July 5–12, 2001

cover story|queer as folk

Fest Shorts

Philadelphia International Gay and Lesbian Film Festival

Following are reviews of movies from the first week of the Philadelphia International Gay and Lesbian Film Festival, July 5-12. All times are p.m.

Tickets, passes and badges may be purchased at TLA Video, 1520 Locust St. from 10 a.m.-9 p.m., by phone at 215-735-7887, online at www.phillyfests.com/piglff (until 48 hours before showtime) and at the screening venue on the day of show.

Venues:

RE Ritz East, Second and Sansom Sts.

PMT Prince Music Theater, 1412 Chestnut St.

WT Wilma Theater, Broad and Locust Sts.

101 Reykjavík

Brother Born Again Marc Pimsleur spent years struggling with his identity; when he finally came to terms with how different he was from expectations, the resulting lifestyle gulf was enough to separate him from his family for ten years. Another story about a conservative religious family unable to accept their newly gay relation? Nope, the other way around: Marc realized he was a bible-thumping born-again Jesus freak trapped in a liberal Jewish body, and, uncomfortable with sister Julia’s bisexuality, he fled to an Alaskan Christian commune. In an attempt to reclaim her sibling relationship, documentarian Julia tapes her visit to Alaska, and Marc’s subsequent trip to New York. The film undoubtably succeeds as therapy for the Pimsleurs’ familial rift; at least the long-closed communication lines are opened. But if your name isn’t Pimsleur, the inherently subjective material may not engage. Aren’t therapy sessions, like prayers and confessionals, meant to be private? —Ryan Godfrey (7/8, 7:15, WT)

	The Cold Lands

The Cold Lands (recommended) Djamel is a young Arab who comes to Grenoble to make contact with the Frenchman he believes is his father. To that end, he takes a minimum wage job in the factory managed by maybe-dad. For a while he is content to explore the city’s night scene, get a girlfriend and spy on the factory manager, who is encumbered with both the possibility of a labor strike at work and familial discord on the homefront. The eventual attempt at paternal closure doesn’t go well, and Djamel’s solution, to use sex as a wedge to further disrupt the bigwig’s family life, is both startling and appropriate, if ultimately tragic. One could make the case that Sébastien Lifshitz’s film is an allegory about France’s difficulty maintaining the ideals of liberté, egalité and fraternité amid the rise of both immigrant and gay culture. Or it could merely be a brisk, simple story well told. —RG (7/6, 5:15; 7/15, 12:15 WT)

Come Undone Sébastien Lifshitz’s film is the story of teenager Mathieu, who gives up his girlfriend back home for Cédric, whom he falls in love with while summering with his family at the shore. After a few weeks of smooching and grabass, it becomes time to tell his mother and sister, and to move away with Cédric. This way overdone scenario is varied by intercutting scenes of Mathieu a few months later, after he and Cédric have broken up and Mathieu has attempted suicide. The timeline is not obvious; the temporal shifts are sudden and it’s often difficult to tell if we’re pre- or post-breakup. Presumably Lifshitz is trying to get the audience to empathize with Mathieu’s life-confusion; it merely made me want to see Memento again. —RG (7/8, 7:30, 7/9, 9:40, PMT)

Fassbinder’s Women Fassbinder fans will find much of interest in Rosa von Prauheim’s look at the "women" who bound themselves to the career of the prolific, tempestuous German auteur. (A few of them turn out to be male collaborators whom Fassbinder insisted on calling by women’s names, but that’s another story.) Fassbinder’s output — 43 features in 13 years — was astonishing, and the charisma which caused so many of his actresses to fall in love with the openly gay director is fascinating. But there’s a certain familiarity to the tales told, and the lack of excerpts from Fassbinder’s films leaves out a crucial link in the chain of cause and effect. —Sam Adams (7/9, 7:15, WT)

The Girl (recommended) In the hands of director Sande Zeig, Monique Wittig’s short story "The Lesbian Body" comes to the screen as The Girl, a sultry film hued in the deep-blue tones of Paris after dark. This story of an obsessive romance begins at a club where jazz spills out onto cobblestone streets. The narrator (Agathe de la Boulaye) asks the singer, called only The Girl (Claire Keim), to take her home. The two end up tangled between white sheets for the scorching hot sex scene which Zeig gets right — all the way down to the post-coital ear nibbling. The Girl, stormy and enigmatic, insists every time they get together that it will be the last, but doesn’t explain why The Man (Cyril Lecomte) keeps following the two of them, or how much danger they’re in. With minimal dialogue and stunning cinematography, this noir-esque feature builds to a deadly and inevitable conclusion. —Jessica Dulong (7/10, 7:00; 7/11, 5:15, PMT)

