24th Annual Provincetown International Film Festival (June 15th - 19th, 2022)

As the world gradually rebounds to a state of relative normalcy in the wake of the global pandemic, the wonderful annual film festival in Provincetown began to do the same this past week, after holding virtual and hybrid festivals over the past two years. For this year’s festival, full slates of narrative features, documentary screenings, and short film programs were hosted in person at venues all across the town, with audiences and filmmakers enthusiastically attending events throughout the five days of the festival. I was excited to see many familiar faces around P’town and also meet some new ones, and the movies that I saw were excellent as always, with top-notch programming that consistently makes the Provincetown International Film Festival one of the very best fests of its kind in the world. As I did with last year’s festival, I’m focusing my post about this year’s fest on the gay-themed movies that I enjoyed seeing the most over these past several days, full of superb writing and performances, and even some fun surprises.

The film that affected me the most at this year’s festival, Bretten Hannam’s Wildhood, is a movie that I missed during the Wicked Queer film festival in Boston back in the spring, so I was grateful to have a chance to watch the film in Provincetown. A winning, picaresque road buddy movie set along the east coast of Canada, the film follows an entertaining trio of young upstarts: sweet but troubled peroxide blond Link (Philip Lewitski), his feisty tag-along younger half-brother Travis (Avery Winters-Anthony), and an alluring drifter named Pasmay (Joshua Odjick), who introduces some gay and two-spirit vibes that he senses are running not too far beneath the surface for Link as well. The young men are Mi’kmaq, though Pasmay is more familiar with the indigenous tribal customs, so he begins to teach Link a bit of their native language and some pow wow dances. Link’s the darker personality of these central figures, and he’s also the one who recently fled with Travis from their abusive father, after Link discovered that their father had cruelly lied to him for years by telling him that his mother had died, when in fact she’d run away from their family.

On the young men’s journey from Cape Breton across the wilds of eastern Canada to find Link’s estranged mother Sarah (Savonna Spracklin), they’re informed by a mystical drag queen in a gay bar that Sarah now lives in her birthplace, an indigenous Nova Scotia community called Blanket Hill. Pasmay and Link gradually grow closer and form a tight bond as they travel onward, a relationship that’s consummated in a beautifully filmed, evocative nighttime sex scene under a waterfall. Of course, that sounds like a typical cinematic approach to youthful physical exploration, but the film and the actors bravely and sensitively elevate it to a totally different level. Hannam’s direction also makes some distinctive visual nods to previous gay classics, such as a scene when the three young guys run to bathe in a lake that recalls the mood of a very similar scenario in The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, as well as a scene in which Link takes a shower and the water slowly streams from his hair, a mirror image of an identical moment for the central character in Gus Van Sant’s under-appreciated 2007 gay skater drama Paranoid Park. (There’s also a cool echo of Ryan Gosling’s little-seen directorial debut Lost River early in Wildhood when Link and Travis abscond with some copper pipes from an abandoned building site and get chased down afterwards, just as the cute protagonist of Gosling’s movie does.)

When Wildhood shifted into its gently moving final act, I wasn’t at all prepared to be as emotionally blindsided by the movie’s gentle, remarkable resolution as I was. Mother/son reunions are certainly not new to cinema or coming-of-age narratives in general, but how Wildhood handles that particular subject is such a refreshing departure, one that’s totally subdued and undramatic, which only further deepens the emotional impact of the film’s finale and its closing scenes. As we learn during the young men’s journey to locate Sarah, she’d long ago struggled with addiction issues and a feeling that she didn’t belong in her community, both reasons for her estrangement from her son Link. His sudden reappearance in her life, which she welcomes in a naturally understated manner while the two gather herbs and wildflowers together in the forest, brought to mind my own long-ago memories of my mother, whom I haven’t seen at all for over 30 years now. By the time the end credits had finished rolling, I was still sitting stunned in my seat unable to stop crying. When the auditorium was empty and the lights came on, I finally forced myself to stand up and made my way to the exit door. Outside, a woman who’d been in the theater watching the same film saw me wiping away tears as they streamed down my face and asked me very kindly if she could give me a hug. That sort of uncontrollable crying had only happened to me past the end credits of one other movie, Jonathan Demme’s Philadelphia, when I watched it at the cinema with my then-boyfriend way back in December of 1993.

My favorite surprise of the festival was attending a secret screening, the first time that it’s ever been done at the fest to my knowledge. I was thrilled to find out that I’d even correctly predicted which movie it would be: the great gay French director François Ozon’s latest film Peter von Kant, and this screening was actually the North American premiere, too. Ozon’s prolific cinematic output falls fairly neatly and evenly into two sets of styles. About half of his films are dramas exploring themes of sexuality and gender, and the other half are campy comedies that examine similar subjects in a lighter manner. Peter von Kant, Ozon’s free-wheeling adaptation of legendary gay German director Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s film The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, combines aspects of both of Ozon’s styles, though its dramatic elements are often so melodramatically over the top that it’s easier to categorize the film as one of his campy movies, and I’m happy to say that it’s also among the best of his campier films.

