The 25th Annual Pittsburgh International Lesbian and Gay Film Festival
Reviews of all films.
All reviews by Steve Warren
I Killed My Mother
So this 20-year-old—now 21—Montreal kid, Xavier Dolan, thinks he can write, direct and star in a movie. He tries and the result, I Killed My Mother (J’Ai Tué Ma Mère) is one of Canada’s best films of 2009 and is one of the best I’ve seen on this side of the border in 2010.
It’s as hard to separate fact from fiction in this semi-autobiographical tale of a gay youth’s love-hate relationship with his single mother as it is to tell how much self-awareness Dolan brings to the story. Does he realize what a jerk his character, 16-year-old Hubert Minel, is or does he agree with Hubert that his mother, Chantal Lemming (Anne Dorval) is a bad parent?
Teenage viewers may sympathize with Hubert even more than they’re intended to, while older generations will marvel that Chantal doesn’t slap him around—or note that he’d be better off if she had done so from an early age.
His father, Richard Minel (Pierre Chagnon), left when Hubert was seven. Even though he lives nearby he only sees his son on special occasions. Chantal works to support Hubert while also cooking, cleaning and driving him to school. In return he complains about everything, curses her and is disgusted by her, while secretly revealing his love for her in video confessionals.
Complicating things further, Hubert has a boyfriend, whose free-spirited mother accepts them as a couple, but Hubert hasn’t come out to his own mother.
With home life increasingly unbearable, Hubert finds a confidante in his teacher, Julie Cloutier (Suzanne Clément), with whom he forms a relationship so close it would be inappropriate if he were straight.
When Chantal can’t stand any more of Hubert’s contempt she teams up with Richard for an intervention of sorts, sending Hubert away to boarding school. Their argument that his grades are low is undercut by signs of his excellence at least in creative pursuits in school.
(This is a minor weaknesses of the screenplay, along with a romance and a gay-bashing that are given too little context.) But I’d still rank Dolan’s script as stronger than most Hollywood blockbusters.)
Oh, Hubert doesn’t literally kill his mother. He tells Ms. Cloutier she’s dead so he won’t have to talk about her in class. When the teacher learns the truth she quotes Jean Cocteau to the boy: “The mother of a son will never be his friend.”
For such a young filmmaker to put all this together is beyond incredible. There are insights that should have taken decades of hindsight—or intense therapy—to bring out. Sure, there are flaws and youthful excesses, but not as many as in the average Adam Sandler movie.
On top of all his talent, Dolan has movie star good looks. With tousled dark hair falling over his left eye he looks like Bobby Kendall in the gay classic Pink Narcissus. At the risk of being thought jealous, I hate Dolan—and want to have his baby!
The Secret Diaries of Miss Anne Lister
If Jane Austen had written a lesbian novel and Masterpiece Theatre (where this BBC production may well end up) had filmed it the result would have been something like The Secret Diaries of Miss Anne Lister.
Lister was a real person who lived from 1791 to 1840. As women had few outlets for venting in those days, she put all her thoughts into her journals, which filled many volumes (four million words, it’s said). And because even lesbian love dared not speak its name then, she devised her own code for the intimate passages about those she loved.
The film is more about Lister’s loves than her cryptography. Anne (Maxine Peake) lives with an elderly aunt (Gemma Jones) and uncle (Alan David)—sister and brother, not spouses—on the family estate, Shipden Hall. As is the custom, the elders make some effort to marry off their “marriageable” niece, but Anne makes it clear she’s having none of it. When she inevitably inherits the estate, she says, “I have in mind to settle with a female companion.”
We meet three candidates for the position. When the film begins Anne is romancing Marianna (Anna Madeley), who has taken her away from Tib (Susan Lynch), who remains a jealous friend. Marianna’s family marries her off to a fat, older man, ironically named Charles Lawton (Michael Culkin). “Marry me!” Anne screams when the engagement is announced. She wears black to the wedding and from then on.
After a year of devoting herself to her studies, Anne starts looking around. Her eye falls on pretty, innocent, “stupid-ish” Miss Browne (Tina O'Brien), and there’s a Dangerous Liaisons quality to her wooing in the guise of friendship.
Marianna comes back into the picture, but ultimately not far enough for Anne, who becomes involved with wealthy young Miss Ann Walker (Christine Bottomley).
