Sunday, June 16, 2024

26th Annual Provincetown International Film Festival (June 12th - 16th, 2024)

This was my twentieth year attending the annual film festival in Provincetown, and it’s a little hard to believe that it’s been so long since the first time I attended the festival back in 2004. I watched fifteen movies over these past five days, a few of which were more spontaneous selections that shaped the direction of what I wanted to write about for this year’s post. Although I did watch some narrative features, I’ve decided to focus mainly on documentaries this time around, with some brief mentions of the narrative films to explain why. Even if I’ve felt this way for a while now, this was the year that reality pretty much outstripped fiction for me. Perhaps that’s my own taste, or maybe it’s just evidence of my feeling that works of fiction are simply more challenging to craft. The maxim that “truth is stranger than fiction” doesn’t completely capture it either. I think it’s more likely that what makes both fiction and reality strange is truth, or at least the appearance of truth, if one can attempt to approximate some form of veracity in convincing ways, which is what well-made documentaries seek to do and moreover seek to problematize. I enjoyed several excellent ones at this year’s festival.

As a collector of pop music, and especially ’80s pop, I was most looking forward to seeing Alexis Manya Spraic’s The World According to Allee Willis. A visionary and willfully eccentric artist who became best known as a songwriter, Willis co-wrote major hits like Earth, Wind & Fire’s pop/funk anthem “September” (the fifth most successful pop song of all time), Pet Shop Boys’ “What Have I Done to Deserve This?” featuring Dusty Springfield, Pointer Sisters’ “Neutron Dance,” and The Rembrandts’ “I’ll Be There for You,” the familiar theme song of the television show Friends. Born and raised in Detroit, Willis (who grew up with the first name Alta) was deeply influenced by the sounds and styles of Motown, and she would listen to music being recorded at their “Hitsville, U.S.A.” studio while sitting outside on the lawn. There’s both a groove and a shimmer to many of the songs she collaborated on. By 1994 she felt like songwriting was a bit of a meat factory and took a hiatus from it for a decade, until she started working with Stephen Bray and Brenda Russell on the songs for the musical version of The Color Purple. Other later Allee Willis tracks include one that I heard playing out in the theater lobby before the movie, Toto’s “The Little Things,” which she co-wrote with the band’s keyboardist Steve Porcaro. I listened to the song on a loop on my iPod for most of the rest of the day.

Willis cultivated her personal style with a keen eye for ’50s kitsch (she founded a museum of kitsch since her home basically was one) and a desire to emphasize her individuality rather than fitting in, a clear counterpoint or rebuttal to her somewhat controlling and difficult father, who had unwisely warned her to “stay away from black culture.” She also openly grapples with how to define or convey her sexual identity in some vintage ’80s footage in the documentary, which was executive-produced by her female partner of many years, Prudence Fenton. In her younger days and the earlier stages of her music career, Allee tells a friend point-blank that she’ll kill herself if she’s gay, a darker stance that’s at odds with her optimistically bright creative pursuits, and her feeling that you can either choose to be miserable or instead revel in your own sense of invention to find a way out of the misery. Her comfort with her lack of fit grew over time as she moved into music video art direction, brilliant retro furniture design, and premonitions of the internet, social media, and the multiverse via her global media village-based concept willisville, all driven by a quality that her close friend Paul Reubens (aka the late Pee-wee Herman, with whom she recorded the song and music video “Big Adventure”) could refer to only as “excess.”

Willis was known for throwing major parties and quirky social events at her home in Los Angeles, the most notorious of which was actually for a television show that the guests hadn’t even been told about beforehand. She was a tireless creative force that connected people across many facets of the entertainment industry in ways that were uniquely her own. While she wanted to be famous (she’d gifted her friend the actor Lesley Ann Warren with one of her own paintings titled “Into the Hearts of Millions”), there was also an earnest aim in her work to make the world a better, more fun, and more bearable place for herself and others. Cyndi Lauper comments on the sadness and loneliness in Willis’ lyrics for her song “Who Let in the Rain,” and Allee had clearly struggled with feeling isolated in the wake of her relationships with people like the singer/songwriter Lauren Wood. On the other hand, later in her life Willis wrote a song for and about her beloved hometown of Detroit, for which she gathered thousands of participants to get it recorded. Willis died unexpectedly on Christmas Eve of 2019 at age 72, but she left a legacy that people will be appreciating and untangling for decades. Some of her younger proteges interviewed in the film mention that she felt her life’s work was to leave behind a treasure trove of stuff for artists in future generations to piece together, and this documentary goes a long way toward making that work happen.

