It was mostly about being part of a society that reads its children bedtime stories about growing up and falling in love with theopposite sex and about being saturated with media that portrays love between members oftheopposite sex as the default kind.
The two men professed their love for each other, though the fact that they were standing on opposite sides ofthe stage made them look more like a divorced couple.
The film would have been seen more as the story of a murderous love triangle set in Saigon in the early 1950s in which Caine, playing opposite Brendan Fraser, artfully portrays a weary British foreign correspondent.