I’m impressed by the job Jane English has done in cutting four million words down to a 90-minute screenplay, and Director James Kent may not be James Ivory yet, but he recreates the period well in a way that won’t alienate modern audiences.
Miss Anne Lister was a champion in her day for rights we’re still fighting for. She can be our poster girl!
Making the Boys
Gay history is getting harder to escape as documentarians scurry to interview bioqueers while they’re still alive and, in most cases, lucid.
Crayton Robey has assembled an all-star cast of playwrights, historians, a few actors and others to recall the creation of Mart Crowley’s groundbreaking 1968 play The Boys in the Band for his film Making the Boys. Like many docs it’s a great hour’s worth of material stretched to a good hour and a half.
The year after The Boys in the Band opened, Stonewall happened, and some newly liberated gays wanted to dig in the broken ground and bury the play, with its reminders of the times we had just emerged from. It remains controversial today, a brilliantly written time capsule of a period most of today’s gays don’t remember. And the rest would rather forget.
Making the Boys is basically Crowley’s autobiography, punctuated with period footage that puts the various decades in context. Crowley escaped from Mississippi to New York as soon as he could and worked as assistant to Natalie Wood on Splendor in the Grass and West Side Story. This began a close friendship that led to most of the breaks in his career.
Broke and out of work, Crowley was inspired by a notorious New York Times piece about an unnamed trio of gay playwrights (Tennessee Williams, William Inge and Edward Albee) that Stanley Kauffman accused of creating female characters who were really gay men. “Why don’t they write about themselves” he asked. So Crowley did, and the world changed a little.
Albee was one of the first to read the script. He says he didn’t like it then and still doesn’t, but he was unable to keep it from getting a showcase production so successful that it went on to a five-year off-Broadway run and a film.
Some activists picketed the movie, which opened nearly nine months after Stonewall, over its negative stereotypes. That’s how fast things were changing in those days.
If you think the play’s characters were unhappy, the rest of the real story is even sadder. Crowley wrote another play (and yet another that's not even mentioned), which flopped, then spent most of the ’70s traveling around the world on the money he’d made from Boys. Finally Wood’s husband, actor Robert Wagner, got Crowley a gig writing and producing his Hart to Hart series, and Wood died in a boating accident while it was airing.
That kicked off the ’80s, the first decade of AIDS, and by the mid-’90s the disease had claimed many of those associated with The Boys in the Band. A few of the actors went on to have careers, but many are remembered only for their association with that play and film.
Documentaries can’t promise happy endings, but The Boys in the Band lives on. It’s too good to be forgotten and someone will always revive it and the controversy surrounding it. Making the Boys gives some insight into its creation and a variety of viewpoints about it.
Undertow
Brokeback Mountain meets Ghost in Undertow, a romantic fantasy from Peru that’s an accomplished first feature for writer-director Javier Fuentes-León.
The Spanish title, Contracorriente, literally means “against the current,” which is how gays would feel in the poor fishing village where the story takes place. Homophobia comes naturally to the macho fishermen, whose religion has a stronger current of superstition than most.
In this setting a closeted bisexual finds the best of both worlds, in more ways than one, when his male lover dies.
Miguel (Cristian Mercado) is married but also carrying on with Santiago (Manolo Cardona), a painter and photographer who’s a part-time resident. The whole town knows Santiago is gay and shuns him accordingly, but no one is the wiser when he and Miguel get together for secret sex.
One day Santiago shows up to tell Miguel he drowned. Now no one but Miguel can see him or touch him. Suddenly they can walk together in public without fear of exposure, and best of all, they can still have sex!
Fuentes-León manages a difficult balancing act by taking it seriously in a realistic setting, but since Undertow is a movie, the good times can’t last forever. Santiago’s spirit must be put to rest and the villagers, especially Miguel, must learn what it means to be a man.
It should be noted that both actors, in addition to being talented—Mercado’s role is far more demanding—are hot. If forced to choose between them I’d probably pick the one who’s still alive, but I’d much rather jump in between them and let nature take its course.
Hey, Fuentes-León has his fantasy and I have mine.
BearCity
BearCity is a romantic comedy about Manhattan’s gay bear population (is there a straight bear population?) and the men who love them. Director Douglas Langway co-wrote the screenplay with Lawrence Ferber.
Like most Gotham-centric films, BearCity assumes New York is the center of the universe. Roger (Gerald McCullouch) is the sun around which the Ursa solar system revolves. He may be hairy—although real bears would probably tease him for being too skinny, but this is a movie; so it gives the majority of gay viewers someone to drool over.
