popsublime: June 2023

I went into this year’s Provincetown International Film Festival looking forward to seeing one face in particular: Harris Dickinson’s in his latest movie Scrapper. I first saw him on screen at this same film festival several years ago in Eliza Hittman’s mesmerizing film Beach Rats, and I remain just as captivated by him now as I was then. No other actor of his generation possesses such an intense, seductive stare. As the character Jason in Charlotte Regan’s feature film debut Scrapper, a heartfelt if scrappy father-daughter reunion tale set in the UK, Harris is in a certain peroxide-blond mode inherited from Daniel Day Lewis’s Johnny in My Beautiful Laundrette, a punky streetwise British drifter on the boyish side of 30 in more ways than one. After ditching his fatherly responsibilities at age 18 to carouse around the European continent following the birth of his daughter Georgie (Lola Campbell, who’s pitch-perfect), he’s hesitantly beckoned to return home in the wake of her mother’s death. The film opens with 12-year-old Georgie fearlessly fending for herself in their council estate flat, with the help of a few friends and neighbors, until Jason turns up at her doorstep, not a re-appearance that she welcomes at first.

It's interesting that Scrapper follows so closely on the heels of Charlotte Wells’ Oscar-nominated film Aftersun, a movie that I wasn’t particularly fond of, even if I understood all of the supposed reasons why many critics praised it. I didn’t buy the elliptical quality of Aftersun because it leaned too heavily on what remains unsaid and indeterminate, narratively. Art is often more valuable when it’s less impressionistic and more decisive, and Scrapper gradually and gently cracks open its deeper emotions by following that path instead. There’s still a lot of playfulness involved in how the otherwise irreverent and less-than-dependable Jason coaxes Georgie to warm up to him slowly after her initial blunt resistance to his presence. Many of the scenes in which the two dance or invent unusual little games for themselves seem partly improvised and are definitely intriguing to watch due to their sense of spontaneity. Because of the childlike ways in which he tries to teach himself how to care for his daughter, we’re willing to forgive Jason’s directionlessness (the two make money by stealing and hustling bicycles), at least until he temporarily knocks himself off-track again. When he discovers Georgie’s imaginary plan to construct and move to her own little tower made entirely from random pieces of salvaged scrap metal, he questions whether he’s equipped to have any place in her life. The scene that follows, in which Georgie listens to the voicemail that her mother had sent to Jason to convince him to return home and take care of his daughter, features the most moving and hardest-earned single tear that I’ve ever seen from a child actor.

Angus MacLachlan’s new film A Little Prayer is another movie that I was looking forward to in this year’s festival because Junebug, for which he wrote the screenplay, is still somewhere in my Top 20 movies of all time nearly two decades later. A Little Prayer is cut from a similar cloth, a family domestic drama that takes place mostly inside the household amongst the same southern milieu. The majority of the dramatic scenes, several of which are top-notch in every way, also focus on a father’s relationship with his daughter-in-law. One of them late in the film on a woodland bench mirrors a nearly identical scene near the end of Junebug, along with echoing the emotional scenes at the end of two of Kenneth Lonergan’s films, You Can Count on Me and Manchester by the Sea. When I asked Angus MacLachlan about it following the screening that I attended, he said, “I love being compared to Kenny Lonergan,” as well he should.

The father this time around is played by the great David Strathairn in a flawless turn as Bill, who’s forced through a series of revelations to scrutinize his family in ways that he wasn’t prepared to do, and much of the movie’s dramatic engine is powered by intergenerational conflicts, in the sense that the older generation doesn’t quite comprehend why the younger generation flounders as much as it does. Celia Weston as the hilariously quippy (verging on critical) matriarch Venida matches David Strathairn scene for scene, and it’s gratifying to watch these two actors work together that way at the very peak of their craft. The dialogue is often deceptively realistic; it seems simple but isn’t at all easy to write or capture as finely as MacLachlan does. After the film’s biggest plot twist is revealed, Bill asks Venida, “Am I just supposed to play dumb?” to which she replies without missing a beat, “Yes, you’re good at that.” He takes the opposite approach and watches the house of cards come tumbling down around him.

