CHROMA

Women on the Move: Three New Films Reviewed by Sophie Mayer

The film itself is haunted by various apparitions, including Turner herself, only visible as a reflection in the night-darkened windows. The voice-over narrator speaks as the filmmaker we glimpse in the window, but this ‘Sarah Turner’ suffers retrograde amnesia, a fictional lens Turner introduced to look at memory and loss. The film ends at Lake Baikal, the site of a slow ecological catastrophe, where it appears that flames are rising from the freezing waves. Through the hallucinatory intensity of the train journeys, this image makes terrible, perfect sense.

So, you’re wondering, where’s the lesbian in all of this? The narrator speaks repeatedly to or of ‘you,’ addressing someone who is travelling with her, who is just visible in a repeated sequence in which Turner stumbles to the restaurant car. Most of the voices (but not all) in the film are female, and there is an underlying sense in which it is a beautiful, unconventional love story between Turner and her loved-and-lost friend Sîan. Turner appears only one unreflected: in a photograph shot by Thomas in which she is filming with her video camera. When we see the footage of Thomas taking the photograph, it has an aliveness that – with the faces blocked by cameras – is heartbreakingly inaccessible. Intense currents swirl around and through relationships between women, to the hypnagogic rhythm of the train that connects us with both dream and desire.

Equally dreamy/nightmarish in its evocation of female subjectivity is Lucrecia Martel’s brilliantly opaque film The Headless Woman. Out now on DVD from New Wave films, The Headless Woman continues Martel’s exploration of her home province in Argentina, Tucumán, which was brutally suppressed during the junta. Motivations are often mysterious, characters are afflicted with lassitude then suddenly ravenous with desire, dialogue is elliptical: her films seem like they are being made as if under political censorship, full of oblique but loaded references, and a vertiginous sense of threat.
At the centre of this unstable world, where nothing is what it seems, is a dentist called Veronica whose Christian name seems to certify the truth of what she witnesses. The problem is that Veronica, driving along an empty road, doesn’t see what it is she may have hit. Even the graze on her head that testifies to the accident is erased when her husband makes her hospital attendance disappear after it transpires she might have killed a young indigenous boy whose body is found in a drain after torrential rains. Veronica is caught between polite society – her husband, lover, friends, sister – who want her to remain untroubled by inequality and her role in it, and the possibility of rebellion, embodied in her favourite niece, Candita.

Candita is played by Inés Efron, the lead from XXY, and her role in that film is just under her skin here, not least when she swims languidly across the new pool while the adults lounge around. But her queerness is also part of the narrative: much to her mother’s disapproval, she has a girlfriend, a campesina who is the fastest-moving and most directed person in the film, riding alongside Candita’s mother’s car on her motorbike, and guiding Veronica through the rural community where the boy’s family lives. Candita, seeing Veronica’s sympathy with her rebellion, attempts to seduce her with a ferocious kiss: Veronica refuses her, and from that moment, she turns back to her old life, refusing the possibility of movement (across class boundaries, as well as literal freedom of movement) that Candita both seeks and holds out.

Ann Hidden, in Benoit Jacquot’s Villa Amalia, makes the choice that Veronica can’t – but her choice is guilt-free, and this new French film (on DVD from Peccadillo Pictures) is a lighter-hearted affair. Although it deals in death, divorce, disappeared dads and other life-changers, it does so with inimitable French style. Everything in the film looks glorious, and it looks all the more glorious as Ann leaves her stultifying life of apparent love and success in Paris to disappear in Italy (note to fashion editors: in doing so, she leaves behind this season’s camel, chignon and white shirt look to adopt a Mediterranean wardrobe of non-maxi flowered dresses and short hair, making clear that minimalism is for people with empty lives). While the character of Ann takes a tranche of Under the Sand, adds a soupçon of The Page Turner and jusqu’un peu of Catherine Deneuve in Les voleurs, Isabelle Huppert makes the somewhat hackneyed role of the fortysomething Parisienne restlessly rediscovering her erotic and artistic life her own by train, mountain and boat. She doesn’t fly because she doesn’t want to be traced via her passport – but that seems secondary to the need to show a woman, alone, on the move, changing direction.

Of course, the film’s distributed by Peccadillo so it comes with certain expectations – and fulfils them, but quietly. Ann’s childhood best friend Georges tells her he’s gay with a shrug, and later gets beaten up while cruising on the island of Ischia, where Ann has retreated. Ann leaves behind her cheating lover Thomas and doesn’t so much come out as come alive: literally, when she is rescued from the sea by – typically! – gorgeous Giulia, out for the day on her friend Carlo’s boat. She and Giulia form an instant attraction of silent glances, and – typically! – shack up after their first night together.

Don’t expect hot sex, though: everything in this film is as hidden as Ann’s (not-so-subtle) stage name (her absconded father is Jewish: she has presumably changed her name to hide that legacy and to hide from him). Huppert’s strong face and awkward-graceful motion convey the sense of Ann’s turbulent and dramatic interior world, expressed through her piano compositions but not language – and, when she returns to Ischia at the end, perhaps a peace in being so far from metropolitan culture, hidden in her new love.

Sophie Mayer is a writer, editor and educator. Find out more at http://www.sophiemayer.net/

Labels: Film Review, Lesbian films

posted by Eric Anderson @ 5:15 PM 0 comments

Film Shorts Review: Boys on Film 2

Directors: Till Kleinert, Håkon Liu, Mathieu Salmon, Soman Chainani, Julián Hernández, Craig Boreham, Trevor Anderson, Arthur Halpern, Tim Hunter

Peccadillo Pictures DVD

Reviewed by Max Fincher


Boys on Film 2: In Too Deep is the second instalment of a three-volume series released by Pecadillo that showcases international short filmmakers’ work.The nine films in this collection are by turns erotic, funny, imaginative, artistic and tender. The directors have either won awards at short film festivals or have been shortlisted for such.

Many of the films explore how the boundaries of relationships are tested between men. The opening film, the superb Cowboy, directed by Till Kleinert, explores bi-sexuality. An estate agent, scouting out a remote farm as a possible investment, meets a taciturn, limber boy. The boy tells him he has slept with all the girls in the village and is kept a prisoner by the farm’s owners. They have sex, in a scene that is powerfully erotic as the estate agent realizes he desires the boy more than his girlfriend. However, the following morning, a nasty surprise lies in wait in the form of a rabbit trap, and the combine harvester the boy has been repairing. Kleinert does an excellent job of establishing a foreboding atmosphere of menace, through images of the derelict farm at sunset and a soundtrack of deep-toned synth chords.

Both Working it Out and Love Bite also show how relationships are tested, but making us laugh in the process. While working out at the gym, Marcus and Peter encounter a hunk called Jeremy. In a very funny scene, Marcus takes out his jealous frustration by pounding the cross-trainer when Peter, friendly and open to a threesome, chats to Jeremy. Meanwhile, Love Bite plays ironically with the conventional coming-out moment between two teenagers. Instead of Noah admitting that he would like to suck his school chum Gus in the way Gus suspects, Noah sucks him in quite a different way.