The main characters we meet in the first scene are two smooth, skinny guys barely out of their teens: roommates Tyler (Joe Conti) and Simon (Alex Di Dio). Ty is a closet bear cub who will crush on Roger at first sight.
That first sighting comes after Ty has made a new circle of friends by advancing from computer chat rooms to his first bear bar, the Ramrod.
Roger can have any man he wants—in fact, he already has. He doesn’t seem eager to settle down; so his apparent attraction to Ty doesn’t ring true, especially when their moments together are always being interrupted, and Roger doesn’t seem to mind.
The screenplay tries to incorporate bear slang and pop culture references to every bear but Yogi (copyright issues?) into every line, so nonbear viewers can learn the scene along with Ty.
This isn’t a bad crowd to hang with for an hour and a half. Although BearCity isn’t great cinema, for the underserved community it spotlights it should be a big hairy deal.
Baby Jane?
For nearly 50 years, it’s been said the only way to make What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? any campier would be to have men in drag play the leading roles. That theory is put to the test in Baby Jane?, which is virtually a satirical remake.
Matthew Martin, who has been reincarnating Bette Davis in various forms on San Francisco stages for two decades, plays what amounts to an amalgam of the actress herself and her character, Baby Jane. J. Conrad Frank co-stars as the yang to Martin’s yang, Joan Crawford and Jane’s sister Blanche. He looks more like Joan Cusack than Joan Crawford, but his voice and expressions are great.
The plot is exactly the same. Jane, a child star in vaudeville, was eclipsed by Blanche’s movie stardom decades later. Then Blanche had an accident—or was it?—that left her crippled and dependent on Jane. Now Blanche is a virtual prisoner, tortured by her alcoholic sister who plans to attempt a comeback.
There are small but significant changes. The accompanist Jane hires for her revived act is now Edwin Fagg, instead of Edwin Flagg, played by Mike Finn. Blanche passes the time watching Mommie Dearest on TV.
Written and directed by Billy Clift, Baby Jane? mostly soars when either or both stars are on screen. The sets in their decaying mansion don’t seem to match the exteriors of the house, but they’re marvelously decorated and filmed in classic noir fashion. When the film ventures outside the house, which thankfully doesn’t happen often, makeshift sets and iffy performances by bit players bring things down.
Martin wouldn’t have made a career of playing Bette Davis if he weren’t good at it. While it’s usually necessary to tone a performance down in bringing it from stage to screen, that wasn’t the case here. Martin flutters his eyelashes as if dusting the camera lens with them, and he’s a hoot throughout. And no self-respecting fan of camp drag can go to their grave without hearing “But’cha are, Blanche!” spoken by a man in a dress.
Fit
The right wing’s worst nightmare is that their children will learn tolerance in school. Racial prejudice is so 20th century (which doesn’t stop those who are still living in the 19th), but discrimination and bullying against queers is still worth fighting for.
The U.K. is a bit ahead of the curve. Stonewall, “the lesbian, gay and bisexual charity” has been touring schools, among other venues, for years with a play, Fit, that demystifies lesbians and gays because it’s easier to hate people you don’t understand.
In addition to promoting equality it smashes stereotypes, showing nerds and tomboys can be straight; jocks, girly girls and homophobes can be gay, and it doesn’t matter—or shouldn’t: they can all be friends.
Rikki Beadle-Blair has done a fine job of opening up the play and adapting it for the screen so it can reach a wider audience. At least some of the terrific young performers honed their roles in workshops and stage performances prior to filming.
Fit is centered on a dance and drama class in college, and Loris (Beadle-Blair), the new dance and drama teacher, is obviously and openly gay. Half the class walks out when he asks who has a problem with it, but they’ll be back when they see how much fun the rest of the class is having. “All language, all movement is dance,” Loris teaches, winning over even the haters a bit too easily.
Lee (Lydia Toumazou), the most masculine girl in the class, is BFFs with Karmel, (Sasha Frost), the most feminine, and follows her to a meeting of a gay support group. That’s the setting where many truths are revealed and lessons learned. To us they may be preaching to the choir, but think of the teenagers hearing these things for the first time.
Outside of school the students have to deal with their families and, in some cases, a Youth Soccer League whose organizer says, “This ain’t a game for fairies.”
Fit should be required viewing in American schools. Let’s hope some people who see it in the festival can take steps toward making that happen.
