Enjoy some time-in this weekend fulfilling your queer cinema itch as two of Peccadillo’s best have been selected for TV showings.

The dialogue is so natural, the performances so nuanced, and the sex scenes so genuinely passionate it makes for an absorbing and quite moving experience. It’s also stunningly shot. Haigh has created a work of effective simplicity. It’s also a rare thing for a gay film to barely make any bold references to their homosexuality, these are just two people falling in love. The fact they are gay isn’t really much of a concern of Weekend, rather, it is just interested in the way love can spring upon two people one day when they least expect it, occurring more quickly than they can fathom.

Peccadillo are beyond chuffed to have been behind pieces of such stunning, memorable and timeless drama.

In addition to contemporary LGBT cinema, you can also be transported to ’80s Thatcherite London with the classic My Beautiful Laundrette. The gay comedy-drama that launched Daniel Day Lewis’ career will be shown on Saturday at 10.30 on BBC2.

It’s refreshing to see not just one, but three quality LGBT films made accessible to a wide audience. And here we were assuming films on TV were just endless, uninspiring re-runs, mostly consisting of  ’90s action movies and dull westerns. 

It’s fine to stay in once in a while.

Purchase Weekend on DVD here and on Blu Ray here 
Purchase Tomboy here and on Blu Ray here 
Purchase My Beautiful Laundrette here 

An article in the Observer  highlighted how ex Man United footballer Eric Cantona has come a long way as a striker for the world-famous British football team. He’s a “renaissance man, reinventing a new career every few years”, wrote Kim Willsher from Paris, where she was conversing with the footballer-turned-actor-turned-filmmaker.

“Eric Cantona had no problem dropping his trousers for his latest film in which arthouse meets soft porn, revealing an unfeasibly large appendage” the article opened with. Apparently Cantona also said to the Observer “I warn you, it’s in sleep mode”.

The role the article refers to is from Peccadillo’s own sexy French arthouse sensation You and The Night (Les recontres d’apres minuit) which has been named one of the top ten films of  2013 by the influential film journal Cahiers du Cinema. 

The Observer recalled; “Cantona’s British fans will remember his famous flights of fantasy. At a press conference in 1995 after he was convicted of assaulting a Crystal Palace fan with a kung-fu kick, Cantona was asked why he had reacted to the screams of abuse. He replied: “When the seagulls follow the trawler, it’s because they think sardines will be thrown into the sea”. He then got up and walked out, leaving journalists scratching their heads.”

From this recollection, it’s evident that Eric’s enigmatic nature is appeased by his new film. He described You and The Night as “a mix of dream and reality and a suspension of disbelief..I feel a lot happier in the world of imagination”.

The article also revealed Cantona’s passion for researching other peoples history, and his penchant for documentary films. Lately he has been making documentaries with his brother Jean-Marie in which he explores a country’s history through football, which for him is the perfect way to make history appeal to wide audiences. The show covered Manchester four years ago, and soon he is off to Rio.

Eric Cantona in a movie role isn’t totally surprising. He played the French ambassador to the Elizabethan court in the 1998 film Elizabeth and himself in the Ken Loach film Looking for Eric in 2009. However, his role as “The Stallion” in this avant-garde work is notably more risque, as he plays a well-endowed partaker in an orgy arranged by a young couple (Kate Moran and Niels Schneider) and their transvestite maid (Nicolas Maury).

Their guests will be The Slut (Julie Bremond), The Star (Alain Rabien Delon) and The Teen (Fanienne Babe). It’s clear by the names alone that this film doesn’t pretend to adhere to realism, preferring to indulge in a fantasy based, bizarre blur. Rather like its characters, it enjoys experimentation. The sexually driven journey is also set to an atmospheric electro soundtrack by M83.

“My time in Britain was an extraordinary period in my life but it is the past and there are so many more interesting things to do and discover”, Cantona had said. It appears that audiences will be soon be discovering new things when witnessing You and The Night, too.

You can experience the film, which Cantona deems to be “magnifique”, come autumn.

Our January home releases were two disparate gay films of equally great quality, yet February is set to be a strong month for fans of lesbian cinema, as we bring you two different but equally absorbing and enthralling works.

A Map for Love is an inventive, minimalist drama from Spain, brought to us by director Fernandez Constanza, that succeeds with simply three characters. Roberta (Moro Andrea) is a woman with a young son, who has discovered her true sexuality through a tempestuous romance with free-spirited Javiera (Francisca Bernardi). The issue is, she hasn’t yet come out to her conservative mother Ana (Mariana Prat), and in an affecting scene near the beginning of the film she confesses to her about the relationship.