It's hard to convey the rest of the plot without giving things away, so it’s probably best to say that opioid addiction and alcoholism both arise, as do marital infidelity and abortion. The younger actors navigate this little onslaught of issues expertly throughout the movie, especially Will Pullen as Bill’s son David, a military veteran who also works at his father’s place of business, and Jane Levy as Tammy, Will’s wife who’s stuck around for longer than she’d planned. Levy has a couple of extraordinary scenes that could do for her career what Junebug did for Amy Adams. A scene of Levy’s at a medical clinic is carefully filmed in a 360-degree close-up shot, so that we can witness her character experience an entire range of feelings in a single short monologue. And in her later scene with Bill on the woodland bench, her words “Nobody has ever paid as much attention to me as you,” delivered in such an unadorned manner, will linger for a very long time with anybody who hears them.

It's Only Life After All, Alexandria Bombach’s documentary about the popular lesbian folk duo Indigo Girls, hits the requisite notes and runs out of fuel about halfway through the film, though I enjoyed the first half of it, having been a longtime fan of Indigo Girls’ songs over the years, especially those on their first four albums. More focus on the lyrical content and the albums themselves would have been nice, yet it’s clear why the documentary would swerve more into the lives and perspectives of Amy Ray and Emily Saliers instead. Following the pair from their initial friendship as schoolmates in Georgia to their current time-tested musical partnership, the film is most successful when it gives Ray and Saliers a chance to contextualize their music and explain what it arose from. An interviewer asks them in some vintage footage what they hope their audience will get out of their music. Amy replies, “Self-esteem,” while Emily responds, “Shared experience.” As reasons for creating any kind of music in the pop/rock realm, those are about as open-hearted as it gets.

I also appreciated how much LGBTQ-related material made it into the film. Ray and Saliers both movingly discuss the homophobia they faced while growing up in Georgia, and the ways in which internalized homophobia by extension affected each of them. I wasn’t formerly aware of John Blizzard, a gay man who’d helped jumpstart their career at his Little 5 Points pub in Atlanta before succumbing to AIDS in the 1990s. There’s also a biting and important segment of the documentary during which Amy and Emily take turns reading and mocking passages from a New York Times review of their music by rock critic Jon Pareles; they point out the various kinds of latent or blatant and long-standing sexism that often lurks behind the criticism lobbed at them. Regardless, I still spent a good part of the film singing along with my favorites from their catalog.

A totally different brand of documentary that really blew me away was Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman’s Taylor Mac’s 24-Decade History of Popular Music, a massive and totally meticulous undertaking that had the entire audience at Provincetown’s Town Hall on its feet by the finale of the movie. I first heard Taylor Mac perform in Provincetown about fifteen years ago as an act in Ryan Landry’s weekly Showgirls showcase, so seeing the documentary about Mac’s biggest concert undertaking really brought things full-circle for me. The film powerfully captures the communal experience of Mac’s 24-hour performance piece, which Mac performed only once in its entirety back in October of 2016 at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. The show features 239 songs spanning the 24 decades from 1776 to 2016 as a way to comment on the glittering Dumpster fire of United States history. That also makes the show nearly impossible to synopsize, which is clearly among its many intentions.

Mac mentions early in the film that the idea for the performance piece arose from the AIDS epidemic and the tragic amount of loss that it caused. In each successive hour of the show, one member of the company leaves the stage, and by the time Mac’s amazing costume designer Machine Dazzle departs late in the show, Mac remarks directly on the parallel to losing so many talented young gay men during the height of the AIDS epidemic. All of the songs that Mac carefully researched and chose to incorporate in the show work to staggering effect, but the most memorable ones are those that lodge a potent message in an unexpected way, like Mac’s brave rendering and reclamation of Ted Nugent’s overtly effeminophobic lyrics in his song “Snakeskin Cowboys.” Audience involvement is key throughout the concert; for instance, at one point Mac instructs the audience members to find another concertgoer who shares their gender for a romantic slow-dance amongst strangers. The cumulative impact of these scenes is deeply moving because Mac demonstrates just how separate we’ve become from each other, while also providing a communal, artistic remedy for that widespread cultural problem.

