‘Three Months’ Review: Troye Sivan Sets a Positive Example in Gay Teen Romance
Peter Debruge Chief Film CriticFittingly enough, “Three Months” is a movie about waiting, and while 12 weeks may seem like an eternity to its openly gay lead character, Caleb (Australian pop star Troye Sivan), it’s nothing compared to the decades others have spent waiting for a project like this to come along.
Here, readily available to anyone with a Paramount Plus subscription, is a frank, affirmational portrait of a contemporary queer teenager.
Writer-director Jared Frieder’s feature debut feels like the LGBT equivalent of “Juno”: snappy and refreshingly nonjudgmental in dealing with the consequences of a risky one-night stand.In 2011, when the movie is set, it takes three months for an antibody test to conclusively determine whether someone who may have been exposed to HIV was in fact infected.
That’s a simple rule-of-the-road for sexually active gay men, but one rarely discussed in popular culture. It can hardly be understated how important it is for contemporary adolescents, bombarded as they are by pornography and peer pressure, to also be informed about the consequences of casual sex — not in an alarmist or moralistic way, mind you, but simply to have a film that depicts what they’re going through, if and when the find themselves in Caleb’s shoes. (His shoes, it should be said, are one of the film’s most endearing details: classic white canvas Chucks, covered heel-to-toe in random and sometimes raunchy doodles.) With his porcelain features and pre-Raphaelite curls, Sivan serves as an idealized stand-in for an insecure gay teen.