Similarly, Kali Ma, Weekend in the Countryside and Lucky Blue all explore teenage sexuality and love, but in very different moods. Kali Ma made me laugh out loud in its story of a protective, food-loving Indian mother who goes on the warpath to take revenge on her son’s homophobic tormentor. With a literal tour-de-force performance by Khamini Khanna involving a pepper spray, a felt tip pen and her sari, the boys ultimately become friends under the terrifying command to ‘eat!’ by Mum. Weekend in the Countryside explores how friendship between boys can be mistaken and turn nasty. Pierre and Marc go on a weekend holiday to Marc’s father’s home in the countryside. When Marc tries it on with Pierre (a beautiful girlish-looking boy) and is turned down, Pierre is traumatized by his three Alsatian dogs in the grounds. Pierre leaves with the parting shot by Marc that he is a ‘faggot’. Håkon Liu’s Lucky Blue offers us a promising, tender vision of teenage self-discovery between two boys, one of whom, Olle, expresses his longing through karaoke. Set on a campsite in Sweden, there is a touching gentle feel to this film, epitomized by the fluttering, caged canary, Lucky Blue, that escapes into freedom.

Isolated and remote spaces where desire and sexuality can be explored are a theme of this collection. Bramadero, by Julian Hernández, is set inside a skyscraper under construction in Mexico City. The silence of the film (there is little music and no dialogue) contrasts strikingly with the sense of a perpetual buzz of the city in the background. As the camera lovingly circulates around the sculpture-like bodies of Hassen and Jonás, they engage in a pas-de-deux of narcissistic desire and sex. Erotic, artistic, and at moments, disquieting, we experience the pleasure of sex in a public space that is imagined as an intimate, private world.

The potential to create interior, imagined spaces to achieve happiness and sexual fulfilment define the remaining two films in this collection: The Island and Futures and Derivatives. The Canadian filmmaker, Trevor Anderson, takes a homophobic email that says ‘all gays should be put on an island to give each other AIDS’, as inspiration to narrate in an ironic tone his musings about what such an island could be like. A homotopia where sex is readily available, there are endless cocktails, parties and moonflowers, and HIV positive people are elevated to the status of gods, Anderson observes that the fantasy of the island ‘has a long history’. A clever use of animation creates a colourful, optimistic paradise that turns around such bigotry. Opening up the mind to new experiences and perceptions also characterizes Futures and Derivatives. Three lawyers at a law-firm hire a temp overnight to produce a presentation to an important client in the morning. The presentation is invaded by butterflies and strange colourful, psychedelic creations that sends each partner into a dizzying new world of personal possibilities, allowing them to see themselves in a new light.

An accomplished collection that is amusing and inventive, Boys on Film 2 shows us the ability of shorts to capture powerfully mysterious, erotic and wonderful moments.

Labels: Film Review

posted by Eric Anderson @ 11:22 AM 0 comments

Art Review: Primitive by Apichatpong Weerasethakul

Phantoms of Nabua
by Apichatpong Weerasethakul

BFI Southbank until July 3
Chroma Launch event July 2

It’s not every issue of Chroma that has an image by a Palme d’Or-winning filmmaker on the cover. Maybe it’s the Utopia theme, but there is a significant serendipity that brings the magazine together with Apichatpong Weerasethakul (known to his English-speaking friends and fans as Joe) the winner at this year’s Cannes Festival for his film Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, which has as multiple an origin as any queer utopia could wish. Chroma launches at the BFI on Friday 2nd July, the penultimate day to see Apichatpong’s Phantoms of Nabua in the Gallery (free entry). Part of a project that included a spaceship, a Monkey Ghost, reincarnation and adolescent sexuality and, as political protest, Phantoms of Nabua echoes many of the themes found in our Utopia issue.

During an on-stage conversation at the BFI (which he nearly couldn’t attend due to the closure of the British Embassy in Thailand during the red-shirt protests, and due to the Home Office’s highly restrictive artist visa rules – reminders that we live far short of utopia) shortly after his win at Cannes, Apichatpong said that he’d become interested in Boonmee as a teenager, after hearing about him from a priest in Khon Kaen where he grew up. It was when he travelled to the village of Nabua, in the Isan province in the north-east of Thailand, that Apichatpong was reminded of Boonmee, a resident of Isan. His interest in Boonmee was, literally, reincarnated through his work with the young men of Nabua, a generation raised fatherless after an infamous conflict. As Apichatpong notes, “This small village was one of the places the Thai army occupied from the 60s to the early 80s to curb the communist insurgents. The soldiers erected a base to administer the villagers' daily activities. The locals were psychologically and physically abused on the grounds of withholding information. Women were raped. Some were murdered in their homes. Consequently, the villagers, mostly farmers, fled into the jungle. Most of them didn't understand the word Communism though they were accused of being communists,” leading to the gun battle that sparked a long-running conflict. Working over several months with the young men, Apichatpong created PRIMITIVE, a video installation that fuses their relationship with their absent fathers (and with the current Thai government) with the story of Boonmee’s reincarnations.
PRIMITIVE itself has been incarnated in multiple forms: as a multi-film installation, as an online installation at Animate Projects, one of the co-producers, and as a limited-edition artist’s book created by CUJO, an artist’s book magazine series that’s part of Edizioni Zero, Milan. CUJO kindly gave Chroma permission to reproduce two images and two short texts from this black-and-red book that combines fragmentary diary entries, film scripts, excerpts from the Boonmee book and sketches of the Monkey Ghost to accompany the black-and-white (and red-and-black) photographs taken during the making of the short films in Nabua. While Apichatpong’s work has a deserved reputation for a whimsical, dreamy, often erotic, gentleness, here the political subtext of his work – or rather, the way that his political intelligence is compatible, and entwined with, his lyrical sensibility – becomes visible. Opposite a brush-and-ink drawing of what might be a volcano stands the text: “They then became victims of Field Marshal Sarit Dhanarajata’s Article 17.” Flares shoot up brilliantly white into huge night skies in some photographs. Young men in military uniform mug for the camera – are they performers, or soldiers? Isan is a poor province, and many of the young men have joined the army that fired on their fathers. According to Apichatpong, some of the young men he worked with were stationed in Bangkok during the recent protests, and faced the possibility of being ordered to shoot protestors, history repeating itself as if the hauntings that Apichatpong had staged in Nabua for PRIMITIVE were coming, perversely, to life.
Premiered at the Haus der Kunst in Munich at the end of the Berlin Film Festival last year, PRIMITIVE travelled to FACT in Liverpool, and one film – Phantoms of Nabua, a haunting late-night jungle excursion marked by flares and a fireball, a film at once teenage kicks and traumatic echo – is currently screening in the Gallery at the BFI. The young soldier-actors appear again here to viewers lounging on the floor in the dark, an unusual position for public film viewing in the Western world. There are boys kicking a fire-ball, watching a giant screen, playing a war/game under a blinding sodium light. The lines between sport and battle, between making a movie and re-opening a conflict, are deliberately blurred as the film interrogates the conventions of the Hollywood war movie (including some explosive special effects), and particularly the jungle-set Vietnam movie, to produce a very different portrait of the male psyche.
It’s impossible not to see, in the films of boys running joyfully/angrily through the streets, or playing sweetly/bored-to-aggression by the river, a queer sensibility – nowhere more than in the burning red night-vision light of desire that illuminates and shadows the young men sleeping in the balsa-wood spaceship that they built in a field as part of the project. These saturated images, reproduced stunningly in the CUJO book, glow with a particular intensity that shows an utterly original artist fusing a new kind of queer cinema: one in which the politics of desire and the desires of politics are utterly entwined. Utopias don’t come easily: like the spaceship, which never takes off but instead becomes an unofficial youth hang-out and sleepover, they have to be fashioned and they never quite function as they’re supposed to. In Apichatpong’s vision, utopia is not created through the drive towards a better future, but by return, reincarnation, reproduction. It’s hard not to be haunted by these irresistible ghosts – and, of course, by the fact that Uncle Boonmee is the only Palme d’Or-winning film ever to feature a princess having sex with a talking catfish.


