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The 20th Chicago Lesbian & Gay International Film Festival
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By John Demetry
It's saddening to find the same cliché running through every feature film I've seen so far (the fest runs November 2-17; this report comes midway on November 11). It's the cliché of the dream/fantasy sequence. The most prominent use of this cliché occurs in Gypsy Boys, Revoir Julie, and Punks. It features the gay protagonist fantasizing about laying the unattainable object of his/her desire. Then, the filmmaker delivers a placating wish fulfillment; it encourages audience disconnection into their own private fantasies--it's called escapism. And this works at odds with these fine films' better impulses. At its best, Gypsy Boys plays like a mix between the groundbreaking, mature and moving, Parting Glances and the kinetic, au current moral thrillride Go. Following the exploits of a group of San Fran clubbers over a single weekend, director Brian Shepp effortlessly ties the disparate cast through a cleverly roving camera. Focussing on the desperate, moving search for love and the unexpected revelations of personal values, Shepp shows himself to be a very promising director. The film is sexy, funny, refreshingly multi-racial and has a kick-ass club-beat soundtrack. Shepp displays an unusually effective expressive style: the Golden Gate bridge backgrounding a declaration of love and pain, documentary footage of men lounging and loving in a public park, a fantasy-bursting opening, and super-imposed dissolves of characters taking the wrong path at the crossroads. There's even a gut-busting drag spoof of Showgirls!
Even Crepeau delivers the audience-pandering dream sequence. Juliet's fantasy of a more forceful Julie tickles audiences, easily riling up the common experience of an unrequited love with a best friend. At least she contrasts this with a more mature look at the pains and self-discoveries experienced by both women. Real-life dreams of acceptance and discovering love gain added poignance amongst the rapping panoply of Black gay men in Marlon Riggs' great documentaries, especially Tongues Untied. Just as Gypsy Boys waffled its strongest cinematic and cultural heritage, so does Punks wax over Riggs' legacy-and that of author James Baldwin (only Those Who Love Me Can Take the Train and Andre Techine's Wild Reeds match his "Another Country" achievement in queer cinema). The group of four friends and the punks of the title, gay men of color, range in types and sashay through cliches. However, the disco interludes performed by a Sister Sledge drag group are unusually smart camp. It's shorthand gospel-impulse about building and supporting a community (rather than its usual use in gay films as camp cheapening already sullied romantic illusions). You can feel that same need to be part of something in the audience's heartfelt reactions; it's a joy to get swept up in it-but it's not good enough. First-time feature director Patrik-Ian Polk directs his cast well and delivers the entertainment goods with a slick, serviceable style. However, when the lead dreams of sex with his "straight" neighbor in a swimming pool and the finale repeats it in "real time," the question of mere representation gets complicated. What do we gain by being seen in the same escapist scenarios classically used to suppress both our existence and the very spiritual revelations that can free us all?
When Damon graced the cover of The Advocate with the release of The Talented Mr. Ripley, a friend of mine likened his visage to the Nazi boy lilting "Tomorrow Belongs to Me" in Cabaret. Is that what our revolution will lead to? Wouldn't a better vision be one where we have changed the culture--rather than it changing us--so much that we no longer look to old Hollywood ideals and create new ones? A Damon-Affleck tomorrow doesn't belong to that vigil candle transformed through Drake's poetic prayer into a single twinkling star. The best film of the fest is the second feature by Francois Ozon, who directed last week's reviewed film, Water Drops on Burning Rocks. Criminal Lovers is my favorite of his features (though it doesn't transcend Sitcom and Water Drops). It's no Chereau opus, but it is something. Ozon connects a cinematic past with fairy tale archetypes. Riffing on Hansel and Grettel and Little Red Riding Hood, Ozon nudges Bonnie and Clyde and Gun Crazy. He exposes those film's sublimated homoeroticism and fetishistic sensuality. Most impressively, Ozon plays up the allegorical lyricism of gay Charles Laughton's only directorial effort, the masterpiece The Night of the Hunter; it's one of the most profoundly lit films of the year. The title lovers kill a beautiful Arab boy. We discover via flashbacks that their desire for him is their shared motive. When they're kidnapped by an older man in the woods, he forces the uncomplaining boy into having sex while his girlfriend watches. When the manipulative high school girl dreams about watching the secret object of her desire having sex with the big-bad wolf, she opens her legs and masturbates against the trunk of a tree. When she and her boyfriend have sex in the woods, Ozon directs this beautifully sexy and funny sequence as a cross between John Boorman's Excalibur and Walt "the Fascist" Disney's Snow White. Ozon recognizes the connection between these dream sequences and a legacy of Hollywood manipulation; his delirious spin transforms it into a drug of awareness.