A Marine Story
In the early days of “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” NBC aired Serving in Silence: The Margarethe Cammermeyer Story, the true tale of a woman discharged from the military for being a lesbian.
Now in what are hopefully the last days of the policy we get A Marine Story, which is fictional but based on true stories. Its quality is nearer that of a Lifetime movie as it spreads itself too thin, but a good performance from an appealing lead carries it over a lot of bumps.
The opening looks like a female version of those ’70s B movies about Vietnam vets coming back and cleaning up their hometowns, which had gone to hell in their absence. Alexandra Everett (Dreya Weber) walks into a convenience store and foils a robbery before she’s had time to drop her duffel bag off at home.
Oh, Alex will take out a meth lab or two before it’s over, but the bulk of the story is about her personal relationships, flashbacks to what ended her Marine career a year before she was eligible for a pension, and her efforts to help a troubled young woman get in shape for the military.
Saffron (out actress Paris Pickard) was in the convenience store with her meth-head boyfriend. The judge gives her a choice of military service or prison. When Alex is asked to help she gives Saffron the initial impression that prison might be the better choice, putting her through her own version of boot camp: “Either give me total submission or get gone.”
In the meantime Alex, who is married to a Navy SEAL (Troy Ruptash), reconnects with old friends. She comes out to Holly (Christine Mourad), whose reaction is not only supportive but totally flirtatious. She even takes Alex to a gay bar, where Alex meets Nona (Alice Rietveld) and goes home with her.
The men in town are mostly assholes, and Alex has to beat up a few of them to earn their respect.
Flashbacks to Iraq show Maj. Everett with her boss, Executive Officer Lt. Col. Pollard (Jeff Sugarman), as he breaks the news that she’s been busted. She has a choice of taking an honorable discharge or fighting it and possibly getting worse. At first he’s sympathetic, voicing several talking points about the stupidity of DADT, but later he’s like another person, offering to testify for Alex if she’ll have sex with him, because adultery is “the lesser of two evils.”
A scene at a paintball party initially seems gratuitous but manages to provide some action and comic relief while also giving Saffron a taste of combat. It’s probably the best work of writer-director Ned Farr, the star’s husband, who also teamed with her on The Gymnast.
A Marine Story tries to cover too many bases, but it covers some of them well, providing eye candy for lesbian viewers along the way.
Sex in an Epidemic
Nostalgia isn’t what it used to be. Neither is sex, except that it still sells. Hence the title Sex in an Epidemic for a documentary that wasn’t intended to be commercial. A fairly comprehensive history of AIDS in America, especially considering its brief running time, it does talk a lot about sex because sex is the principal means of transmission and safe sex the principal means of prevention.
Sex notes sarcastically the big deal made in the U.S. about the discovery that the HIV virus causes AIDS, when that discovery had already been made in France, and it bemoans the stigmatization of what we used to call (the film doesn’t use the term) “the 4H Club”—homosexuals, Haitians, heroin users and hemophiliacs.
Early controversies will be nostalgic for some, eye-opening for others. When gays suddenly started dying from an unknown disease in the early ’80s, panic set in. Larry Kramer encouraged the panic to scare gay men into protecting themselves, although there was no real knowledge about how to do that. Edmund White recalls how two French friends laughed at the American concept of a “puritanical disease” that killed gay men for having sex, and soon died of AIDS themselves.
Dr. Joe Sonnabend, hustler and author Richard Berkowitz and singer Michael Callen came up with the concept of safe sex and promoted it in the gay community. They and others found that eroticizing safe sex was the best way to get the message across to gay men, but the government, especially in the Reagan and G.H.W. Bush years, would have nothing to do with education that wasn’t G-rated.
Updates show ignorance still being fought at many levels as the disease becomes increasingly manageable. There’s no mention of the return of barebacking or intentionally contracting the disease, but of promoting condom distribution in prisons and getting the word out to minority communities.
Most of the information in Sex in an Epidemic is available elsewhere, sometimes more entertainingly or with fewer spelling errors, but it’s a compact reminder of what some of us lived through in the last 30 years—and many of us didn’t.
Elena Undone
In Elena Undone Nicole Conn revisits the classic lesbian plot (Desert Hearts, Lianna, Personal Best and Conn’s own Claire of the Moon) about a heretofore straight woman discovering her inner lesbian when she falls in love with a delectable dyke.
