A group of friends stumble down jagged rocks to spend a day on the beach in the sweltering sun. It’s the early days of April in 1983 in San Francisco, so there are even hotter days ahead. The glory days of in-person cruising are becoming a faraway memory more and more with every app invention, but Michael Schwartz’s Strangers On a Beach is a vibrant reminder of how the possibility of pleasure could come with an element of palpable danger.
As this quintet of friends run on the sand, Jelani Alladin’s Calvin feels slightly separate from the rest. The other four are two couples (played by Jack Falahee, Juliana Aidén Martinez, Nancy Lam, and Perry Young) so while they flirt and play in the surf, Calvin’s eyes wander to find a lone figure standing atop a cliffside. He excuses himself and climbs back up and ignores the protestations from Martinez’s Vicki. “I’m just going for a walk,” he tells her simply. Is Vicki in tuned with how gay men hook up, or is she just scared for her friend’s safety with an active serial killer targeting gay men in San Francisco?
Calvin finds Dan sipping a Pabst Blue Ribbon and smoking a cigarette as he stares out at the water. His trench coat looks out of place in the beachy setting. Is he running from something? Could Dan be in need of escape? Maybe he went out and he hasn’t been to bed yet. Calvin approaches Zane Phillips’ Dan with horny curiosity as they get closer and closer to one another. They speak about predator and prey without uttering a word, and Alladin and Phillips share a crackling intensity as they sniff each out.
One cannot help but think about the burgeoning AIDS crisis throughout Schwartz’s film. Strangers takes place two years after the pandemic first took hold and right after Larry Kramer’s “1,121 and Counting” essay was published by the New York Native. Schwartz’s film plays radio announcements over its first few minutes about the Challenger Shuttle’s maiden voyage and how the Reagan administration was more concerned with peppy announcements of things like Swedish-American Friendship Day. Maybe paranoia hadn’t reached everyone yet, but Schwartz’s color palette is boldly bright: the water is inviting and surrounding flowers mirror the shine of the sun. Phillips’ presence, with his hours-old hair and tired expression, even reminded me of Joe Pitt, the Mormon character from Tony Kushner’s Angels in America. Is Dan dangerous or does he just feel helpless?
“There’s nowhere left for us to go,” he tells Calvin as the sun begins to set. Is he talking about places for gay people to play or does he know what’s coming? Schwartz’s film reels us in with that sexy spark, but as we get closer to a tasting a first kiss, we might realize that we are in for something more sinister, vicious, and unforgiving.
