popsublime: 2025

As always in mid-June, I was very much looking forward to attending the annual film festival in Provincetown, just in time to balance out the kinds of movies that take over all of the cinemas elsewhere for the summer season. This year I had mostly documentaries on my schedule of films to see at the festival, all of which I enjoyed; those that I’ll be writing about in depth this time all focus on individual artists of various sorts, from a musician to actors to a Provincetown painter. I’d also been anticipating the gay drama Plainclothes, which got me thinking in a variety of different directions, even while I wanted it to probe its subject a little more deeply and extensively than it’s able to do. Part of the pleasure of seeing about fifteen movies in five days is simply thinking about the movies together in between watching them, as this post continued to take shape in my mind from movie to movie: how they converge and differ, what they say about cultures past and present, and how they contribute to the wider fabric of film history.

The movie that I was most excited to see in the festival this year indeed turned out to be the one that I’ve been thinking about the most since watching it, Amy Berg’s insightful and carefully assembled documentary It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley, which is the first major documentary treatment of the late singer-songwriter’s career in over two decades since the 2002 BBC documentary Jeff Buckley: Everybody Here Wants You. That Buckley’s birth, life, and tragic early death at age 30 should feel like such a readymade story, yet one that’s still challenging to tell, speaks to why he’s remained an enigmatic ghost since his accidental drowning in 1997. The film works to unravel his enigma through many traces of archival footage and audio recordings that he left in his wake, accentuated with live performances and animation, as well as personal memories and commentary from other artists such as Ben Harper and Aimee Mann.

Jeff Buckley was born in 1966 to a single mother and is the son of famed folk musician Tim Buckley, who didn’t want a child to hinder him from touring at that point in his career. The presence of his absence and the overall sense of abandonment can be keenly felt throughout the early parts of the documentary that explore Jeff Buckley’s childhood, in spite of his obvious affection for and attachment to his mother. Jeff spent only one four-day period with his father during his youth, which ended with Tim putting Jeff on a bus home to his mom with a matchbook that he’d written “Love you” inside of, along with his phone number. All calls went unanswered, and Tim Buckley died within a year thereafter of a heroin overdose at age 28. The darkness of that loss haunts the film and clearly haunted Buckley even if he tried to escape or downplay it, remarking that it felt strange to have outlived his father when he turned 29. At that point, his career had already taken off, based on the popularity of his transfixing live performances and the strengths of his only studio album, his 1994 debut Grace. David Bowie praised it as the greatest album he’d heard.

Aimee Mann’s recollection of her conversation with Jeff Buckley at a noisy jazz bar has lingered with me the most since watching the film. Because of the loud volume of the music in the bar, the two wrote notes back and forth on a large white paper placemat throughout the night. His comment that he really likes sex gave Mann pause since he was the kind of guy who clearly needed love and rescuing. Her description of him as a very “liquid” person and his need to be rescued as a “tidal wave” that she had to protect herself from being drawn under by, despite the intrigue of his seductive, “self-medicating” sexual advances, reveals a lot and works on multiple levels, given his tragic death by drowning in Memphis. The sadness of that loss still brings her to tears as she recalls it nearly three decades later in this film. Ben Harper similarly recounts watching Buckley dangling dangerously from the rigging far above the stage at a Led Zepplin concert, in order to let the music totally surround him, so an animated image of Buckley falling through open space recurs throughout the documentary. In the end, curiously, it's a cultural aesthetic product about someone who was himself being turned into a product of commerce and deeply skeptical and distrustful of that process at that point in his young lifetime, but it works in the film because the documentary intelligently examines that exact same friction.

My Mom Jayne, the actress Mariska Hargitay’s moving, cleverly layered documentary about her legendary mother Jayne Mansfield, is just as sharply determined to investigate the harsh glare of fame’s limelight and how it caused various and often surprising distortions in her knowledge and understanding of her own family. Her father, the late Mickey Hargitay, who had immigrated from Hungary at a young age, found notoriety as a bodybuilder while his all-American wife Jayne Mansfield rode the pin-up wave to become a legitimate actress along the lines of Marilyn Monroe. Mariska’s older sister and two older brothers were somewhat perplexed by their mother’s vampy blonde Hollywood persona, contrasting with her smart and accomplished demeanor at home; she spoke several languages fluently and was an adept classical musician.

