by Will Davis
The 20th year of the London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival proved once again that this is one of Britain’s best and most exciting film events. Running from the 19th of March to the 12th of April, the National Film Theatre showcased a spectrum of diversity from a wide range of countries, dealing with all manner of gay-related issues, from historical perspectives of homosexual freedom, gay and lesbian comedy and drama to transgender identity and postmodern kitsch. With so many films on offer, it was almost impossible to choose which ones to see, but here are some of the highlights:
Shorts
From New York, Todd Downing’s The Underminer was a rather OTT exploration of the self doubt that afflicts an affluent Manhattan gay man as he tries to live up to his own expectations. The character’s own self (played by the same actor) haunts and hounds him: which is convincing as a veritable human tendency, but the lack of any resolution makes the film feel rather like an interesting artistic exercise. Meanwhile from the UK, Kolton Lee’s simple film Blood, about an up-and-coming boxer, packed a visual punch. Well shot and edited, the film tells the story of a boxer before his first big match while repeatedly flashing back to the past in which we meet his stern father and criminal lover. Perhaps holding back a little on the emotional front in favour of style, this was nonetheless a competent and engaging piece of work. Dirty Glitter 1: Damien proved to be a very impressive and funny short about a drugged up prostitute, Damien, hazily trying to figure out what is what. Merging extremities - impressive effects and acts of an obscene nature - make this a memorable and highly original short. Matii Harju’s Man Seeking Man, from Finland, is a powerful and poignant short. Here an older man uses a personal ad in a desperate attempt to connect, but ends up mistaking his estranged son for the service he has ordered. A tragedy in miniature. Jacqui Frost’s What Is Gay?, from the USA, shows a series of snaps of children as they are interviewed with questions pertaining to homosexual issues. Although a little overly indulgent (given that not of the children actually had an interesting response to all the questions), this is a nicely shaped piece and an innovative idea. Especially clever is the decision to initially withhold the information that all the interviewees have gay parents. From Spain, Implication, by Julian Quintanilla, was a short, sweet and surprisingly effective piece in which a mother confronts the man who had her son sacked for being gay. The humour is brash and laugh-out-loud funny. The sudden transition into seriousness at the end, when the message comes about, is perhaps a little misjudged, but hardly detracts from a simple, thoroughly exuberant short. Finally Search for Her, from Singapore by Dawn Khoo, was a sweet but rather uninspired film in which a voiceover is set to a series of rather bland, sometimes metaphorical images. Power, however, is contained within the voiceover itself, which tells the story of a Malaysian-Chinese lesbian coming to terms with who she really is.
Features
Transparent
Jules Rosskam’s simple yet effective documentary is composed of a series of interviews with female to male transgender parents. The subjects themselves are fascinating and compellingly open about their experiences, producing a range of extraordinary stories, from comic to tragic. One interviewee tells of giving birth to his child alone in his house because nobody, including himself, knew that he was pregnant, because of his obesity. Another relates the sad fact that he must return to being female when he wants to visit his child. Then there is the mother who gave his daughter an ambiguous name so that when she was older and had chosen her gender the name would fit either way: the girl grew up, decided to ‘transition’ but ended up rejecting his former name anyway because he wanted to be a new person. Transparent is a sensitive and highly original work about the transgender community that deserves to be seen by a wide, open-minded audience.
Gay Sex in the 70s
This is a short documentary that does pretty much what it says in the title and not much more. A series of interviews, not un-engaging, in which the subjects nostalgically reminisce about their trysts in bath houses and abandoned piers, before the advent of AIDS changed the golden days of promiscuity for good. There are plenty of funny and endearing moments in Joseph Lovett’s USA-based documentary, though the more serious material - the loneliness and isolation of some subjects, such as a man who had one gay friend to whom he would write and refer to homosexuality in code - is kept to a minimum. Everything you could possibly want to know about bathhouses for those who haven’t read Felice Picano’s Like People in History.