Sophie Mayer is a writer, editor and educator. Find out more at http://www.sophiemayer.net/

Labels: Art, Film Review

posted by Eric Anderson @ 3:29 PM 1 comments

Film Review: Kakera – A Piece of Our Life

Kakera
Directed by Momoko Andô

Opens April 2 at the ICA in London


Kakera tells the story of a relationship between two young women in Tokyo. Well, not exactly a relationship: a kind of complex diagram of tangents, angles, obliques, axes, intersections and vanishing points. It’s like Hal Hartley didn’t lose contact with the real world after Amateur, but moved to Japan to pursue his relationship geometries: Kakera is strongly reminiscent of Trust or The Unbelievable Truth in its washed-out palette and tone, at once deadpan and quirky, often gently nostalgic for things even as they are occurring. Some of the Tokyo street scenes, accompanied by ringing guitar chords, are clearly a reference to Lost in Translation, but the protagonists – Haru and Riko – are both Japanese (and there are some Yasujiro Ozu references to recall the Japanese tradition of quietly observational love stories).

But like the protagonists of Sofia Coppola’s film, and of Hartley’s films, they are fish out of water, moving to their own rhythm that’s just a little different from the rest of the world. It has the quiet, everyday texture and delicacy of new manga as pioneered by Frédéric Boilet, which focus on love, sex and real people rather than superheroes and wide-eyed cuties. Not that Haru and Riko aren’t, in their own way, wide-eyed cuties. Haru is a dreamy-eyed literature student drifting along in a relationship with her toy gun-carving boyfriend, while he dithers over dumping his former girlfriend. After an unsatisfying morning with him (he has holes in his socks! clearly no good will come of this) she stops in a café for a hot chocolate, and a stranger comes over and wipes away her milk moustache.

Talk about meeting cute: Riko says she doesn’t usually do this, and hands Haru a beer mat with her number and an adorable sketch. Attracted to Riko’s attraction, Haru calls her – the first in a series of ringing phones that will be ignored by their owners and initially answered by other people, just one of the tangents by which communication proceeds. Riko takes the afternoon off and they wander around the zoo then head back to meet her parents. Haru wonders nervously about where their friendship is heading, and Riko tells her that she thinks gender is as arbitrary as whether the zoo was open or not.
It’s a film that likes to make much of its metaphors: Riko works as a prosthetics modeller, while Haru suffered from paralysis from the waist down as a young teenager. Her boyfriend has forceful sex with her limp, numb body while a WWII movie plays in the background. Sometimes this literalisation can be dazzlingly beautiful: as when Haru fantasises diving into a starlit pool as she dissociates from the rape. Other times, as when Riko, frustrated by Haru’s uncertainty, starts a relationship with a striking dom for whom she’s modelled a prosthesis, it seems a little too forcibly and neatly quirky. Riko also swims dangerously close to the clichéd crazy lesbian: possessive, irrational, manipulative yet self-sacrificing, wearing a hideous pink furry cardigan.

But the film pulls back at the end, through a series of missed calls, to something more opaque and melancholically hopeful than the expected psycho denouement. And then there’s a prolonged scream over the final credits, followed by more of those plangent guitar chords. If you’ve missed Hal Hartley, or longed for a lesbian Lost in Translation, or wished that yuri manga was a little more true to life, or you’re just in the mood for girl-meets-girl with prosthetic boob jokes, then Kakera is a dreamy-eyed way to spend 90 minutes.


Sophie Mayer is a writer, editor and educator. Find out more at http://www.sophiemayer.net/

Labels: Film Review

posted by Eric Anderson @ 5:21 PM 1 comments

Review: A Single Man

A Single Man
Directed by Tom Ford

General Release from 14 February 2010 (UK)

Reviewed by Paul Kane


A film of quite singular beauty; its power to move derives from a number of elements, of which one should mention, above all, Colin Firth’s immense lead performance.

The world of this film – America in the early 1960s, at the time of the Cuban missile crisis – is as perfectly realised as in any of Tim Burton’s Gothic creations. Indeed, the period detail and digital colouring is so distinctive and realistic as to be oddly disconcerting, placing the viewer at once in a world unlike our own. It is wonderful to look at.

Tom Ford's direction moves the story along at a stately tempo, and the music aids in this respect too. Abel Korzeniowski and Shigeru Umebayashi's score is sublime.
One cannot help but feel that a film as well made as this - as intelligent, clear-sighted and well-observed - is a tribute to Isherwood himself (he of ‘I am a camera’ fame) and not just an adaptation of one of his many fine novels.

Ford’s directorial debut is a masterpiece, compelling and irresistible.

Paul Kane lives and works in Manchester, England. He welcomes responses to his reviews and you can reach him at ludic@europe.com.

Labels: Film Review

posted by Eric Anderson @ 6:02 PM 0 comments

Film Review: All Over Me

All Over Me
dir. Alex Sichel

Peccadillo Pictures DVD

Reviewed by Sophie Mayer


In her autobio-stage show Paradoxical Undressing, Kristin Hersh tells the story of an early show with Throwing Muses, the band she put together with her sister Tanya Donnelly when they were still in high school in the early 1980s. Coming offstage after playing a spot in a punk show, the band encountered a fan who asked, “What did you say your band name is? Throwing Up Mucus?” There’s a gulf between what he thought he heard with his punk ears on and the nascent riot grrrl protest of the band’s actual name – but there’s also a truth. Riot grrrl, inspired by punk and feminist performance art in equal measures, threw the concept of the muse out the window with songs that often threw bodily fluids and processes in audience’s faces; metaphorically, for the most part, although Donita Sparks from L7 did throw a bloody tampon into the crowd at Reading in 1992. Embodiment, angst, rage, wild emotion: all those things girls were supposed to keep under wraps burned through in the long hot summers after the ’87 crash.