Mariska has no childhood memories of her mother, however, because she was only 3-years-old when Jayne Mansfield died in a car accident in New Orleans at age 34 with her children riding in the backseat, the devastating emotional climax that the film expertly and respectfully builds up to, and which elicited a collective gasp from the audience with whom I watched it, although the incident itself is fairly familiar from Hollywood history. The well-told narrative of Mariska’s personal trajectory beyond that point in the story is very finely paced, and its secrets and revelations (some of which must be kept spoiler-free in this review, in order to maximize the film’s cumulative power) are also deployed to riveting effect, with the appropriate balance of attention and purpose throughout the documentary. The result is an earnest homage to Jayne Mansfield’s unique individual memory, one that’s by now become somewhat faint, to be honest, in our own cultural memory. No Hollywood tale’s details would be easier to sensationalize, but Mariska Hargitay’s command over her subject matter navigates around those potentially lurid obstacles with authenticity and grace.

It's also heartening to watch her family’s mission come to fruition as the adult children gather together not only to share their painful memories, but more importantly to enjoy together the vault of archival materials that Mariska collected during her making of the documentary, a feat that serves in many generous ways to resurrect her mother’s spirit. Watching the family bond over these artifacts through their laughter and tears is a testament to the strength of a familial unit to endure some of the deepest forms of private and public tragedy, yet ultimately remain able to find redemption over time and with patience to heal. As Mariska Hargitay comments at age 60 in looking back on her mother’s life, Jayne Mansfield was so young as a successful Hollywood actress and a mother of four children, that time and understanding have now entirely shifted the perspective on what she survived and how her life should be viewed, as well as celebrated.

I truly enjoyed learning about a couple of Provincetown icons from Michael Cestaro’s documentary Everything Moves, two names that I’ve heard often over the past thirty years that I’ve been a regular visitor to the town: Salvatore and Josephine Del Deo. Sal, as he’s known in Provincetown, is one of the town’s many local star painters, whose work has documented the lives of Ptown’s fishermen and its extraordinary landscape. His wife Josephine was instrumental in helping to protect the land itself through spearheading the movement to have the tip of Cape Cod preserved as part of the National Seashore. It’s a very eerie feeling to be sitting in a movie in Ptown and realize that I might not have been sitting there at all had this woman’s work not prevented developers from gaining access to the very lands on which Town Hall stands.

Josephine’s efforts, as her New York Times obituary noted, helped to ensure that Provincetown wouldn’t be transformed into the typical kind of touristy resort beachfront ruined by endless strips of skyrise buildings, strictly for commercial and economic reasons. It makes sense then that Salvatore, who immigrated from Ischia, Italy, to Provincetown as a young man, was intent on forming community from the beginning of his time here. Not only did his paintings set out to capture that and preserve the images through his art, but he and Josephine also founded Sal’s Place in the west end of town, the wonderfully homey and genuine oceanside Italian restaurant that still operates in that same location under different ownership today. Sal memorably recalls how they barely ever made a profit in the restaurant’s early days since many fellow artists would come by late into the night to eat dinner cheap or even for free.

I’ll always remember a scene from much later in his life when Sal is gathered at a long outdoors dinner table with about twenty or more guests and cheerfully raises a toast: “To friendship!” I’ve been to similar gatherings here in town, so it’s a familiarly reliable scene. He speaks just as eloquently about his artistic process throughout the film, how it’s tied to both the history and presence of movement and light in the town’s landscape itself. His line about knowing that a painting is finished because “if I add one more thing to this picture, it will lose the balance” is also the perfect last line for the documentary. Although Sal’s legs weren’t feeling quite strong enough to stand up and address the audience at the packed Town Hall screening, everyone agreed that it was especially meaningful and memorable that he was able to attend and see his life play out retrospectively up on the big screen.