Gypsy 83 (recommended) Todd Stephens (Edge of Seventeen ) directs his first complete feature with this story of a Stevie Nicks impersonator (Popular’s Sara Rue) and a teenage Robert Smith-loving gay virgin (Kett Turton) who set out on a road trip from Sandusky, OH, to NYC with plenty of misadventures along the way — including encounters with a randy AWOL Amish man and Karen Black’s washed-up karaoke hostess. The film can be awfully choppy at times, with major chunks either lost in the editing or simply omitted. But like Edge, Gypsy channels the spirit of John Hughes to pleasing effect, with well-chosen music that for once expands the characters’ lives rather than merely serving as wallpaper. —SA (7/6, 9:30, PMT)

History Lessons/My Babushka With History Lessons, Barbara Hammer, the godmother of lesbian film, completes the history trilogy that began with 1992’s Nitrate Kisses. Hammer fuses primarily archival film material with short directed clips to reconstruct a queer visual history out of censored or forgotten images, including lesbian porn, Women’s Army Corps footage and drag-king gangsters. By mischievously overdubbing dialogue onto old newsreel footage and educational films, Hammer makes young college girls ask each other, "What’s fucking a woman like?" and Eleanor Roosevelt offers a warm welcome to the first-ever "lezzz-bian conference." In My Babushka, Hammer takes a more conventional documentary approach to her search for her own roots in Ukraine. Between looking for her grandmother’s village and investigating the status of Jews, women and queers there, Hammer finds some time for her trademark lyric sequences of visuals, but it’s the personalness of her journey that carries the project. —Sara Marcus (7/14, 5:15, PMT)

Lost And Delirious Set Me Free director Léa Pool takes a precipitous slide down the crap chute with this laughable stab at commercial lesbian cinema. Coyote Ugly’s Piper Perabo (apparently passing as a "name") plays a wild-hearted tomboy (she trains hawks in the woods) whose relationship with a soft-willed pretty girl (Stardom’s Jessica Paré) becomes the scandal of an all-girls boarding school. Young Mischa Barton (Lawn Dogs, the fest’s Julie Johnson ) plays the wide-eyed freshman who watches as Paré plays it straight under parental pressure, and Perabo squints her eyes like she’s gonna do something crazy. Pool’s attempt to spice up the utterly pedestrian story with slap-in-the-face symbolism only makes the whole mess more ridiculous. —SA (7/7, 9:30, RE; 7/8, 12:30, RE)

Metrosexuality Produced by the people behind the original Queer As Folk (not to be confused with Showtime’s insipid American version), this British TV series is a soap opera on speed, zipping merrily through the cellphone-connected lives of a group of friends in London’s multi-culti Notting Hill district. Led by creator Rikki Beadle-Blair as a blonde-dreadlocked, spandex-wearing gay dad and Noel Anthony Clarke as his straight but gay-friendly son Kwame, the cast of characters covers every urban subculture you can think of and some you probably haven’t, like the sexy drug dealer with the birth defect or the paratrooper turned prostitute. The frenetic pace can get tiresome, and the plotting can get a little too Parent Trap. (Kwame wants to get his two fathers back together again, you see.) But this is witty, gritty stuff, with quotable lines ("Bisexuals are so ’70s — like human lava lamps"), hilarious set pieces (like one boy’s painfully tolerant, embarrassingly with-it parents), characters you can care about, even lip-synced musical numbers. And when Kwame tells off a haughty gay bouncer — "I have two gay fathers, two gay best friends, a gay godfather and a lesbian-sympathizer girlfriend, and you’re bouncing me? You should be pinning a medal on me." — you may feel like cheering. —David Warner (7/8, 12:00; 7/10, 9:15; 7/14, 2:15 PMT)

The Monkey’s Mask

The Monkey’s Mask In the struggle to simultaneously sustain a steamy affair and a gripping murder mystery, The Monkey’s Mask ends up falling a bit short on both counts. What makes the film worth seeing, however, is Susie Porter as Jill Fitzpatrick, a cute, tough and underemployed private dick. While trying to track down a missing teenage girl named Mickey (Abbie Cornish), Jill uncovers a sordid world of sex and poetry and gets entangled with Mickey’s poetry teacher, Diana (Kelly McGillis). In a classic display of crotch overpowering head, the truth about Mickey begins to get lost between Diana’s sheets. The sex is hot, and rougher than in your average Sapphic flick; the mystery, on the other hand, never reaches its climax. Clunky clues come too easily to Jill, who’s no Sherlock Holmes, and the denouement deflates when a tie-up ending fails to take advantage of all its deadly potential. —JD (7/6, 7:30; 7/8, 2:45, RE)