20 cm
The title of this frothy feature refers to the penis length of the narcoleptic pre-op transsexual, Marieta (Monica Cervera), who nods off at various, inconvenient moments throughout the narrative. While she sleeps, the film launches into optimum drive, and Marieta is reborn as a musical star, singing and dancing her way through some very impressive routines - rather like updated Gene Kelly numbers with (mercifully) racier themes. While she is awake, Marieta struggles to make ends meet and lust after the local shelf-stocker. When he becomes her boyfriend, Marieta is thrilled, except that his attachment to the one part of her body she yearns to be rid of puts a strain on their relationship. Marieta’s waking existence is not without its humorous moments, and is certainly at times compelling, but ultimately it is the musical interludes that really make 20 cm stand out, referencing films from the 50s and 60s as well as the infamously outrageous films of director Pedro Almodovar. In one particularly memorable number, Marieta and her friends emulate various clichés of married, unfulfilled womanhood whilst their husbands get it on with each other behind their backs. A gloriously un-PC celebration of womanhood with all its drawbacks, stereotypes and inequalities. Notable for its engaging central performance from Cervera, this is an immensely enjoyable film.
Night Watch
This Argentinean film proved to be an unexpected gem, in which the poverty of Buenos Aires is treated with Bresson-like distanciation. The film tracks the progress of Victor (Gonzalo Heredia), a young male prostitute, during the course of one night in the city. Although he seems to be leading a comparatively enjoyable existence, Victor’s life is clearly hampered by the selfishness of the world around him. Slowly his hedonistic existence is eaten at by humanity’s sheer, boundless heartlessness. He witnesses a woman push her boyfriend in front of a truck; his good friend and lover tries to smother him; and he is almost killed by a well-off middle-aged woman who helped him with money and drugs. Altruism does not exist, except perhaps within the small and poorest community of down-and-outs whom Victor befriends. But even here, it is not long before Victor heads off to lead his old lifestyle once again. It is only with children, with whom Victor plays football, that any true innocence is to be found. But innocence is transient, a message that a visit from Victor’s former lover’s ghost chillingly hams home when she accuses him of pursuing life in the city over her and their child. Night Watch was definitely a highlight of the festival. An intelligent and deeply affecting film.
The Line of Beauty
This reviewer was very much looking forward to seeing the first part of the televised adaptation to Alan Hollinghurst’s Booker Prize-winning novel The Line of Beauty. The adaptation is directed by Saul Dibb (Bullet Boy) and written by TV script-writing favourite Andrew Davies. Regrettably, the first episode turns out to be rather run-of-mill, mostly due to uninspired direction. It is of course impossible to adapt a book to screen and yet retain the myriad subtleties of the text, especially when they are largely internal. However, one does not necessarily expect a literal adaptation – rather a work that uses the book as source material and is not afraid to have its own take. In choosing to adapt so closely, comparisons with the novel are inevitable. Ultimately, this is a competent and enjoyable piece of television, but simply not worth the bother of anyone who has read the book and enjoyed its many metaphors and the detailed evocation of the Thatcher era. The episode was followed by a Q&A with Hollinghurst, Davies and Dibb. Davies in particular ensured this was entertaining with his fabulous, endlessly rambling diatribes on how he approached writing the script and his attitude to homosexual sex.
11 Men Out
Ottar (Bjorn Hlynur Haraldsson) is a professional footballer in Iceland who looks like a cross between Freddie Ljungberg and David Beckham (i.e. not half bad). Suddenly choosing to come out during a magazine interview - in the locker room no less - because he thinks it will get him on the cover, not only gets Ottar thrown out of his team, but shatters his sham marriage to a former Miss Iceland and puts a strain on his relationship with his disenfranchised son. While this sounds like a number straight out of The Full Monty catalogue of comedies, the script is mercilessly unsentimental, while the rather evident lack of a budget unfortunately prevents this film from quite being believable. While it is refreshing for a script to excise virtually all unnecessary sentiment, ensuring that the deadpan humour is very constant, the lack of any real emotional engagement with the story prevents you from laughing out loud because you’re not sure whether or not you care enough to do so. Ottar himself, however, is a fabulous character. Completely self absorbed, chilled out to the point of suffering from dissociated personality disorder, and a fan of quiet evenings in with red wine and chick flicks, he is a rare comic creation and makes for a strangely likable anti-protagonist in Robert Douglas’ witty, bemusing film.
