The Boston Phoenix
Review from issue: May 20 - 27, 1999

[Movie Reviews]

| reviews & features | by movie | by theater | film specials | hot links |


Rising to the top

The cream of the Boston Gay & Lesbian Film Fest

by Chris Fujiwara

This year's Boston Gay & Lesbian Film/Video Festival suggests that the most searching, intelligent work in current gay and lesbian film is being done in documentaries. The narrative feature films in the festival are uneven, but several nonfiction films are outstanding.

The highlight is The Cream Will Rise (1997; May 22 at 5:30 p.m.), Gigi Gaston's intense portrait of self-identified "omnisexual" singer/songwriter Sophie B. Hawkins. For a while the film seems like a lot of other documentaries about musicians on tour: it has concert footage, scenes of the musicians rehearsing, an occasional tête-à-tête between the filmmaker and her subject, clips from music videos ("Damn, I Wish I Was Your Lover"). All this is fine, but either you're a fan of Hawkins's slithery folk/funk/jazz or you're not, and since I'm not, I was having trouble finding reasons to stay interested.

The film gradually builds intimacy, though, giving its audience time to get acquainted with the subject -- a process that parallels the changing relationship between Hawkins and the filmmaker. Hawkins is anything but afraid to expose herself, but she keeps Gaston at arm's length for much of the first part of the film. Then comes a long monologue in which she vents her rage against "the fucking assholes of the stupid motherfucking record company who have no fucking taste, and I don't care if I get dropped tomorrow. I don't give a fuck because they need me and I don't need them." From this point on I was hooked. It's impossible to resist a person who talks like that and is angry and has right on her side.

As Hawkins goes on, further depths to her anger become apparent. "All artists must have had such fucked-up childhoods, because we find these parents in the record company and in the directors and in the movie companies, these fake fathers and mothers, and they treat us worse than our own parents treated us. And yet we think that they're nicer, 'cause they're giving us a shot, and they're not nicer, they're just abusing us." Gaston follows up on this clue, which we can be sure hasn't been dropped innocently: Hawkins wants to have her secret plucked from her.

We learn about Hawkins's bohemian upbringing in the '70s, about her mother's drinking and attraction to sadomasochism (which resulted from the sadomasochism of her own parents). It emerges, at first in a confused way, that as a child Sophie was repeatedly sexually abused by a male family member. This discovery becomes the center of the film, around which Hawkins and her mother confront each other in a series of oblique, free-form encounters. Because both women are versatile, volatile, articulate, and histrionic (and they play to the documentary camera with Strasbergian skill), their filmed relationship becomes unusually absorbing and unpredictable, a self-conscious psychodrama and a veiled preparation for therapy sessions (which also took place, though not on camera, during the period of the film's production).

The Cream Will Rise invites you to respect Hawkins's lucidity, musicianship, and intensity. Gaston's vivid, densely textured filmmaking does justice to her themes (whose complexity undoubtedly wasn't fully apparent to her when she started the project): parents' betrayals of children, the sources of creativity, the relationship between seduction and performance.

Two other accomplished documentaries enhance the festival. "Sambal Belacan in San Francisco" (1997), Madeleine Kim's 25-minute study of three Singaporean lesbians in San Francisco, is the highlight of a program of short films by women on June 5 at 2 p.m. Moving and discreet, this movie conveys the women's longing both for home and for the right to "be themselves." It also conveys the mystery and symbolic importance of their journey with a sensuous, delicate visual style and a hypnotically intimate soundtrack that consists largely of the women's voices interspersed with songs.

In Nish Saran's Summer in My Veins (1999; May 29 at 2 p.m.), the filmmaker, unsettled while waiting for the result of his HIV test, resolves to come out to his mother when she arrives from India to attend his Harvard graduation. Then he puts off the discussion until hours before her return flight. The imminent deadline posed by her return and the anguish of Saran's constant postponement give the film tension; hidden behind his video camera except in a few scenes, the filmmaker is the prisoner of his own lucid uncertainty, until, in the moving climax, his mother's unconditional love absolves him.