101 Reykjavík (recommended) Reprised from this year’s PFWC, this complicated, genuinely offbeat Icelandic import has some of the baffled inertia of mid-period Jarmusch; one moviegoer called it "an Icelandic The Graduate." It’s the story of an aimless twentyish Reykjavíker whose carefree life in his mother’s house is knocked for a loop when his mother takes a roommate (Victoria Abril) he later finds out is her lover. Encompassing both utter despair and lighthearted farce, Baltasar Kormákur’s feature debut is remarkably sophisticated, and well worth a repeat run. —SA (7/9, 9:30, RE; 7/10, 5:15, RE)

Sleep in a Nest of Flames Over the last 70 years, Mississippian Charles Henri Ford has collaborated and caroused with a virtual who’s-who of 20th-century art and literary elite, including Gertrude Stein, Man Ray, Paul Bowles, Salvador Dali, Jean Cocteau, William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg and Andy Warhol. He’s also been a poet, novelist, painter and magazine editor. But as tough as it is to make a compelling film about an artist, it’s even tougher when that artist isn’t particularly troubled, tormented or afflicted. Filmmakers James Dowell and John Kolomvakis do their best, spicing up the talking heads with dramatizations of his often-bizarre work, including scenes from his queer novel The Young and the Evil, which plays like an American Brideshead Revisited as written by Salome-era Wilde. While the documentarians deserve credit for bringing Ford to a new audience, the film, like Ford’s oeuvre of surreal camp, is noteworthy but ultimately lacking in emotional heft. —RG (7/7, 5:00; 7/8, 2:30 PMT)

Stranger Inside (recommended) Let’s hear it for the mainstream: Cheryl Dunye’s second feature (shot for HBO Films) is less experimental than her debut, The Watermelon Woman, but it’s also a hundred times more watchable. Set inside a woman’s prison, Stranger Inside concerns Treasure (Yolonda Ross), who’s already seen her share of trouble with the law when she finds out that the mother she’s never met is locked up in a higher-security facility. She promptly assaults a fellow prisoner and gets herself transferred, but the path hardly gets easier from there. With strong performances and a script that never stoops to sentiment, Stranger Inside is a powerful, even important film, set on turf which rarely graces the big (or small) screen. The film, which snagged the audience award at PFWC, plays best on the big screen, and it won’t get a theatrical release, so see it now. —SA (7/7, 7:30, PMT)

Stray Dogs Stranger Inside screenwriter Catherine Crouch makes her directorial debut with this uneven slice of Southern Gothic. Adapted from Julie Jensen’s play, the film feels stagey throughout, both in setting and in its overcooked dialogue. Guinevere Turner plays a grits ’n’ gravy housewife whose troubles with her boor of a husband (Bill Sage) are matched by a pair of sons who’ve developed obsessions with, respectively, killing and the Lord. Once the mood is set, the film basically goes nowhere until its predictably bloody conclusion. —SA (7/6, 9:30, WT; 7/7, 2:45, WT)

	10 Attitudes

10 Attitudes (recommended) Low-rent video production and stilted acting aside, this meandering journey through the trials of gay dating has some very funny moments, although it descends more than once into maudlin contrivance. Standup comic Jason Stuart gives an appealing performance as a caterer who dumps his cheating Hollywood big-shot boyfriend and takes a bet placed by his buddy (charming Christopher Cowen) that he will find Mr. Right in 10 dates. The result, of course, is a rogues’ gallery of toxic queers — the closeted married guy, the two-faced flirt, the beautiful hustler — plus a few that are less predictable and hence more entertaining, including a hilariously obsessive boy-band fan and an actor (Married With Children’s David Faustino) who wants to satisfy his girlfriend by setting up a three-way with another guy, preferably masked. The improvisational rhythms sag a bit, but the proceedings are brightened by Stuart’s wry amazement at what he fishes out of the dating pool, and by Judy Tenuta as a histrionic psychologist. —DW (7/10, 7:15, WT)

We Are Transgenders For people who have never heard of transgenderism, transvestism, transsexuality or intersexualism — or who believe that such phenomena only exist in Western countries — this amateurish, poorly photographed Japanese documentary by Lulu Ogawa might hold some interest. But even for the neophyte to all things trans, the parade of talking heads and panel discussions will probably wear thin in about 15 minutes. This is a shame, because the few interesting characters — including Inoue, an FTM who says he doesn’t take hormones because changing one’s gender is just a matter of changing one’s own consciousness and deciding to "make the impossible possible" — deserve a more flattering setting. By the time we get to the thoroughly affecting wedding of a drag queen in a poofy white dress to a stone butch dyke in a tuxedo ("There just weren’t very many good women left," explains the dyke), we’ve already stopped paying attention. —SM (7/11, 5:15, WT)