Paul is a former juvie from Pittsburg. He’s come to New York to live with his half sister. His half sister is not waiting for him at the bus.
Paul takes to the streets and winds up part of a gang of homeless white guys who make money terrorising illegal immigrants and other minorities by pretending to be enforcers for landlords or ICE.
Paul stumbles into a ball and locks eyes with a beautiful young woman, Wye. Thus begins a slow-burn flirtation that metamorphoses into a romance.
And then Paul learns that Wye is trans, and something something something.
As you can probably tell, I am not the biggest fan of this movie.
I was intrigued to watch this because the press made it out as a revision of The Crying Game. I am a fan of The Crying Game, even with its problematic aspects, and the blurb in the film festival catalogue from last year made it sound like Port Authority was a revisionist take on the 'twist' of Neil Jordan's film. So wrong was I...
While I enjoy ambiguity in films, I left Port Authority with so many questions that it just made me angry with how hollow it ultimately is.
Since I come from the same demographic as the male lead, I am going to try and stick to a very narrow critique of this film: the human black hole which is our lead character. This is no slight against actor Fionn Whitehead - this movie just gives him nothing to work with.
The big issue for me with this movie is that the movie's focus on Paul is a stumbling block that the movie cannot get over. Apart from the fact that it perpetuates the common theme of upholding a white cis male gaze over its trans characters, the film undermines its central theme of finding one's identity by making no attempts to delve into Paul's psychology.
While Paul is at the centre of the story's action, the movie really has no centre in either of its central couple - Wye remains an object of Paul's gaze, and we glean nothing from what is going on behind said gaze.
In the early part of the film, there were a couple of moments where it felt like the movie was playing with the trope of the gaze - Paul's first sighting of Wye is down a street, where she is surrounded by her family. In a couple of later scenes, he watches a gay man who has been living at the same hostel. There seems to be an implication that Paul is recognising something in himself, but the movie does not maintain this stance or delve any further into Paul's psyche.
For almost half the runtime, it feels like the movie has been highlighting hidden fault-lines in Paul's identity, with Wye and her family as an ideal he is too afraid to reach for. But the film-making choices make it hard to track, and the central character is such a black hole that it is difficult to piece together his motivations, and his final actions remain inexplicable.
The direction is a big factor: The filmmakers are going for a documentary-style fly-on-the-wall but too often the camera work feels like it is working against whatever the scene is about - there are scenes where Wye and Paul talk to each other, and the camera is just floating around like a distracted spectator - it is like the filmmakers watched an Andrea Arnold movie and took the aesthetic without recognising what made it work dramatically. The pseudo fly-on-the-wall approach is also inconsistent. The camera is always aligned with Paul's POV, and it makes the film feel like a spectator to Wye and her family. It never feels like the film's POV aligns with them.
There was a point about halfway through when I began to question just how modern the film's conceit was - Paul spends so much time with Wye and her friends, I actually thought that the film's twist on The Crying Game would be a reveal that Paul knew but was wary/empathetic enough not to ask.
Nothing of the kind happened. When the reveal did take place I actively began to question the film's reason for being.
Unlike The Crying Game, the movie does not visualise the reveal, and avoids the horrible stereotype of the trans woman ‘surprising’ her cis lover. But after that... the movie never expands in a way that would make Paul - since we anchored to this slab of meat - in any way interesting.
Just to be clear, I am not suggesting that Paul needs to be the centre of this story. But since he is, the movie should answer for why he is the centre of the movie: is he questioning his sexuality? Is it the old trope of the white person learning [blank] from a minority? The movie is so non-committal it cannot even do that.
While the script makes some very light attempts to highlight the ways in which Paul is ignorant and too self-absorbed to recognise the ways in which he is endangering Wye (and their relationship), we know so little about Paul, and Fionn Whitehead's performance is so one-note, that I gave up caring. I did not care if he learned anything, I did not care if he was punished. I was stranded.
There is just something so wrong-headed about his character, and the way that the movie organises itself around him, that ultimately makes Port Authority feel far more conservative and far less embracing of the community it is trying to highlight.
While I am lukewarm on the movie overall, I absolutely hated the finale - after Paul finally confesses to the House, and they exact vengeance on Paul’s racist cohorts, Paul turns up to audition to join the house and the film ends as he is about to perform. Like the other choices, it just feels arbitrary - and the way it happened, it implied a romantic reconciliation that made no sense. It also reminded me of the endings to a thousand romcoms where a guy invades the woman's space to try and get back together with her.
May be that is too much of a read, but there is so little beneath the surface of this movie that you can almost bring whatever you like to it and it probably will make some sense.
Port Authority is a disappointment. What makes me mad is that I feel so strongly about the apathy of this movie whereas in my previous review I lauded the movie's gonzo energy despite featuring certifiable transphobia. I'll be thinking about this for weeks.
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