Elena Winters (Necar Zadegan) has been married 15 loveless years to Pastor Barry (Gary Weeks), having been forced into it at a young age by her Indian and Spanish parents.
Peyton Lombard (Traci Dinwiddie, who doesn’t exude the heat of Patricia Charbonneau but gets the job done) writes self-help books but hasn’t been able to help herself since her partner of six years left while her mother was dying.
Of course, Elena and Peyton meet and hit it off. They instantly become best friends while trying to deny their mutual physical attraction.
At the movie’s midpoint nature takes its course and we have the heralded “world’s longest movie kiss,” which I clocked at three minutes and 24 seconds. Not long after that, the women have a sex scene which goes on even longer.
Barry’s parishioners would tell you the women are going to hell, but the movie threatens to get there ahead of them. After letting them have a few minutes of happiness, Conn is compelled to throw all manner of obstacles in their path. How can love conquer all if there’s no all for it to conquer?
Lesbians starved for onscreen representation will tune out the bad writing for the chance to watch two hot women get together in beautifully photographed surroundings.
Violet Tendencies
Violet Tendencies is yet another movie about an insular group of New Yorkers, most of them gay. It was directed by Casper Andreas and written by Jesse Archer, who reprises the character of Luke from Andreas’ Slutty Summer (2004) and A Four Letter Word (2007).
If anyone’s wondered what’s happened to Mindy Cohn since The Facts of Life went off the air 22 years ago—don’t all raise your hands at once—the answer’s on view in Violet Tendencies.
Cohn plays Violet, who’s fat, 40 and “the oldest living fag hag.” Violet is also lonely, despite the companionship of her roommate Luke (Archer) and his friends. While these guys pair up and go home together every night, Violet sleeps alone.
Could it be, as young, skinny co-worker Salome (Kim Allen) tries to coach her, that she’s looking for love in all the wrong places—i.e., gay bars?
Violet tries a telephone dating service, but her dates never work out. Luke, meanwhile, is dating a handsome hairdresser who throws him out when Luke refuses to give up his slut status.
Riley (Samuel Whitten) is in a long term relationship with Markus (director Andreas encoring his role from Slutty Summer), but it’s still evolving. Riley likes the status quo but Markus wants marriage and children—white picket fence optional.
The other major—and majorly hot!—character is Zeus (Marcus Patrick), a dancer who is open about his HIV status (“ten years positive and still kicking”) and former heroin addiction but private about other aspects of his life.
Typical of Manhattan melodramedies, you won’t care as much about these people as they do about themselves. Cohn works up some sympathy for Violet, then makes you want to kick her when she thinks she’s found Mr. Right (Armand Anthony as Vern), but you know she’s wrong.
Depending on your tolerance for these Manhattan types and your reaction to Andreas’ other films (which include The Big Gay Musical), you’ll find the people in Violet Tendencies terribly witty, terrible trying to be witty or just terribly trying.
Edie & Thea: A Very Long Engagement
It’s just a couple of old dykes sitting around talking, but no one could vote for a Proposition 8 after watching Edie & Thea: A Very Long Engagement. Unfortunately, you won’t be able to get anyone predisposed to vote that way to watch it, but that’s their loss. It’s here for us to enjoy the story of two women who were in love for nearly 50 years.
Edie Windsor and Thea Spyer met in the early 1960s, but as Edie says, “It took another two years to be the beginning.” They enjoyed dancing together and later doing other things together. Then Thea proposed. They moved in together and never separated again.
Their story is illustrated by hundreds of photos, some dating back to the women’s youth. Some aspects of their stories are virtual clichés for people of the pre-Stonewall generation, while others are quite specific.
Edie was born in Philadelphia, married a man and moved to Baltimore, then left him and went to New York in 1950. Thea was born in Amsterdam to a family wealthy enough to escape the Nazis in 1939, first to England and then to America.
At the age of 45 Thea was diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis. Her body began to deteriorate but her mind remained sharp. In 1983 she and Edie dressed as a bride and groom for Halloween. Ten years later they were among the first to register as domestic partners in New York.
When doctors told Thea she only had a year to live the women started making plans to marry in Toronto, which they did on May 22, 2007. It’s ironic to see them declared “partners for life” after more than 41 years together; hence the film’s title.
Edie & Thea was made by Susan Muska and Gréta Olafsdóttir (The Brandon Teena Story). They’ve done a splendid job of assembling the details of two lives totaling more than 150 years, most of them spent together.