Speedy Boys

Toronto International Film Festival Program Book
1999

Speedy Boys
James Herbert
USA, 1999
75 minutes
Colour/35mm
Production Company: Cargo Cult Productions
Producer: James Herbert
Cinematographer: James Herbert
Editor: Mark Jordan
Sound: Mark Jordan
Principal Cast: Andy Piedilato, Carter Davis, Aline Nari, Alessandra Palma, Kari Malievich, Sylvia Picchi Production: Cargo Cult Productions

The unusually intense and beautiful films of James Herbert are difficult to describe in terms that make them sound neither lurid nor overly formal. After all, they are dominated by gorgeous nude men and women, getting it on in languidly paced, yet rigidly structured aesthetic worlds.

For many years, Herbert’s work has been preoccupied with an experimental rethinking of the classical nude. How does this archetypal trope of various art forms operate for the viewer? What draws us to it? What fantasies does it conjure in us? And, most importantly, how does time, in the form of cinematic rendering, change our relationship with the nude?

Herbert once addressed these complex aesthetic questions with a beautiful series of short films featuring re-photographed, elegantly distressed images of the nude in motion. Two years ago, Herbert attempted something more sophisticated. He contextualized and gave voice to his nudes, allowing them the power of active storytelling while posing them (and occasionally letting them pose themselves) in an explicitly Renaissance fashion. The result was the astonishing Scars, an incredible distillation of the narrative power of the body and how its shape has shaped history. Herbert underlined the timelessness of his work by setting the film in Italy, arguably the site of the pictorial nude’s greatest triumphs.

Speedy Boys takes this experiment to its next step. Again in Italy, two young American lads encounter various women together in situations sensual and sexual. Still anchored in our narrative fantasies borne from the Renaissance nude, Herbert allows the half-formed ideas of friendship, romance and sexual need proposed by his two male leads to act as a naive counterweight to historically rich and sophisticated imagery. This idea’s visceral immediacy is warmly predictable, but the dreamy sense of reclaiming the lost stories of people captured in the great masterworks of fine art (and perhaps one’s own forgotten past with them) makes the film a powerful, moving and ultimately magical experience.
—Noah Cowan