Riding the crest of riot grrrl, All Over Me brings feminist protest and adolescent vomit in equal measures as it plunges the viewer into the woozy world of Hell’s Kitchen summer with fifteen year olds Claudia (Alison Folland, who popped up in I’m Not There alongside Kim Gordon), known as Claude, and Ellen (Tara Subkoff, a New York hipster who’s in We Live in Public). They’re trying to form their own band, inspired by Helium (lead singer Mary Timony appears in the film as a member of the comedically-named grrrl band CoochiePop), Patti Smith, Babes in Toyland, and Sleater Kinney, who all appear on the soundtrack. Ellen’s a little distracted by neighbourhood bad boy Mark (Cole Hauser, who went on to play tough in the Riddick films and K-Ville), while Claude’s a little distracted by Ellen’s distraction. While Ellen goes boy-crazy (literally, as Mark turns her on to coke and booze), Claude finds herself drawn to pink-haired guitarist Lucy (Leisha Hailey, who grew up to become Alice on The L Word). What seems like a classic love triangle is given edge and dimension when Mark is unsettled by Claude’s new neighbour, Luke (Pat Briggs, lead singer of Psychotica), a queer musician who has befriended Claude’s shy workmate Jesse (Wilson Cruz, aka Ricky from My So Called Life).

Hello? How have you not bought the DVD already? Riot grrrl, Wilson Cruz, Leisha Hailey with pink hair, and thanks to Lisa Cholodenko and Maria Maggenti in the credits… As if that’s not enough, Sylvia Sichel pens dialogue that sounds, yknow, how actual teenagers, like, speak or whatever, while her sister Alex keeps the camera intimate and mobile, like a more chilled-out Spike Lee joint. Unlike the Campion sisters, they weren’t able to sustain their filmmaking partnership, only creating this jewel of a film. Maybe that’s because it’s so of its time and place: a time when grrrls could do anything and everyone pitched in to help. Maybe it’s just me (I’m listening to Helium as I write this) but somehow All Over Me’s timeliness is also its timelessness, in the way that the music brings the swirl of adolescent feeling to the surface.

This is the ur-queer film, way more so (and way less pretentious) than Go Fish – and possibly the only film ever to catch the moment of infinite possibility that was mid-nineties riot grrrl, capturing how it felt to be bouncing up and down in a club full of grrrls in ripped jeans and home-cut hair, comparing guitar licks with boys wearing nail varnish. Claude might be broke, but she has an electric guitar, roller skates, Patti Smith on CD, and a paintbox. Long before Naomi was dreaming of Emily to the strains of Sleater Kinney on Skins, the Sichel Sisters (director Alex and writer Sylvia) were doing it for themselves, setting queer teenage hearts aflame with a film that’s part love story, part rocking soundtrack and all heart. These girls rule!


Sophie Mayer is a writer, editor and educator. Find out more at http://www.sophiemayer.net/

Labels: Film Review

posted by Eric Anderson @ 11:58 AM 0 comments

Film Review: Greek Pete

Greek Pete
dir. Andrew Haigh

Peccadillo Pictures DVD

Reviewed by Max Fincher

Greek Pete gives us a glimpse into the world of Pete, a very popular London-based escort who was voted best escort at the World Escort Awards in Los Angeles in 2008. A mix of documentary and fiction, we see the real personalities behind the profiles, and an original view of the escort world.

Pete admits, unsurprisingly enough, that he wants to make ‘as much money as possible’. We see how using Internet chat rooms and websites, and being London-based are essential to being successful. Included is footage of Pete fucking one client, participating in a threesome for a film and some erotic photographic shots of him acting out fetish fantasies involving boot sniffing. He gets through as many clients a week as he possibly can, even taking a call while tucking into his Xmas turkey dinner.

The film challenges any expectations or prejudgments the viewer may bring that the escort is to be pitied, condemned or seen as somehow having no feelings or the perception that they are unintelligent. Pete is perhaps smarter than the viewer gives him credit for as we can infer from Pete’s opening monologue to the film. He asks why we are watching. If our motivation is for voyeuristic reasons, this is ok, ‘as long as you pay me for it’. Good-looking, sexy and well-hung, Pete ticks all superficial boxes to be an escort. But there is something more to him as a person. And it is here that the film’s strength lies in showing us that Pete is more than just a good fuck or wank fantasy.

What emerges distinctly is that, despite his ambition, Pete comes across as very likeable and charming. Confident and articulate about being an escort, he clearly takes a pride in doing the job well, boasting that his many clients return to him repeatedly. One scene in particular shows him chatting with an accountant, describing how excited he is to be going to Los Angeles and the importance of having a work-ethic in life. At no point do we doubt that he takes his work seriously, but perhaps sometimes too seriously. The film at no point patronises him or us.

However, Pete’s matter-of-fact, self-aware attitude does make the viewer question whether Pete really wants to be an escort. There is a sense that something is missing. Particularly after the ‘high’ of being in the spotlight of the World Escort Awards. We see him watching himself alone in his apartment and calling up his friends to proudly tell them how happy he is. In an earlier monologue to the camera, he reflects somewhat regretfully on how he was surprised that his Mum doesn’t accept his ‘choice’ of career, and tells us that his father would be ‘ashamed’ of him. We are left to our own conclusions as to whether Pete is in the right job or not. He never indicates whether he enjoys his work or not. However, what emerges strongly is that he enjoys sharing stories and experiences with his friends and his new family. At times, his melancholy mood suggests that possibly his feelings about being an escort are more complex than they appear.

By contrast, Pete’s boyfriend (also an escort) whose screen name is LondonboyKai, appears withdrawn, vulnerable and more susceptible to his emotions. Dependent on Pete for somewhere to live, he dislikes Pete’s business interrupting their lives. We see a side of Pete that is less pleasant in his treatment of Kai who takes second place to his work. Kai is subject to Pete’s rules and his criticism of his drug dependency. The film draws our attention to the fact that there are darker sides to escorting. When he receives a call from someone in Vauxhall who asks whether Kai can take ‘hard fucking’, Kai says he can and agrees to do ‘G,K or C’ and golden showers. However, he laughs nervously while talking to the client. The film does not shy away from the fact that many escorts need so many clients to pay for their drug dependency. Pete is aware of the realities and dangers escorts face, including ‘gift-giving’ (the deliberate passing on HIV). He tells us that some of the younger boys will ‘say yes to anything’, and we are in fact left to wonder if Kai has in fact been abused in some way.

