2old2bloved
I totally agree with you on that & it’s truly sad how life for the LGBT community past and present still fear of what could happen!
rcster
I agree with you but to be fair it has definitely gotten better. I remember when it was just coming out stories and tragedies. But I’d still like to see more everyday life of already out gay guys
Joshooeerr
The problem with commenting on something without seeing it first is you can be entirely wrong. First up, Operation Hyacinth is not a series; it’s a movie. Second, it’s not just another thriller in which the gays are merely victim fodder for a thriller narrative. This is a fact-based story about real-life gays being hunted and persecuted in Poland, as they were in many other countries around the same time. The story – including the police conspiracy – is almost identical to events that played out in Australia in the 80s (as depicted in the recent series, Deep Water), to give just one example. Also, the gay men here are not just passive victims, but real people engaged in what is virtually an underground war. Their stories deserve to be told and remembered. Hyacinth also has an interesting take of the central cop’s moral and sexual awakening, which makes it much more interesting and complex than, say, Cruising (an example of the worst kind of movie about gays being hunted). I watched it just this weekend and would highly recommend it as a superior rogue cop thriller and a surprising love story.
ShiningSex
As a gay man who is a huge horror film fanatic, this film is great! We need more “gay” thrillers. Hellbent is another good one.
Not all of us want boring RomCom films.
Some of us love gore and horror.
I personally loved Cruising as well. It was well done and I didn’t feel like it showed our community in a bad light.
Writers like Dennis Cooper, Larry Townsend, Peter Sotos show the dark side of life and sometimes includes gay themes. Nothing wrong with that.
GayEGO
As All in the family guy – Arthur would say – Meathead!
nedxxx
See all that Joshooeerr has to offer above. This is not a typical stalker-yeah–lets-watch-them-die movie, but one that does consider its complicated characters carefully.
ShiningSex
Really good film. I also loved Cruising and Frisk which are dark gay themed films, but so what. They’re done well and I don’t see it as an insult to our community. Not all of us want boring RomCom films or just another stereotype gay film. Some of us don’t mind seeing films that tackle serious subjects or horror.
Essie
Too dark and depressing for me. Things are already dark and depressing enough these days without sitting down and watching people being beaten up and murdered just because they are different. I couldn’t even make it through that trailer. Plus, while I don’t mind foreign language films, Polish is too hard. I prefer French or Spanish because I can understand most of what is being said without closed caption.