The strange love in the title, I think, refers to the love of art (or "aesthetic life" in the postmodern sense), not homosexuality.
The film takes the New York contemporary art scene and the artist's life that began in the 1960s as the foreground, and the gay and equal rights movement as a faint background. The rise of contemporary art at the same time corresponds to the decentralization of elegant art to a wider "mass", and the lowering of the art threshold also corresponds to the aestheticization of life, and the blurring and demise of the boundary between life and art. So we see Ben and George pursuing absolutely serious and uncompromising art in the very everyday life scenes-regardless of the difficulty of Ben's painting by himself (though in the eyes of others, he is just a painting "favorite" who has never entered the institution. "), George still treats the yellow-haired girl who learns the piano with the attitude of treating the master's performance in the piano tutoring class.
In addition, the intergenerational relationship of the main characters in the film is also quite interesting. The perseverance and downfall of the first generation of art life practitioners represented by Ben and George is more "sensible" and "reasonable" and "reasonable" compared to the second generation of practitioners Kate. The survival strategy of "professionalization", and the unformed artistic inclination and life attitude of the new generation of artistic teenager Joey suddenly emerged in the final stage of the film, and it became an end with a strong echo.
Will Joey become an idealist like Uncle Ben or a compromiser like his mother Kate? We have no way of knowing. We only know that as the adolescence is approaching, the time to make choices is not far away. Therefore, at the end of the film, we see Joey, a young man who loves French literature, is sensitive to a certain kind of sadness that originates from the depths of life and tears. The majestic sunset has immersed his under-age face-this seems to be a new generation of artistic youth. From now on, they will be entitled to enjoy the indulgence and ecstasy brought by art, and they will also endure the fragility and suffering of entrusting their lives to art for their entire lives.
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