I've had the opportunity to sneak screener tapes of some of the videos playing this week (Monday, November 13--Thursday, November 16). As an aesthetic principle, I won't preview films on video, so the pickings were slim. Video is best on the small screen; it's a medium of isolation and you have the option of pushing the "stop" button. The Gay Games, a documentary celebration of the annual international queer Olympics, attempts to glory in the communal spirit such an event evokes. Essentially a talking-head piece with montages of hotties, its director Ran Kotzer misses out on the most obvious expressive material-the sporting events themselves. A real director, like that Nazi bitch Leni Riefenstahl with Olympiad, could turn these displays of personal, national, and (here) sexual pride into artistic abstractions. Or a more socially aware director would have examined the complicated historical ramifications of a basketball game between Israeli and German Lesbians-sexual solidarity up against national rifts. It plays Tuesday, 7pm at City North 14.
Portion of a Lady is the only bearable documentary at the fest. The three drag queens followed are entertaining, smart, attractive--a good time. This video actually looks pretty good, especially the performance sequences that do justice to all the hard work documented and to the personalities displayed. Switching genres, it's fun to see queer life represented by various forms of animation as in the series: Animation Confabulation. We see how queer animators can create works as inane as South Park with the stop-motion Legos of Rick and Steve: The Happiest Gay Couple in All the World. The naughty The Rape of Ganymede is a little better. It diminishes classical mythology to the scale of the kind of gay-bar conversation goofed on in Gypsy Boys. Three other shorts are both more serious and full of greater animated wonder. Two by Wil Lin give me hope that he'll get feature-length financing. Anime-style teen brooding in Admission to Strangers turns sexily surreal. He scores "Guileless Guile" to a Kurt Weill song, giving a Brechtian jangle to the clarity and hard edges of his anime style. The best, though, is Colleen Cruise's 3DME, a computer-animated, philosophical meditation on the big bang and the birth of gender. This collection plays Tuesday, 7pm at Landmark's Century Cinema. Saving the worst for last. We're supposed to feel sorry for the pathetic 29-year-old Eban in love with 15-year-old Charley. James Bolton, the director of this video called Eban and Charley, takes every dramatic turn out of the NAMBLA handbook to justify their relationship. Eban is misunderstood and empathetic. Charley is abused and artistic--he even saw his deaf mother get run over by a drunk driver! I'd gladly take the steering wheel if Bolton were crossing the street. Driving under the influence of critical sobriety. Even in as visually dank a video as this--Chuck & Buck stripped to its immoral essentials--Giovanni Andrede, who plays Charley, is undeniably beautiful. He has a strange way of bobbing his head when he speaks, his hair and lips are full, his eyes wide with innocence. Bolton doesn't understand that what Eban does to Charley is an abuse. What Bolton does to Andrede is a violation of the innocence that makes him beautiful. When this plays at the City North 14 theater on Monday, November 13 at 9:15 pm, the gay community should come out in force to picket this filth out of the festival. That is one way a feature at this festival can bring out the best in our culture. We call it "pride"; and it is powerful enough to leave the world reeling. |
Scene from the documentary 101 Rent Boys playing at the Chicago Lesbian & Gay International Film
Festival 
Criminal Lovers
One of the 101 Rent Boys
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