The movie is anchored by a magnetic and progressively unhinged performance by Denis Ménochet as Peter von Kant, an intense and semi-tortured film director and stand-in for Fassbinder himself. Ozon’s take on the original film is a masculine riff on themes of artistry and creativity as they relate to other forms of love and obsession. The object of Peter von Kant’s obsession throughout the movie (and his own movie within Ozon’s movie) is Amir (Khalil Ben Gharbia), a beguiling young aspiring actor who’s cunningly delivered to Peter by his former muse, an iconic actress and singer named Sidonie (Isabelle Adjani, irresistibly vamping it up); she's since moved on to her more illustrious, if artistically stalled career in Hollywood movies. Working away silently like clockwork at Peter’s every whim is his seemingly faithful assistant of three years, a slim wisp of a man named Karl (a hilarious and poignant Stefan Crepon). We as the audience are always aware just from his eyes that Karl knows everything about Peter’s unhealthy habits, despite that Karl doesn’t speak a single word of dialogue in the film, a wondrous aspect of Crepon’s portrayal of the character. Karl does, however, get to have the last word of sorts in the movie’s devastating penultimate scene.

Most of the barebones storyline traces how irreversibly, and how foolishly far, Peter falls for Amir, transforming his apartment into a shrine to Amir’s perfectly fit image, alongside the requisite queer iconography of St. Sebastian. Sidonie, of course, knew exactly how seriously Peter’s fixation on Amir would derail him, her way not only of turning Amir into a movie star through the vehicle of Peter’s films, but also a way to get her own kind of revenge for Peter’s ultimately condescending view of her. Peter’s unwavering and reckless passion for Amir is a standard plot device in gay cinema, to be sure, yet what marks Ozon’s film as truly special is the sharp and whipsmart screenwriting throughout nearly the entire film. The dialogue is far more clever and intricate than it seems on the surface, mainly because Ozon is mining many decades of gay male cultural tropes and their cinematic corollaries at once, a tightrope walk from which his footing rarely ever slips. Again, I think it’s one of the finest of his campier scripts, one in which he keeps winking playfully at the viewer because he knows that most of us are in on the joke. The film works, therefore, both as entertainment and as an artistic document of cultural value.

Craig Boreham’s Lonesome is a pensive and involving Australian film about a massively hot itinerant hustler named Casey, memorably played by gay actor Josh Lavery in a frequently unclothed and potentially star-making performance. (His Instagram handle, I feel compelled to report, is @twinkindecline.) After sleeping rough and roaming his way towards the urban metropolis of Sydney because he claims that he’s never seen the ocean, Casey’s able to wander into crowded late-night house parties to find some food and charge his phone. Gay dating apps like Grindr lead him to hookups and eventually to a steady boyfriend, Tib (Daniel Gabriel), whom he ends up living with for a slightly longer-term timeframe, at least by Casey’s less-than-commonplace standards.

Because both men are young, hot-headed, and horny, their idyllic situation doesn’t last for too long, yet Casey is earnestly attempting to find an authentic sense of peace and stability for himself. The character feels like a realistic creation, in spite of his omnipresent Joe Buck ornament, a ten-gallon cowboy hat, which lends him some credibility, as well as some cool shade from the blazing Australian sunshine. And even though Josh Lavery’s sweetness, tempered by some casual raunchiness, remains alluring throughout the duration of the movie, it never fully kicks into the higher gear of a riveting emotional performance like Félix Maritaud’s in the frenetic 2018 gay French hustler drama Sauvage. Lavery endows Casey with a tone that’s steady, nonchalant, and downbeat, perhaps somewhat too taciturn at times or maybe even too easygoing at others. He's both attractive and laidback enough to get away with that type of distant stance.

As bad luck would have it, Casey’s predicament turns more desperate as he’s left dangling in the winds of the circumstances that had initially set him adrift. Earlier in the film, he reveals to Tib that he’d been involved with a married closeted guy back in his small rural hometown, a situation that had unraveled and gotten unfairly blamed on Casey, tragically culminating in the married man’s death in a car accident. After Casey and Tib part ways abruptly due to a threesome hookup gone very wrong, the film’s storyline also turns swiftly in more uncomfortable directions as Casey again retreats to sleeping out on the streets. Provincetown audiences are almost always well-prepared for anything, and in the movie’s hardcore final stretch, including a difficult-to-watch BDSM sequence, I was reminded of when I first saw Gregg Araki’s masterpiece Mysterious Skin in this same film festival over 15 years ago now. Some in the audience couldn’t quite handle where that movie fearlessly went, but Lonesome seemed easier for the diverse audience to handle since the actors never fully ramped up the energy in the same way, as effectively filmed as Lonesome’s particularly graphic sequence is. Without giving away too many concluding details, let’s just say that the movie offers Casey a hopeful and redemptive finale, although one that leans a bit too neatly on wish fulfillment to provide a sudden and easy denouement.