Austin Bunn’s Campfire won this year’s festival award for Best Queer Short Film, an accolade that it totally deserves. I’m an admirer of Bunn’s two excellent previous shorts, important LGBTQ historical pieces titled Lavender Hill and In the Hollow, and his latest short film rounds out his trilogy with both strength and tenderness. The film takes place at Hillside Campgrounds in New Milford, Pennsylvania, which has provided a natural refuge for gay men since its founding in the mid-1980s. Bunn includes documentary interviews in which longtime campers mention how they could finally be themselves once they entered Hillside’s big green gates. That footage is supplemented by a fictionalized narrative about an outwardly straight middle-aged man named Carl (Mark Rowe), who visits Hillside in search of a man whom it’s suggested he was romantically or sexually involved with long ago, Marty (Carlos Cardona), a hot guy that appears in a series of hazy, sunlit, beautifully shot flashbacks.

Campfire is a fantasy tale on multiple levels. Not only is Carl hoping to find Marty again many years later; he’s also making something of an attempt to come out later in life, a change he resists in the course of the film and then opens up to more as he grows comfortable with the men at the campground, most of whom are nonchalantly cheerful bears who are undisturbed by his presence. I’ll leave the subplot with Marty unexplained for those who want to watch the short, and I’ll just say instead that the narrative culminates in an emotional resolution that I hadn’t been anticipating, one that reminded me of a Radical Faeries camp that I’ve visited several times up in Vermont over the years. During the festival this weekend, it was fun to catch up with Austin (whom I’d initially met in Provincetown back in 2015) and meet the actor who plays George in the short, George Hoxworth, an easygoing guy who welcomes Carl to the campground and sweetly urges him toward what he seems to be looking for.

I’ve always loved the photography of George Platt Lynes, whose work I first encountered just after I came out as gay at age 18. He’s best known for his classically inspired male nude portraiture, though he also worked in commercial fashion photography and was the principal photographer for the New York City Ballet for thirty years. Hidden Master: The Legacy of George Platt Lynes, a superb documentary directed by Sam Shahid, gives the artist long-overdue exposure through close examination of his life and work, a collection of photography that’s been somewhat neglected by art historians, in part due to the bold and unflinchingly sensual quality of his images, and also perhaps in part because of his own sexuality. His photographs seem born out of shamelessness, an early sense of pride, and a touch of youthful vanity, yet there’s also a consistent seriousness to George Platt Lynes’ photographs, which aspire to an aesthetic achievement beyond all of those qualities.

Platt Lynes and his ever-shifting body of male models formed a sexual identity-based community at a very specific point in gay history, prior to Stonewall and the gay liberation movement, a community that one historian in the film argues wasn’t really all that closeted for its time period, thereby debunking claims that gay men couldn’t be fully out in that earlier era as simply untrue. The years during which George Platt Lynes made his art in the 1930s and 1940s may have been less hospitable to gay men in a wider public sense, but in their semi-secluded circles, those men were able to socialize and meet friends and lovers in a way that was actually quite contemporary.

George was involved in a longtime threesome with the writer Glenway Wescott and his partner Monroe Wheeler, the latter of whom George took very intimate and sometimes explicit photographs with, and then left them behind in an envelope marked “Private.” Platt Lynes was also linked to other well-known figures in his lifetime, including the famed sex researcher Alfred Kinsey, and the Kinsey Institute houses a number of Platt Lynes’ photos. Despite his artistic successes, George Platt Lynes’ career gradually ended in a kind of slow-motion ruin that left him penniless and somewhat obscure by the time he died of cancer in 1955. His lack of more widespread and longterm acclaim is largely due to the cultural anxieties surrounding his unashamed images of male nudity, but this new documentary goes a long way towards attempting to revive George Platt Lynes and his photographs back into broader recognition and historical relevance.

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Monday, June 19, 2023

25th Annual Provincetown International Film Festival (June 14th - 18th, 2023)

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