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.