'A Different Story' lives up to its title. Meg Foster is Stella Cooke, a real estate agent in Beverly Hills. One day while about to show a property she finds a squatter inside, a squatter she vaugly knows. Perry King plays that squatter, his name is Albert Walreavens and until recently he was the boyfriend of one of Stella's wealthy clients. Ms. Cooke invites Albert to stay with her until he can make other arrangements, he tries unsuccessfully to do so but ends up staying on a long term basis. Stella and Albert find that they get along, their personalities click, they become best friends. Stella goes out and makes the money, Albert stays home, takes care of the condo and proves an excellently cook. The whole situation becomes very domestic. The sexual tension such a set up would seem to invite is mitigated because Stella is a lesbian and Albert is gay.
Things go well, but then complication arises when Albert's legal status in this country comes into question. You see Albert is Belgian, something you wouldn't guess from hearing him talk. The movie explains this away through some delightfully lazy dialogue. "Why don't you have an accent?" "Because I don't want one."
Stella suggests they get married as way to keep Albert in the country legally, so they do. Things continue to go well and Albert manages to land some work outside the home. One night they attend a birthday party, they get drunk, once home they start to fool around and end up having sex. The next morning neither talks about it, they are not sure what to make of it. When they finally do talk about it they realize they both liked it, so this domestic partnership becomes a real marriage.
Within three months Stella is pregnant, they decide to have the kid and raise it. Stella has a sometimes girlfriend named Phyllis, played by Valerie Curtin. Phyllis is a high strung sort, a school teacher she is paranoid about her personal life becoming public, a major reason her and Stella's relationship never quite worked out. Well she finds out about Stella and Albert's new relationship, this prompts a suicide scare our couple must intervene to stop. They succeed but we never see Phyllis again.
Stella and Albert have a baby boy they name Albert Jr. Stella stays home to care for him. Albert, the son of a tailor, gets work in the fashion industry. His talent is soon recognized and he rises through the ranks quickly to become the assistant of a prominent designer, this designer is clearly gay. Albert start spending more and more time working late, Stella gets suspicious and surprises him one night. She finds him in the shower with someone, unexpectedly it's another woman.
Unsurprisingly this puts a great deal of stress on their relationship, Stella wants a divorce, Albert wants to explain but she won't listen. Eventually Albert forces a situation where she has to hear him out. He apologizes profusely, says he deeply regrets his mistake, loves Stella, and it will never happen again. He explaines that he had never anticipated becoming a husband and father, nor the work success he'd achieved; he was modeling off his understanding of what a successful man does, cheat on his wife. You know what, I can kind of buy this explanation, so does Stella and by the end the couple is reconciled. This really is a different story.
What a strange movie. I don't know who this was for then, and even less so now. The film never really takes a position on homosexual relationships, it doesn't overtly critize them, though it would be hard not to notice the couples adoption of traditional gender roles by the end of the film. The movie is too graphic to be of presumably much use in a 'pray the gay away' "educational" context.
The story of course is a horrible model, the 'become straight by finding the right partner' trope which is highly unrealistic and has caused so much pain for so many over the years. However, as viewed from our time of increased acceptance of gender fluidity, perhaps these two were more bisexual then they realized.
This film could have easily been a total disaster, but the likability of Foster and King goes a long way to selling it. Both are long time second stringers who never broke out, though Foster has extremely memorable blue eyes, and King is one of those actors you recognize but can't quite place. The pretty good script is directed in a pretty straight forward style, the films mixture of the low key and melodramatic works for it. It's off kilter energy is matched by an extremely 1970's production design, I'm a fan of the aesthetic but here there is honestly too much of it. It's a hard to make out kind of picture, though honestly I enjoyed it, was charmed by it, even with all its problems. **1/2
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