This honesty is moving and refreshing. The director, Andrew Haigh, commented that ‘I wanted the film to be truly authentic’ and that he wanted to ‘try and get closer to the reality and focus on the everyday nature of things, the nuts and bolts of the job, the real personalities behind the online profiles and magazine adverts’. Undoubtedly, this is achieved. We see that escorts have lives, histories and aspirations like any other person’s whose job does not define who they are.

Max Fincher wrote his PhD at King’s College London, a queer reading of late eighteenth-century Gothic fiction that was published as Queering Gothic Writing in the Romantic Age by Palgrave Macmillan (2007). He has taught part-time on eighteenth-century fiction and women’s writing, at both King’s College London and Royal Holloway, and is an occasional book reviewer for the TLS. He is currently writing his first novel, tentatively titled The Pretty Gentleman, a queer historical thriller set in the Regency art world.

Labels: Film Review

posted by Eric Anderson @ 8:29 AM 0 comments

Film Review: The Celluloid Closet

The Celluloid Closet

Labels: Film Review

posted by Eric Anderson @ 7:14 AM 1 comments

Film Shorts Review: Here Come the Girls

Multiple directors

Cast: Nathalie Toriel, Yolonda Ross, Lucy Liemann

Peccadillo Pictures DVD

Reviewed by Sophie Mayer


Film festival shorts programmes can be melancholy affairs: not because of the films per se, but the feeling that these slices-of-life or fragments of wild imaginations may be seen here and never again. More often than not, shorts don’t act as calling cards for the big-ticket feature, and the director of that film you loved is never heard from again. It’s like a brief pick-up, a smile and dance in a bar or a single fuck at the baths: you’re haunted by the question, could they have been the one?

All of shorts on Here Come the Girls have played their parts in film festival programmes, both queer and general, many of them winning awards as well as the prized Official Selection tag, so the DVD is like a festival of festivals curated across the last ten years of lesbian cinema – which is looking pretty healthy. There’s a diversity of content, narrative styles, performers and tones across the collection, from Suzanne Guacci’s sweet two-hander of domestic metaphors A Soft Place to Roberta Munroe’s Dani and Alice, a hard-hitting short about partner violence between two African-American lesbians that pays stylish tribute to 1980s issues-led TV movies while subverting their conventionally tragic endings (which contrasts again with Monroe’s very different, Whit Stillman-meets-The L Word/lesbian Woody Allen witty short Happy Birthday).
And there’s a diverse group of artists being recognised: several of the directors are either accomplished feature filmmakers – all hail Guin Turner! and friend-of-Chroma Inge ‘Campbell’ Blackman, recently feted at NY’s Queer Black Cinema festival – or went on to make features, like Laurie Colbert and Dominique Cardona (Finn’s Girl). Munroe made her films with the prestigious Fox Searchlight Directors Program (after several years as a Sundance programmer) and Cassandra Nicolaou, whose first feature Show Me starred Ginger Snaps cutie Katherine Isabelle, is a graduate of the Canadian Film Centre’s Resident Programme. While fellow Canadians Colbert and Cardona tell the tale of two school-age best friends experimenting with desire and identity (if you like boxing, you’ll love this short), Nicolaou tells a story of older lesbians, a lifelong couple facing up to dementia and terminal illness, in what could be called a lesbian Away from Her.

But it’s the emerging directors whose films charmed me the most, maybe because they came of age, as artists, in an era when they have models like Blackman, Munroe and Turner to look up to – and to challenge. Angela Cheng’s Wicked Desire is American indie at its best: the warmly quirky observation of Me, You and Everyone We Know, the blue-collar grittiness of Boys Don’t Cry and the almost poetic strangeness of Wild Tigers I Have Known. I hope Cheng gets funding for her feature soon, because Wicked Desire is bursting at the seams with great ideas, as it follows a young girl reading dimestore romance novels, flirting with the Thai boy next door, and discovering that her sister Jessica is enrolled as a boy at school.
Abbé Robinson’s Private Life also blurs the boundaries between lesbian, trans- and straight identities and desires, offering the challenge of ‘fluidity’ to lesbian cinema – all in 1952 Yorkshire. Drawing on the same historical taproots as Sarah Waters blockbusting novels, Robinson uncovers and tells a slender tale of female-female desire between the mill boss’s daughter and a young female mill hand who meet cute at a backstreet jazz bar in Leeds. Class, race, and gender really are meshed in this touching tale, which combines the sexy camp of La Cage aux Folles (as Ruth swaps her evening gown for pal Louis’ sharp suit so he can attend a boys’ night as Lauren Bacall) and the English romanticism of Brief Encounter: Never has Leeds railway station looked more dreamy.

So far, so narrative and character-driven. The two superstars, Turner and Blackman, offer more conceptual and experimental delights. Turner’s Late is a surprisingly complex and bittersweet film based on a simple conceit: the viewer listens to a series of answerphone messages left for Maggie as the camera pans around her apartment. It’s a neat solution to the thrills of the thriller and Maggie’s apartment is given incredible texture and vividness by the production designers. Texture, colour and style are entwined with the substance of Blackman’s Fem as well, a catalogue film unlike any I’ve seen before, a pin-up calendar of almost overwhelming femme variety. Beginning with Eve in the garden, the film reclaims lushness and excess, the camera lovingly recording every curve that each performer gladly exhibits. It’s a mutual seduction poetically voiced by Split Britches’ Peggy Shaw, and is definitely the short to show your next hot date. At one point Shaw praises the gorgeous femmes for “inventing new rules from old games.” Each filmmaker here takes up that challenge differently, but few are as successful as Blackman at inviting the viewer to play.


Sophie Mayer is a writer, editor and educator. Find out more at http://www.sophiemayer.net/

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posted by Eric Anderson @ 10:13 AM 0 comments

Film Review: Lost and Delirious

Directed by Léa Poole

Cast: Mischa Barton, Jackie Burroughs, Jessica Paré, Piper Perabo

Peccadillo Pictures DVD

Reviewed by Sophie Mayer


When I first saw Lost and Delirious in 2001, I thought it was the most perfect lesbian film ever made. It outstripped my personal best of Salmonberries (what can I say, I like the girls of the frozen North?) because its hearts-on-sleeves tale of adolescent love seemed more universal, and its embrace of emotional honesty more ambitious. I loved its defiant heat, its refusal to go quiet.

I still feel that those qualities define the film: it has neither the icy disaffection of arthouse cinema, nor the hysterical sentimentality of Hollywood. Léa Poole draws spectacular performances from her young cast (OC fans should check out Mischa Barton when she still had flesh), whose quivering pouts convey the depths of passion and grief rather than a tantrum about the new iPhone. It was an unfashionable tone in the summer when Ghost World ruled, and it’s even more unfashionable in the Skins era. Mary B., Paulie and Tori may be sarcastic, flippant and rude, but they’re never apathetic. They care – mainly about each other, somewhat about Shakespeare, and a little bit about birds and trees.

