The Canadian gay sports drama Heated Rivalry, a steamy no-holds-barred adaptation of Rachel Reid’s serialized novel Game Changers (which is so much better as a title) , is a sumptuous treat for both gay and straight people.
I know this sounds like a cliché. But love, true love, really has no gender. Hudson Williams and Connor Storrie playing two world-champion hockey players, look so much in love, we forget their sex and just focus, on their,well, sex.
The global debate on whether Williams and Storrie are gay in real life, is as absurd as wondering if an actor playing a rapist is a real-life offender. Williams plays a Canadian hockey player Shane Hollander ,and Ilya Grigoryevich Rozanov is his Russian rival on the field.
But off it—and here comes the heat—they can’t keep their eyes and hands off one another. Writer-director Jacob Tierney films the love making scenes like an aching opera: there is pain, passion, mischief, and urgency in Shane and Ilya’s lovemaking. My compliments to the intimacy co-ordinator who is as much the orchestra conductor as the director.
My favourite sequences in the 6-part series are the ones where Ilya speaks of his tragic family history to Shane on the phone from Russia Russian (the tears are a language of their own) and Shane’s dinner date with Rose (Sophie Nélisse,fabulous) who dares to ask him what no one else could, and yeah, gets a straight(no pun intended) answer.
The ‘square peg in a round hole’ analogy in the Shane-Rose conversation is simply priceless.
The series is beautifully constructed with each timeline working fluently and agilely towards cementing the relationship between the two players. We are swept along in the torrential tides of passion, those stolen glances, hands touching furtively, feet colliding at the dinner table…
Parallel to this peaen to gender-free passion is the other love story between an American hockey player Scott Hunter (François Arnaud) and Kip (Robbie G.K) a smoothie bartender and their tender romance which grows from a chance encounter across the counter to a full-fledged admission of romance in teeming hockey field.
This is where I jumped out of my seat to applaud a love so sublime it matters not if the main players reproductive organs are the same.
What I didn’t like was Episode 6 in which Shane and Ilya retreat to a cottage in the wilderness for two weeks of blissful solitude. I am not too sure if I am interested in their activities now that the opposing forces are beaten. It is time to leave the lovers alone.