At the other end of the artistic spectrum is Stephen Soucy’s documentary Merchant Ivory, an engrossing in-depth exploration of the famed filmmaking duo, with many inside revelations about how their signature aesthetic evolved and how exactly their movies got made. I had a feeling I’d enjoy this movie, but I enjoyed it much more than I’d anticipated I would. The film is cleverly constructed in subtitled chapters that follow the work of director James Ivory, producer/director Ismail Merchant, and their longtime team of close collaborators mostly chronologically, with plenty of detours into their personal lives and complex relationships. Richard Robbins, the composer who scored the majority of their films, was involved in something of a triangle with Merchant and Ivory at points (alongside Robbins’ being involved with Helena Bonham Carter for a number of years). The trio of men were kept in check in various ways by their screenwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. The four of them formed an upper-crust yet semi-bohemian group who shared a country home in upstate New York and got intricate movies finished many times over, despite often not having the funds immediately on hand to do so, much to the frustration of their casts and crews, who were given weekly elaborate meals prepared by Merchant as a substitute for pay, or impromptu picnics at exclusive palatial residences in India when filming there.

Because they made refined and intelligent movies, it makes sense that they get refined and intelligent commentary from the documentary’s interviewees. Actors, editors, and other collaborators share their memories, enthusiasms, and superlatives. Emma Thompson praises Anthony Hopkins’ “perfect” performance in The Remains of the Day, which Hugh Grant agrees would be his choice of the finest performance for a master class in film acting. Rupert Graves similarly expresses his accolades for James Wilby and Hugh Grant in Maurice, though Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, who later won an Academy Award for her screenplay adaptation of E.M. Forster’s Howards End, felt that his posthumously published gay-themed novel was second-tier Forster. Grant also mentions the subliminally charged atmospheres on set back when the movies were made, unlike the more sterile and controlled environments on film sets today. The documentary’s openness about how tightly knit and sometimes volatile the Merchant Ivory team were, in more ways than one, only serves to make their films themselves more interesting.

Every Little Thing, Sally Aitken’s delicate and moving documentary about hummingbird caretaker Terry Masear, who’s the author of the 2015 book Fastest Thing on Wings, closely traces Masear’s work as she patiently aids recovery of injured or damaged hummingbirds until they can be released back into the wilds of Los Angeles. It’s a hard narrative to make engaging since the birds heal gradually in tiny increments, but it works since they’re all named and identifiable characters. Raisin, who suffered head trauma and internal damage. Cactus, who fell out of a nest and landed on a cactus, with spines from the cactus stuck in one of its wings. Sugar Baby, who’d had sugar water dumped on her, damaging her feathers. We root for them to survive, so magic happens by the end of the film as they ascend from the aviary one by one, if they were lucky enough to make it that far. Those who are less fortunate are quietly buried with a little red flower out in the yard, where their light bones disintegrate underground within two days.

Masear’s own trauma of surviving childhood abuse is addressed only briefly because she says that she’ll “evaporate” if she discusses it, though what the documentary provides is sufficient to fill in the blanks about how it affected her decision to pursue such a distinctive occupation of tending to small, vulnerable creatures who need intensive care to make it back out into the world. Masear recounts the death of her partner, who was also a writer whose work was rooted in the natural world. Her memories of him bring the documentary’s focus on mortality and loss into even sharper focus, as well as what it means to be alive. One man who delivers a wounded hummingbird to her after it exhausted itself trying to escape from the skylight in his home marvels that such a little creature breathes the same air that he breathes, and a young woman who rescues a baby hummingbird in her yard along with its tiny nest is startled when Masear points out that the bird’s mother had plucked the young woman’s own hair from the dryer vent and woven strands of her hair into its nest. Our interconnectedness with the animal kingdom and remnants of wilderness that surround us, even in big cities, is one of the film’s key themes. It reminded me a lot of the legendary documentary The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill.

I’d been curious about Dawn Porter’s documentary Luther: Never Too Much since I’m a fan of Luther Vandross’ vocals, particularly on his 1988 album Any Love. Some elements of his early career that the film illuminates I wasn’t previously aware of at all, such as his singing role on Sesame Street in the show’s initial episodes. I was interested to learn more details about him since he’d been such a private public figure, whose struggles with weight and sexuality were often the focus of the media’s attention on him. The way in which his music career faced how to categorize his sound as a “crossover” artist is also intriguing, in part because of how the appeal of his distinctive voice bridged different audiences during a pivotal era in popular music. The documentary showcases how he simply wanted more people to enjoy his songs, and that he preferred remaining somewhat enigmatic and uncategorizable for that reason. (As a side note, it was also revealing to watch 1-800-ON-HER-OWN the very next night, a documentary about the independent folk musician Ani DiFranco, whose entire brand is based on openness and honesty.)