It’s the “about each other” bit that makes this a Peccadillo release, of course. Mary (Mischa Barton), known as Mouse, arrives at boarding school after the death of her mother and finds herself rooming with Pauline (Piper Perabo), known as Paulie, and Victoria (Jessica Paré), known as Tori. Drawing the shy new girl into their friendship, Paulie and Tori re-christen Mouse “Mary B. for Brave” when she shares her grief with them in a round of confessions about the girls’ relationships with their mothers. Mary’s bravery lies in her ability to survive the confusing new world of the school, including rooming with two charismatic girls who are both crazy, and crazy in love. Cue hot love scenes with added cute, straight voyeure.

But the film is not (just) boarding-school porn: it’s adapted from Susan Swan’s The Wives of Bath, known as “Canada’s Lady Chatterley” because of the censorship it faced, not only for its depiction of lesbian sex in a school, but also its utterly shocking ending, in which Paulie castrates a male character and uses his penis (and some Superglue) to transition in order to “become” male and win back Tori’s love. Not so popular with the male broadsheet critics. The book’s stunning critique of sex, gender and class is tempered, rather than tamed, for the film, as Poole makes a number of interesting decisions: she updates the story from the 1950s to the twenty-first century; she dropped the plot concerning a merger with the nearby boys’ school (which was given ample, if uncredited, treatment in the Kirsten Dunst vehicle Strike!); and she changed the balance of the novel by giving the viewer some insight into Tori’s cruel behaviour towards Paulie.

What seems like a love story is in fact only the springboard for a thorough-going exploration of these young women’s relationships not with each other, but with their mothers. Mary, grieving for her loss, feels dead from the waist down and seems barely able to connect with either Paulie or Tori, who hates her mother but says she is “addicted to her, like chocolate.” It’s this addiction – which is both romantic/incestuous and about her family’s comfortable, bourgeois lifestyle – that causes her to pull away from Paulie. Deprived of Tori’s love, Paulie feels again the bereavement of being taken from her mother by Children’s Aid: she even tells Mary that Tori has the same fake brightness in her eyes as her adoptive mother.

Entwining the mother/daughter and lover relationship is as risky as anything in the book, and I think that’s what gives the film its depth and purchase beyond the obvious attractions of beautiful young women kissing passionately to the strains of Me’shell and, in my favourite scene, weeping to Ani Difranco’s “You Had Time” (which Poole and her composer discovered via Perabo, who had it on her Walkman). The intensity and ferocity of mother-abandonment underlying these demanding, world-blotting-out relationships between the girls raises these moments above cliché.

But it also introduces a worrying politics that I totally missed on my first viewing. 2001 was a more innocent time, both globally and for me politically. After six years in Canada, I was more aware of what it meant for Paulie to imagine her mother working the streets at Gerrard and Parliament, and why certain characters in Canadian art are paralleled with wild (and endangered) nature. Both suggest that she has First Nations heritage (Poole invents a First Nations character, a school gardener played by the wonderful Graham Greene, to – surprise – dispense wisdom to Mary and be identified with the natural world). Paralleling Paulie with Cleopatra (the dark Other) underlines the implication. Paulie’s crazy courage, her desperation to be loved, and her final act of merging with the wild world/dying are all tropes of the Noble Savage, the romantic Indian with no place in the contemporary world. So how are we to take her exhortation to “rage more”?

In its politics and emotions, Lost and Delirious feels like a film from another time, when bisexuality was the new black, riot grrrl had morphed into girl power, and a daughter’s grief didn’t have to stand parallel for larger national ones. In telling its story of innocence and experience, the film takes a bold stand on the side of adolescent passion in all its colours – and the transfer preserves the hallucinatory colours of the Ontario landscape – but its final cut is crueller even than that imagined in the novel.

Sophie Mayer is a writer, editor and educator. Find out more at http://www.sophiemayer.net/

Labels: Film Review

posted by Eric Anderson @ 7:49 AM 1 comments

Film Review: Sunkissed

Sunkissed
Directed by Patrick McGuinn

Willing Suspension Films

Reviewed by Max Fincher


An arthouse, erotic thriller, this new film by director Patrick McGuinn leaves the audience to ponder whether the dark fantasies of one of the handsome young men is the destiny or tragic past of the other.

Teddy, bright, romantic and sociable, is a novelist staying temporarily in the Californian desert home of Crispin, his literary agent, to complete his novel. Arriving at the house, Teddy meets the handsome but conflicted Leo, an aspiring actor. Leo settles him into the house and the two of them get drunk and have sex. They then embark on a passionate affair together. However, all is not as it appears. We begin to wonder just what Leo’s past history is, and what will be Teddy’s fate.

Although the initial pace of the film is slow to build, the tension increases after the confessional drunken exchange between Leo and Teddy. This is a pivotal scene that reveals Leo’s backstory. As we subsequently discover, Leo comes out to his mother who denies he is gay. Teddy’s novel, (which Leo suggests should be titled ‘Goodbye’) is partly autobiographical. Teddy tells him that the experience of coming out in the mid-West was a ‘nightmare’. Leo’s story, then, is one that Teddy is, unwittingly, writing. The mystery over what happens to Teddy is intensified by a close shot later on that shows Leo’s name on the dust jacket of Teddy’s novel.

The nightmare that was coming out continues as we realize that Leo suffers either from premonitions or from flashbacks that involve violence and murder. We see Leo waking from a nightmare, and at one point, telling Teddy that he has visions that he doesn’t want to talk about with him, and that he is ‘going through some shit’. Leo’s visions or remembrances unsettle the viewer’s temporal anchors. These unnerving sequences are often filmed as rapid jump-cuts, and contrast effectively with the slower conversations between them and erotic lovemaking scenes filmed in slow motion.

That it is difficult to decide whether these visions that Leo sees are premonitions or flashbacks increases the tension and suspense, and seems intended to deliberately confuse any (straight)forward narrative chronology. The viewer is forced to piece the narrative together, but is left with no definitive answer as to what has happened or what will happen. Was Leo married to Cheryl, whom he then murdered? He tells Teddy that Cheryl was the victim of a random killer on their doorstep. But we are unsure if this is the truth or a fabrication because later we see Leo and Cheryl sunbathing, a copy of Teddy’s story beside them. Earlier, however, there is a startling shot of Teddy and Leo jumping up out of their seats in the front yard rushing towards something or someone. We are not sure if this is another fantasy of Leo’s. The line between what is fiction and fact is blurred to the extent that we feel, like Teddy, that it is impossible to know the character of Leo. Does Leo murder Teddy? We are refused any clear-cut, easy explanation, and are made to work hard to read the film’s narrative.

