Swoon
Written and directed by Tom Kalin
Starring Daniel Sclachet, Craig Chester
Reviewed by Bronwen Beechey
In 1924, Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, two wealthy and precociously brilliant Jewish teenagers, kidnapped and murdered an eight-year-old boy, a friend of Leopold's younger brother.
At their trial, it was revealed that the two were involved in a relationship which centred on the exchange of sexual favours for crimes of escalating violence. The trial made legal history by the inclusion of Freudian psychoanalysis in defence evidence by the flamboyant lawyer Clarence Darrow. However, this analysis not only failed to make a distinction between homosexuality and pathological abnormality, but suggested that the sexual relationship between the two men was in itself proof of insanity.
The case has provided the subject for two previous films — Alfred Hitchcock's Rope (1948) and Richard Fleischer's Compulsion (1959). Due to the climate of the time, both of these films were euphemistic about the nature of the relationship between the two men.
Tom Kalin, who grew up in Chicago, where the murder took place, and often heard his mother and grandmother discussing it in hushed tones, chose to use the story as his first feature-length film, and to restore the sexual politics at the heart of the case.
For a low-budget first feature shot in only 14 days, Swoon is extremely impressive. It is not intended to be a "politically correct" re-reading of the case or a carefully reconstructed history (in fact Kalin includes deliberate anachronisms such as walkmans and push-button phones — perhaps suggesting a link between the anti-gay hysteria generated by the trial and the current homophobia around the AIDS issue). With its stunning black and white cinematography and frequent use of close-ups, Swoon creates an atmosphere of intensity that brings to life the two men's obsessive relationship, one that is not so much about sexuality as the use of power.
Swoon has some weaknesses — the last third of the film becomes more documentary-like and doesn't seem to fit in with the mood created in the beginning; it's sometimes difficult to tell the two actors playing Leopold and Loeb apart; and there are some sequences that are a bit obscure and self-consciously arty. However, overall it is a stylish and interesting film which raises a number of interesting questions about homosexual and Jewish identity, the use of "science" to justify prejudice and the creation of history.