Ana is less than impressed, but still willing to meet her daughter’s girlfriend. Roberta sets about arranging a sailing trip, ignoring the weather warnings that a storm is brewing. The three of them board. The wine flows, food is consumed, but tensions soon begin to build as past resentments surface. Roberta feels pangs of inferiority and jealousy as her lover and mother make a surprising connection despite their polarized views. Javeria is a actress of artful, erotic films, a political activist and a philosopher; her thought-provoking vocalisation of her views that exist in contrast to Ana’s traditionalist outlook give the film real intelligence. The fiery interaction between the characters, in such a limited and claustrophobic space, gives it the pleasing air of a stage production.
The aggressive weather and the impending sense of danger make the characters vulnerable, thus exposing their motives. An intelligent script and strong performances make their relationships fascinating from start to finish, leaving the viewer to pose questions about their agendas, and proving that a film primarily based on dialogue and interaction can be just as gripping as one with a complex plot. Sharp, sophisticated and well-executed, those behind a A Map for Love are certainly ones to watch. Purchase it here on DVD.

The Adored is equally tense – albeit more traditionally – as it uses the psychological thriller genre to keep the audience on edge. Like A Map for Love, it has an astute sense of place, but rather than a stifling sailing boat the setting is a remote home in the Welsh countryside (shot on location in the atmospheric house where Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein, in the 19^th century village of Tremadog).

Previously successful model Maia (lone Butler) is facing a lull in her marriage and career, and decides to give the latter a reboot by undergoing a shoot by famous celebrity photographer Francesca Allman (Laura-Martin-Simpon), and gladly accepts Francesca’s offer to stay in the solitude of her country home. The tone rapidly becomes sinister, however, as Francesca gradually reveals an obsessive nature, as does Maia’s jealous husband. Soon, matters escalate into a competitive pursuit of dangerous desire. Erotic and engrossing, Medland and Singh have created a work of sensuality that keeps you pondering. Be seduced by ordering it here. 

The comparison between Ang Lee’s modern classic and our latest gay drama – Stephen Lacant’s Free Fall – is easily made, and one we are content with in the Peccadillo office anyhow. Both dramas are of course widely different and can’t be likened simply because of the gay relationship at their core, but there are notable similarities worth observing.

Brokeback Mountain – the adaptation of the short story by Annie Proux, occasionally wrongly referred to as a “gay western” – was a wonderful thing. Not only was it superbly performed (particularly by the late Heath Ledger as gruffly reserved Ennis Mar) and sensitively portrayed, it provided a rare opportunity for a queer film to be brought into the mainstream and be shown at the multiplexes. It was beautifully constructed, but stylistically conventional enough to appeal to a mass audience. Plus, it boasted hot A list actors. I recall being profoundly affected by it at my local Odeon, aged fourteen, as I hadn’t seen anything like it before.

In a sense then, it was a groundbreaking work. It allowed popular audiences – the sort that perhaps wouldn’t actively seek out the gay cinema niche – to be moved by it. It was that popular it even has its own (albeit a tad distasteful) Family Guy parody, and it has lingered in public consciousness for nearly a decade. It is only natural to refer back to it when another all-consuming gay drama is in the picture.

Brokeback Mountain is set in ‘60s rural America, whereas enthralling drama Free Fall is set in a Police Academy in contemporary Germany. In the former, Jack Twist (Gyllenhaal) and Ennis Del Mar (Ledger) are cowboys hired to corral sheep on the plains of Wyoming. In the latter, Marc (Hanno Koffler) and Kay (Max Riemelt) are policemen. Marc is settling down with his heavily pregnant girlfriend before new recruit Kay arrives, and tensions build as they train together.Neither film is content to wrap the narrative in a neat little bow and pretend that there is a solution. The tension develops gradually as the viewer must pose the question, how can this possibly end?

Both couples are forced together by an irrevocably masculine work environment. They exist in roles with screaming stereotypical ideals, and they don’t conform. As we all know, the ’60s was a cruel and impossible time to be homosexual. Jack and Ennis’ love can only be known in an open rural space; an escape from their conventional, unhappy family lives and false pretenses. But equally, in the modern era, Marc and Kay’s space is the sort of sexist, testosterone-fuelled environment where breasts are essential discussion and to be gay is to let the side down.

Marc and Kay become jogging partners, and even after their affair has started, they continue to run through the same secluded forest. The activity protects them, like Jake and Ennis’ ‘fishing trips’. Similar to how Jack and Ennis reside in remote rural spaces, their nature is at one with nature itself. Sexuality is organic, contrary to frequent societal assumptions that it is a choice.

But the main connection between the two is the closeness between sex and violence. Both relationships possess a simmering anger that contradicts their affections in frequent powerful scenes where desire and brutality are intermingled. It’s the result of released sexual repression and the frustration of a love that’s unattainable and must be wasted. Both couples are verbally reserved, communicating through other ways and keeping back the emotions they dare not utter.

It could get tiresome to continually suggest that the next quality gay film is the new version of Brokeback Mountain.Free Fall therefore isn’t simply a German version, but it has certainly retained some positive influences. Brokeback Mountain and Free Fall contain lovers that must remain a romantically unfulfilled possibility, lovers that experience both euphoria and sadness through the pursuit of a necessary desire that leaves behind a path of devastating destruction.