The effect of these temporal dislocations upon the viewer is dizzying, disorienting, perhaps even frustrating. Indeed, the prevailing mood of the film is dream-like. The cinematography aims to capture that dizzying, dreamy effect of being sunkissed, that slow, dream-like state one feels after being in the sun for too long perhaps. The breezy, ethereal soundtrack by the band The Sea and Cake emphasizes this effect, and imbues the film with an intense eroticism in its whispered, soft slow vocals and refrains. In one scene, Leo kisses a variety of men against a black background. The faces are lit brightly and shot close up, in profile accompanied by the soundtrack of a song, ‘Watch their Mouths’, that is particularly erotic. Other erotic moments include Leo and Teddy showering each other with a hose in the hot sun, and having sex in a Cherokee jeep in the desert. The overall effect feels as if the viewer is experiencing narcolepsy; there are periods of time that cannot be accounted for or are like hazy dreams.

To return to the point that Teddy, like the viewer, does not or cannot really know who Leo is, or what will happen, one perhaps needs to understand McGuinn’s inspiration for making the film. Over the course of one year, four of his close friends passed away in a series of sudden tragic deaths. As part of coming to terms with his grief, McGuinn returned to the desert, where he was brought up, to reconnect with nature. It was here that he felt that he could ‘embrace the creative forces within myself and in nature, as a source of renewal in the midst of loss.’ To some extent, the film reflects the experience of how the sudden death of those closest to us often feels meaningless and impossible to comprehend. The film resists any closure of meaning in that we are not permitted to know what happens.

At one point, we see Teddy looking up shocked into the night-time sky as a bright white light comes down from above. Perhaps it is a fanciful reading, but this moment seemed to play with the possibility of alien abduction. In another scene, Leo and Teddy are both lying down together discussing giving each other some space. The camera angle, shooting from behind their heads, makes their heads/faces appear almost alien-like, inhuman, alienated from each other perhaps. As mentioned above, there is another moment in the film, when the viewer is unsure if s/he is in present narrative time, or Leo’s dream/nightmare. Both of them jump in shock from the front porch and rush across the yard. But we are not shown what causes their shock. Later in the film, we see Leo running back to the house from a creek. The opening of the film shows Cheryll lying dead in the creek. Another of Leo’s visions shows him carrying Teddy back into the house, covered in blood and unconscious, crying over him as he lays him down on the bed. Why? Any explanation is left unclear? Has Leo murdered Teddy? Has he repressed the action, returned to the house to find Teddy missing, and then discovered him out at the creek? Does he have amnesia? Or have the aliens come for him? Teddy’s disappearance and death is the central aporia in the film’s narrative, and the essence of the film’s philosophy: death is more often than not meaningless, absurd and unable to be explained.

The ending finishes with a shot of both characters in profile, walking in slow motion to kiss against the backdrop of the pounding white waves of the Pacific ocean. In another shot, it would seem that Leo is going to walk into the ocean, his back towards us, perhaps even to commit suicide. The shot evokes the famous suicide scene with Joan Crawford in Humouresque. There are also some traces of Hitchcock and Ingmar Bergman’s Persona. One could also read this final scene as the meeting of two halves of a divided personality which Leo stands for.

Sunkissed is a film that blends some beautiful cinematography, of the desert, of desire, and affirms the importance of both passion and truth to oneself as the source of happiness.


Max Fincher wrote his PhD at King’s College London, a queer reading of late eighteenth-century Gothic fiction that was published as Queering Gothic Writing in the Romantic Age by Palgrave Macmillan (2007). He has taught part-time on eighteenth-century fiction and women’s writing, at both King’s College London and Royal Holloway, and is an occasional book reviewer for the TLS. He is currently writing his first novel, tentatively titled The Pretty Gentleman, a queer historical thriller set in the Regency art world.

Labels: Film Review

posted by Eric Anderson @ 5:17 PM 0 comments

Entre Nous

Overview of the 2009 London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival by Sophie Mayer

A few years back, a friend of mine joined a dating agency called Entre Nous, which held out the promise of an “exclusive” match-up service for professional men. Up front, it was classy – and pricey. But the dates were all disasters, and when he wanted to leave things went “Hotel California.”

On the other hand, 57000 KM Entre Nous is the title of one of my favourite films at this year’s LLGFF, a film that expounded this year’s theme of family and adolescence with wit, charm, and edginess. As filmmaking, it was both psychologically insightful and artistically innovative. Rather than being exclusively focused on queer characters, it brought together a family with both queer and straight members, and – through its sharp, almost Ozon-ian gaze – queered the bourgeois family beautifully. Which is to say: the message of this year’s LLGFF was that queer cinema is entre nous: I’m just not sure which of the two meanings of the term they’re managing to put across. With the trans programming strand continuing strongly from last year (although supported by fewer community events), excellent retrospectives of lesbian experimental filmmakers Ulrike Ottinger (I’m still grooving on Delphine Seyrig among the yurts in Johanna d’Arc of Mongolia) and Barbara Hammer (and a more questionable dive into the misogyny-fuelled world of film noir), a new strand of queer-friendly family programming (but no Spongebob?!), and a hard-hitting, global range of documentaries, it would seem that the festival was casting its net wide to create its inclusively queer (queer as inclusive) family.

My favourite film, John Greyson’s Fig Trees, was all about creating that family, documenting transnational AIDS activism as it combated (and learned from) corporate globalisation. Fizzing with pop, opera, poetry, one-liners, drag performers, gorgeous visuals and animatronic squirrels, Fig Trees was a visual and political all-you-can-eat, everyone-invited feast. But the festival programme made it sound like hard work and nothing but. I’m the first to admit that experimental film can be a slog, but this film had something for everyone, from opera buffs to fans of hot naked men. What’s not to ‘get’?

Programming a festival isn’t just about curating the films, it’s about curating audiences as well. Sometimes that can be about creating an audience that isn’t yet there, through education, retrospectives, and discussions; sometimes it’s about linking up with an audience that feels it isn’t welcome or represented, and working to include them. I’m wondering if the LLGFF has got a bit too confident of its curated audiences in both senses: the 2008 and 2009 festivals have both made money, so there’s no reason for the programmers not to feel confident. As part of a national institution, and as a commercial venture, the LLGFF is trapped into the vicious circle of justifying their programming of mainstream films with the fact that they attract big audiences.
It’s just that, as a longtime attendee, I feel slowly excluded: not middle-class enough, too interested in experimental cinema – too committed, perhaps, to a belief that queer cinema should queer cinema, not just repackage Hollywood conventions with gay faces. The prestige features this year were a yawnfest of bourgeois lives: global travel, adoption, house-buying, and did I mention gratuitous femicide in the Mortal Desires shorts programme? The festival is competing, now, with digital television movies-on-demand, LoveFilm rental, YouTube streaming and a million other globalized platforms, but its policy seems to be to replicate what’s available on those platforms, right down to its racism, to get bums on seats.