Speculation about Vandross’ sexual identity doesn’t enter into the documentary Luther: Never Too Much until much later in the film, and his refusal to be easily categorized arises again in a more forceful way since he felt that it was nobody else’s business. As he makes clear in some interviews, he was there just to sing and for people to enjoy his music. After Vandross’ death, Patti LaBelle revealed to Andy Cohen on his talk show that Luther remained closeted because he didn’t want to upset his mother. Nor did Vandross want to confuse or alienate his legions of female fans. After all, he’d recorded mostly love songs and founded his career on making romantic music, so keeping that fantasy alive was a large part of his mission. Jamie Foxx and others hilariously recall how Luther’s soulful music played a significant role in the bedroom for them back when they were coming of age. Luther himself never found the kind of love that he sang about. Perhaps that’s one reason why energy gathered around his later 2003 Grammy-winning hit “Dance with My Father” (co-written by Richard Marx), in which Vandross examined familial and paternal love instead. Vandross died in 2005 from complications after suffering a massive stroke, from which he partly recovered, though he was unable to continue his singing career from that point on. 

Jazmin Jones’ hybrid documentary Seeking Mavis Beacon (which clearly takes a cue from the memorable 2013 documentary Finding Vivian Maier) was like a missing puzzle piece for me in determining how these film reviews would fit together for this post. Along with her younger collaborator Olivia McKayla Ross, Jones plumbs the depths of her longtime desire to find the woman who was the face of the instructional computer software program called Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing, which had inspired her when she was a girl because of how empowering it was to see someone like herself featured in a prominent and important position. As it turns out, Jazmin and Olivia discover through their quirky and byzantine research process that Mavis Beacon wasn’t ever an actual person, but an invention of the software designers. The face of Mavis was originally a Haitian-born woman named Renée L’Espérance, who was discovered while working behind a perfume counter at Saks Fifth Avenue in Beverly Hills. She had been paid $500 for the modeling gig, and the company later sold for $400 million. Jazmin and Olivia set out on a journey to find her since there’s barely any trace of who she is or how to locate her whereabouts. We discover gradually as the documentary unfolds, however, that even those scarce details are uncertain because they rely on individual people’s memories that themselves must be mined for information, interrogated, and challenged.

Without giving away too many of the rather amazing twists, let’s just say that the software developers know way more about the woman who was their original model than they initially let on, something that Jazmin Jones intuited. When even the late actor Robert Blake’s former wife turns up as a someone whose involvement unlocks other necessary secrets, it becomes obvious how documentary trumped fiction for me in this year’s batch of films at the festival. The ground is always shifting under us, no facts are actually reliable, some people will disappear for good (mostly) and not want to be found. Jazmin and Olivia are counseled via the wisdom of several women of color throughout their project, scholars and writers who convince them that they may have to let go of the person they’re seeking if it turns out that she prefers not to be sought, and that respecting that wish would be more vital than pursuing their own wishes for the sake of the project. Some maps must be burned, some flowers must be tossed into the ocean, and some projects must be abandoned, though all of that can be the culmination of the project itself, ultimately, as well as a profoundly insightful commentary on our current precarious position in a world that’s been fractured into various forms of social media, where we’re both people and not people, figments of imagination that also must live daily lives and exist, even as the terms and meanings of what existence is constantly get altered, changed, and continue to bend alongside the flow of time.

I’ll conclude this post by mentioning several gay-themed narrative feature films that I watched during the festival: Greek director Zacharias Mavroeidis’ cruising beach dramedy The Summer with Carmen, Finnish director Mikko Mäkelä’s London-based hustler foray Sebastian, Italian director Marco Calvani’s Provincetown-set High Tide, and Belgian director Anthony Schatteman’s sweet coming-of-age tale Young Hearts. While I loved seeing such a wide array of international movies exploring gay male lives and what kinds of predicaments we face in contemporary society, they also rely on plenty of familiar tropes. Of course, there’s nothing inherently problematic about stories of gay best friends, sex work, finding one’s sense of belonging, or first love, and I enjoyed many moments in these films, as well as much of the writing and all of the performances in them. There’s a sense of affirmation in these movies that can be a worthwhile aim in itself. I also don’t feel like such films even need to do anything particularly “new,” and a movie like Young Hearts obviously intends to end on a hopeful note, manifesting in the standard wish fulfillment for its two central characters, Elias and Alexander, who are just leaving boyhood and entering their adolescent years. After enduring the usual struggle for both self-acceptance and the approval of their peers, they get to have their relationship and the support of their families and friends, something we’d all have loved to be lucky enough to receive at that age. They’re able to ride off happily on their bicycle together in an image that reminded me of the great gay French film Wild Reeds from nearly 30 years ago. Perhaps it’s simply seeing the distinction between films as mirrors of experience (or fantasies of experience), rather than as opportunities to unravel (or further entangle) the complexities and mysteries of experience, which the documentaries that I watched seemed to achieve in a more assured or nuanced fashion. Or maybe it takes seeing and appreciating all of these approaches just to make that distinction clear?

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