Carmen Emmi’s Plainclothes, set in 1997, focuses on the plight of a young gay closeted undercover policeman named Lucas, and his covert pursuit of Andrew, a slightly older closeted guy who’s also in a surprising occupation as we find out later in the film (again, that’s best left spoiler-free for those who plan to watch the movie). Lucas is stationed undercover near the restrooms in a local shopping mall as part of a sting operation to lure and entrap men who are cruising for sex there (think George Michael) and then get arrested for indecent exposure. Tom Blyth’s portrayal of Lucas is excellent and nuanced throughout, and one of the main reasons to see the film. He's keyed into his character’s downlow anxiety, one that spikes to a higher pitch in his moments alone, and yet he’s also aware of his own attractiveness and seductive energy to pull unsuspecting men at the mall into his orbit.

Russell Tovey is equally well-cast in his role, and he clearly knows these kinds of guys well and probably has even had some past personal experiences with them, given how precisely he modulates his character’s forwardness, indulgences, retreats, double-backs, and betrayals. Lucas imagines (or desires) that there’s much more to Andrew’s interest than Andrew would ever allow to enter into his own life, though Andrew is clearly drawn to Lucas in ways that he hadn’t anticipated when setting out to the mall. (“Where did you come from?” he asks with a bewildered smile as he gazes up at Lucas’ face during their intimate scene in a quiet greenhouse midway through the movie.) The movie’s time setting in 1997 is significant because it was still an era mostly before cell phones, and certainly well before gay instant hookup culture via apps like Grindr. Pagers go off often throughout the film, usually at inopportune times, a taste of things yet to come. But since cruising still happened mostly in person at that point in time, especially in a location just outside of Syracuse, New York, it gives the film and the actors’ performances a charge of energy that they would lack otherwise.

Nevertheless, not everything has changed about these sorts of men’s interactions since that time, nor even since the much earlier 1963 setting of Brokeback Mountain. The real underlying theme whenever a movie is dealing with the topic of sex between closeted guys, and a subject that remains intentionally undiscussable in relation to these issues, is men’s emotional unavailability, particularly their emotional unavailability to each other. So much in our culture is still dependent upon the smokescreen of that reality never being fully addressed. The big confrontation scene between the two men later in the film is blunt enough and well-scripted (Russell Tovey is great at conveying this, just as he was in the underseen movie The Pass), but it bends too soon to the idea of heteronormative family. Note how much more played up the marriages in the film of Brokeback Mountain are, for instance, when compared to Annie Proulx’s original short story. I would have liked to see the two central characters in Plainclothes have a chance to go deeper into that dialogue one-on-one, which they come a bit closer to doing in a hushed scene at an old movie-house, although I wonder whether that will ever really happen in another film someday or not, given the reasons that I’ve mentioned above. Andrew Haigh’s Weekend provides the kind of model that could work, if it’s even possible for closeted guys to talk about it at that intimate kind of level. Perhaps it isn’t.

Finally, on the festival’s opening night I was glad to see Little Shrew, Kate Bush’s animated music video for her song “Snowflake,” included in a program of short films. Surely, she’s the most globally famous director of a short film ever to have appeared in the lineup for the festival in Provincetown (unless there’s someone else who’s more widely known that I’m forgetting?), even if her inclusion in this year’s festival seemed to provoke little fanfare, maybe because the video has been available online since last fall. It’s a beautifully conceived and executed short, on the heavy topic of war and its effect on small children. The approach is delicate and harrowing at once, as the little shrew of the title traverses war-torn forests and cityscapes, including the body of a dead soldier, followed and seemingly safeguarded by a light-like snowflake. Kate Bush has mentioned that the idea for the film was sparked by the start of the war in Ukraine in 2022. The audience’s complete and total silence as we watched and listened (the gorgeous song was sung by Bush’s son Bertie) said everything.

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Monday, June 16, 2025

27th Annual Provincetown International Film Festival (June 11th - 15th, 2025)

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