Feline Masquerade
Feline Masquerade is an accomplished and informative documentary about the lives of five Swiss women from different generations. Director Veronika Minder – a fascinating lady herself, who introduced the film and later answered questions about its funding – sensitively gives her subjects the time and space to give their views and stories without interference. To break up the interviews, classic moments of lesbian-identified cinema are injected, ranging from Dietrich’s famous tuxedo scene to more obscure, lesser-known film clips. The interviewees themselves are all informative and interesting, and the balance of perspective in the younger and older generations guarantees that this documentary will prove insightful to all who watch it.
Time to Leave
Ozon’s latest film tells the story of Romain (Melvin Poupaud) a handsome fashion photographer who discovers he has a (suspiciously obscure) form of terminal cancer. Deciding to tell only his grandmother, Time to Leave charts Romain’s last months as he deals with his unfortunate predicament. This film is somewhat let down by the fact that it is so completely uninspired: there are simply hundreds of others like it, from Close to Leo to Savage Nights - and much better done too. Ozon has little to say apart from the fact that it is sad to be dying, which is hardly a ground-breaking observation. Meanwhile, the apparent referencing of Death in Venice is also neither here nor there, since thematically there is little to link Dirk Bogarde’s monstrously aging connoisseur of youth and Poupard’s modern-day photographer used to looking at life through a lens. It is almost as though Ozon has hit upon a half-decent idea and not bothered to develop it any further; yes, material goods are indeed very meaningless when you’re going somewhere you can’t take them with you – but so what? Those fearing a more mature work from the prolific director needn’t worry too much, as it is not long before the usual preposterousness wrenches the film away from credibility (think the father in 5X2 inexplicably choosing not to go to his son’s birth, or the wife suddenly sleeping with another man on her wedding night). Here, Romain’s grandmother suggests they commit suicide together, and, rather more hilariously, a woman (Jeanne Moreau) just happens to sit down at his table and ask him if he would impregnate her because her husband is sterile. Ozon has not yet managed to recapture the mood of Under the Sand, his most sombre and impressively pensive work. This is a director whose talent for drama is best at home in farcical comedy – which is why his early films Sitcom and Water Drops on Burning Rocks remain his best. Unfortunately, his farcical comedy sits less well in straight-faced drama, something best exposed by the bizarre and muddled concoction that was Swimming Pool. At the end of the day, Ozon’s films are so colourful and fun to watch that the fact they are so often disjointed seems almost irrelevant; he is fast becoming an institution of imperfect but gloriously enjoyable cinema. And maybe there are seed pods of maturity in Time to Leave, such as when we witness Romain taking pictures of his estranged sister and her children in a park without her being aware. We can only await the next one with the usual mixture of tentative, slightly perverse curiosity.
Queens
A supremely camp, colourful and soapish affair, it is virtually impossible not to be entertained by this ultra modern comedy centring around about a group of mothers whose sons all happen to be getting married at Spain’s first mass queer wedding ceremony. The characters of the mothers themselves might have been plucked from Almodovar’s finest – indeed, one of his regulars, Marisa Paredes, leads the way as a successful actress trying with limited success to be cool about the fact that her son is marrying the son of her gardener. The other women include a nymphomaniac head-case, a super-bitch hotelier, a reticent judge and a loquacious busy-body with the mutt from hell. Manuel Gomez Pereira’s glossy feature pays homage to shallow, sunny television dramas, and gives them an original twist by keeping the focus on its five middle-aged protagonists and their individual unfolding dramas in the wake of their sons’ impending marriage. This is the sort of hip, witty comedy that ought to provide an example of the sort of material that ought to make for regular prime-time television.
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