By comparison with these three fine documentaries, the festival's narrative feature films seem lightweight. The best one I saw is David Moreton's Edge of Seventeen (1998; May 23 at 7:30 p.m.). Set in Sandusky, Ohio, in 1984, this briskly made effort is the coming-out/coming-of-age story of aspiring musician Eric Hunter (he's into Eurythmics). The hero's identity crisis is well drawn and compelling; the high-school/summer-job milieu is evoked skillfully. The cast is appealing: Chris Stafford's Eric is adorably pensive and edgy, Tina Holmes is the ultimate sacrificial girl-next-door, Andersen Gabrych is a plausible charming cad. Moreton's direction achieves a combination of slickness and incisiveness that's all but disappeared from American films since the best high-school comedies of the '80s. Unfortunately, the last half-hour or so is all obligatory scenes, but thanks mainly to the actors, Edge of Seventeen doesn't altogether wear out its welcome.

I can't say the same for Anne Wheeler's Better Than Chocolate (1998; May 21 at 8 p.m.), though this Canadian romantic comedy was made to please crowds and nothing will stop it. It has everything: a tender, sweet, sexy 19-year-old aspiring writer, Maggie; a somewhat tougher itinerant street artist, Kim, with whom Maggie has an instant romance; Judy, a lovable transsexual; and Maggie's mom, who's going out of her head after being dumped by her husband and who moves in with Maggie not realizing that her daughter is gay. The personal dilemmas these characters drag around with them are eventually resolved with token stress against a lightly drawn background of battles with censors (Maggie works at a lesbian bookstore that has had a shipment withheld by customs) and lumpen homophobes. The film is, at best, undemanding entertainment, but I liked the throwaway production number in a club in which three women in fluorescent wigs and go-go boots sing, "I'm in love with Julie Christie/She makes me go misty."

Still less substantial, and more pretentious, is Get Real (1998; May 20 at 7:45 p.m.). Sixteen-year-old Steven, a student in a small English town, has accepted his gayness but hasn't informed his parents or most of his schoolmates. Steven falls for the most popular guy in school, a repressed, closeted track star named John. By the time Steven and John get together, the film has come to resemble what it probably is: the adaptation of a bad play. What little Get Real has going for it comes from actor Ben Silverstone, whose Steven is perfectly, obliquely sardonic in dealing with the cluelessness and hypocrisy of the outside world. But Simon Shore's direction struggles with the script's mixture of strained confrontations and comedy relief that could be from a Carry On entry (and not one of the better ones).

The most formally intricate of all these films is John Greyson's Uncut (1997; June 3 at 8 p.m.). Three men named Peter meet in Ottawa in 1979. Peter #1 is a student who's obsessed with circumcision and who has written a paper on the psychosexual implications of the practice. He dictates the work to Peter #2, a typist, whose apartment is filled with framed photos of Canadian prime minister Pierre Trudeau. ("Pierre," remember, is "Peter" in French.) Into these two rather theoretical existences a third Peter insinuates himself, a mysterious, wily semiotician secretly working on a videotape collage using the image of Trudeau. When Trudeau sees the tape, he has a heart attack and falls into a coma. All three Peters are found culpable and sentenced to a rehabilitation camp (Canada in this film, by the way, is a matriarchal police state), where Peters #1 and #2 devise a last-ditch plan to revive Trudeau from his coma. Interspersed with this narrative are documentary scenes in which a series of artists talk about copyright and the use of others' images and work.

After the charm of its wit and complexity wears off, Uncut leaves a thin impression. Greyson has all the preciosity of Peter Greenaway but, in this film at least (I'd like to see his other work), not enough of Greenaway's inventiveness. Several of the conceits are terribly labored; everything having to do with Trudeau's coma suggests an overlong Saturday Night Live sketch. In the narrative segments, the hard, oppressive, lurid shot-on-video visual quality works against the elegance Greyson is striving for; Greyson's interest in using the properties specific to video (as opposed to those that belong to cinema in general) grows more and more perfunctory as the film goes on. And though his theme of copyright puts him in the area of Craig Baldwin's Sonic Outlaws, Greyson is far from rivaling Baldwin's exuberant facility with the medium or his Burroughsian insight into the virus-like proliferation of images.

Tired as some of these movies are, they still point up the vitality of the themes of identity, belonging, and difference that concern many gay filmmakers. For anyone interested in how cinema can explore such themes, the Boston Gay & Lesbian Film/Video Festival is a worthwhile event.

[Movies Footer]

| home page | what's new | search | about the phoenix | feedback |
Copyright © 1999 The Phoenix Media/Communications Group. All rights reserved.