The documentary that I’d most anticipated seeing in the festival was All Man: The International Male Story, directed by Bryan Darling and Jesse Finley Reed. The infamous International Male fashion catalog is otherwise known as an underwear magazine that launched a gazillion gay identities for guys who were going through their boyhood and adolescence back in the late ’80s and early ’90s. I was one of the lucky recipients of the catalog in those days, and I never even understood how I’d started receiving it. (I have a feeling it was my teenage subscription to the cinema magazine Premiere that set the ball in motion.) As commentators from Scissor Sisters’ Jake Shears to comedian Drew Droege vividly recall in the documentary, the images of the gym-bodied, underwear-clad models were the bridge to gayness for many young American men.

Anybody who’s ever seen the magazine knows that the fashion it showcased was mostly terrible, including pirate-style puffy shirts and bizarre dalmatian-print pajamas, so obviously all that really mattered about the publication were the reliable images of tan, ripped guys in their skivvies. The documentary covers the standard bullet points, from the business background of the diverse crew of gay men and straight women who founded and ran the catalog, to the culturally rich intersections of gay and straight masculinity, to how gay liberation had a harder time reaching very far inland from the American coasts in those years. Gay male employees who answered the phones to take orders recall how many of the calls were from gay and bisexual men who were seeking not just to buy some clothing but to make some kind of connection with someone because they lived in places too far away from the action. Several employees also recall how the AIDS epidemic ravaged the business and even the very office of the California-based company that they worked for, while also realizing that the catalog’s fashion spreads offered a kind of parallel world of fantasy where illness and the widespread loss of gay and bisexual men’s lives couldn’t disturb the picture of perfection.

Overall, the commentaries of the catalog’s models were most interesting and revealing because they were the ones whose carefully sculpted physiques were actually selling the clothes and the image of a certain kind of lifestyle that they represented. The documentary includes candid interviews with ubiquitous superstar models like Tony Ward and Brian Buzzini, who still remain handsome and recognizable today, as well as equally appealing models like David Knight, who’s gay himself and claims that he was one of only two gay International Male models he’d met in a sea of chiseled straight guys. It’s refreshing that they all approach their iconic status back in those days with a down-to-earth sense of humor, a levity that they also brought to their photo shoots given the ridiculousness of most of the clothes they had to model. As fate would have it, the International Male catalog was eventually bought out by big capitalism for $25 million by the Hanover mail-order conglomerate at the height of its public notoriety, and then it gradually sputtered out of relevance soon thereafter.

I was also very glad to watch some short film programs during the festival, the most interesting of which was a collection of experimental shorts called Dreamscapes. I was especially psyched to see Jonathan Caouette’s elliptical and quasi-political new short film  The Blazing (because I totally loved his previous groundbreaking full-length documentary Tarnation back in 2003), as well as Cam Archer’s imaginative, self-reflective, and offhand personal meditation His Image (since I loved his 2006 feature film Wild Tigers I Have Known). Both of their short films are fine demonstrations of the slippery process of image-making, evoking the sometimes daunting task of capturing moving images in their transitory act of shifting and evaporating, thereby shaping montages within the context of our current world of sensory overload. (Plus, Caouette’s short includes some sonic collaborations by Simon Raymonde of Cocteau Twins and the great gay musician John Grant, so that alone made Caouette's new short film worth watching.)

One true highlight of the festival for me was the chance to talk with energetic young artists and filmmakers at the various parties around town throughout the week. During Saturday’s press luncheon I had a fun conversation with the talented actor Antonio Marziale, who recently starred in the 2018 Netflix film Alex Strangelove, just a day after I’d watched his edgy new gay short film Starfuckers, which he also wrote and directed. His daring short shows a ton of promise by crafting an atmospheric Hollywood revenge tale that’s both innovative and distinctively rendered in a poetically compressed timeframe. Later at the filmmaker party on Saturday night, I also enjoyed talking with Fredgy Noël about her new short documentary The House of Labeija, which re-contextualizes some key members of that legendary drag-ball house, first introduced to the world in Jennie Livingston’s 1991 classic documentary Paris Is Burning. I’d been teaching my students in my summer course about Crystal Labeija, the house’s founder, only a week ago, so I look forward to seeing Fredgy’s short when it begins streaming at noon today on the festival’s website for viewers anywhere in the world to watch.

Provincetown has always been and still remains today a collectivity of inspired and spirited misfits, coming together at the edge of the world to advance our creativity and create social and artistic change. As a longtime resident of Boston, I’ve been a regular year-round visitor to Provincetown for nearly three decades now, and I’ve been attending and reviewing the annual film festival for almost two of those decades. (The festival will soon be celebrating its 25^th year in 2023.) Witnessing the collaboration of everyone who organizes such a fantastic film festival every year has provided me with many real lessons in community-building, and what a unique community of people it continues to be. As this year’s Filmmaker on the Edge honoree Luca Guadagnino hilariously summed it up during his conversation with John Waters at Sunday’s awards ceremony, “The only two people here who aren’t perverted are you and me, John.”

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Jason

Boston, United States

Pop culture aficionado.

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