The films that don’t replicate this, the documentaries, instead repeat Bill Nichols’ famous formulation of documentary: me talking to you about them. A two-tier queerness was thus spectacularly on evidence in this year’s programming. Most, if not all, of the documentaries concerned subjects marginalised in terms of class and ethnicity. Some were made collaboratively in the communities documented, but still ended up as fodder for middle-class audiences getting their liberal kicks. Most docs are programmed in mid-week matinee slots, making it hard for them to reach audiences who don’t have flexible schedules and afternoon leisure (to say nothing of £7.60 for a film ticket).
So, entre nous, I feel like the festival’s got a lot of rethinking to do. While it protests that it remains different from Outfest by not having to satisfy corporate sponsors, its self-presentation is all Giorgio Armani toiletries (in the prize draw for the online audience survey) and not enough OutRage. Check the ident and poster for proof: a red curtain leading up to a closed door between windows where hazy figures can be seen drinking cocktails (the female figures in skirts with femme hair). That’s not a welcome to me: it’s a statement of exclusion. Note to the LLGFF: see the no-one standing outside by the barriers along the red carpet? That’s the audience you’re slowly alienating, the audience who won’t come back. Have fun on the inside with the martinis and beautiful people. Some of us think queer means not having to hang around wanting to join the club.

Sophie Mayer is a writer, editor and educator. Find out more at http://www.sophiemayer.net/

Labels: Film Review

posted by Eric Anderson @ 3:06 PM 1 comments

Film Review: Derek

Derek
Directed by Isaac Julien
Written and narrated by Tilda Swinton

BFI DVD

Reviewed by Sophie Mayer


Of late, the BFI have done Derek Jarman proud: they’ve released Caravaggio, Wittgenstein and The Angelic Conversation, all in deluxe editions with commentary and – best of all – with Jarman’s loopy, fantastical Super-8 shorts like Glitterbug, the films he made in his studio and his community around the same time as the legendary Sebastiane. Their raw energy spills from the screen in pouts and flounces and poses and the occasional frank gaze to camera, charged with an intimacy that’s at once sexual and political. We are family, it says.

Jarman was famously a community-builder as much as an artist and agitator. He gathered people to his light, to his generosity, to his curiosity, giving people like costume designer Sandy Powell and actor Tilda Swinton their first breaks, based on a vibration of sympathy and an eye for raw talent. There’s that word again: raw. Swinton says of Caravaggio, the queer artist and murderer who was the subject of Jarman’s most conventional film, that he painted rent boys as saints – then corrects herself: he painted saints as rent boys. It’s an aesthetic – and ethics – that Jarman himself loved, juxtaposing classically-trained actors with circus performers and punks, all spitting Shakespeare or Marlowe or Eagleton with that same freshness.

Vivienne Westwood thought that the middle-class, middle-aged Slade-trained Jarman had co-opted punk for his film Jubilee, assimilating it into the more highbrow avant-garde film community. In the final interview excerpt in the documentary, Jarman tells this story with great relish, taking delight in the fact that he was the only person, aside from the Queen, that Westwood had turned into a T-shirt. Alive to his own multifarious co-optation – by queer rights groups, art movements, AIDS activist nuns, and even gardeners – Jarman seems to have accepted all the attention and all the (mis)reading as part of his role as artist(-as-saint).

Impassioned, articulate (he would have loved Barack Obama, a fellow speaker-in-subclauses), thoughtful: Jarman comes across in the excerpts from interviews, press conferences and TV news as almost donnish. As his notebooks – carefully panned by the camera – show, he was as intellectual as he was instinctual, writing reams and reams of preparatory notes in his distinctive calligraphic handwriting. His legacy is almost overwhelming: boxes and boxes and boxes of material lining the basement of the BFI’s archives.

Julien’s documentary cuts a sharp picture of Jarman from this spillage, presenting Jarman as the Renaissance man he was, and intertwining art and queer life as Jarman’s own films did over twenty years. It’s a film as crammed full of goodies as the two-disc edition that includes it: there are clips from all the features, but also from early shorts – including a startling and sexy one of Jarman having public sex.

But here’s the problem: if you wanted to track that film down and watch it, you’d have a hard time. None of the clips are labelled with subtitles – just one of the symptomatic problems with this documentary. Sometimes a film can be recognised from Jarman’s commentary, but it would take a true Jarmanhead to catch all of them. It’s a rewarding drinking game for the longterm fan, but a somewhat alienating introduction for the neophyte.

Julien and Swinton take the communitarian world of Jarman’s films – as Jarman describes it, he starting out making shorts with and for the people who would watch them later in his studio – and turn it into something hermetic. They’re understandably protective of his legacy, given the neglect it’s suffered since Jarman’s death. But the line between protective and possessive feels like it’s been crossed here: Swinton, alone of Jarman’s collaborators, commands the screen and dictates the shape of the legacy. The films are expected to speak for themselves: we’re rarely told when they were released, how they were financed, how they were received, where Jarman got his ideas – or how he turned them into films.

To me, this feels like the greatest betrayal of Jarman’s pursuit of art in a commercial world. While the film has no reason to be a how-to manual, it elides the hard graft and pragmatism that made Jarman’s films possible. They weren’t made (entirely) by alchemy. The sequence showing the making of Sebastiane, from phone calls in Bar Italia through to sex on the beach in Sardinia, is one of the most rewarding sections of the film, one that comes closest to identifying and revivifying the spirit of Jarman’s own work.

Because, in the end, that’s what this documentary is about: raising a ghost. The 1991 interview with Jarman that’s intercut throughout the film provides a powerful sense of his presence: it seems to be happening in this moment, up until the late footage of Jarman, thin and almost blind, at his last gallery show, and talking about Blue. The film goes looking for him in the BFI archives, and in his garden at Dungeness (which is flourishing), which makes sense – but it also goes looking for him in contemporary glass-and-money London, as Swinton paces the streets affectlessly, her words running in voice-over.

These inserts are frustrating in their obviousness – yes, London has changed and the places that Jarman filmed and fucked have been concreted over – but also in their stylistic flatness. Julien’s Fantôme Afrique installation pieces use the ghostly walker to brilliant effect, but here the footage feels banal, tacked-on. Swinton’s blank gaze adds to the sense that the film is closed off from those of us outside the charmed circle. It’s utterly in opposition to Jarman’s own sense of his films as put forward in the interview: that they are always about uncovering secrets – and, one could add, setting ideas and images free to scatter and cartwheel through the consciousness. Derek is worth watching as a catalogue of these images – but to uncover the secret of life, go to the films themselves.


Sophie Mayer is a writer, editor and educator. Find out more at http://www.sophiemayer.net/

Labels: Film Review

posted by Eric Anderson @ 11:47 AM 0 comments

Every Good Boy Deserves Teddies

Roundup of the 59th Berlin International Film Festival by Sophie Mayer

Labels: Film Review

posted by Eric Anderson @ 4:06 PM 2 comments