popsublime: gay cinema

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.

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?

Sunday, January 7, 2024

All of Us Strangers (dir. Andrew Haigh, 2023)

Because I’ve already written at length here about my three favorite films of 2023 (Aristotle & Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe, Scrapper, and The Unknown Country), it makes sense to begin 2024 with a post about the film that I’d been anticipating the most this past year, but that I couldn’t see until it was released here in Boston in the new year at the end of the first week of January: Andrew Haigh’s latest gay cinematic exploration All of Us Strangers. While the movie wouldn’t quite have made my year-end Top 3 list anyway, I was still affected by the film, especially the earlier three-quarters of it. In loosely adapting his screenplay from the 1987 Japanese novel Strangers by the late Taichi Yamada, Haigh takes wide liberties to make the story serve his own narrative’s purposes. The result bends and expands conventional boundaries of gay-themed storytelling for the most part, a unique mixture of romantic fantasy and bleak realism that’s lingered with me even while not entirely convincing me of its aesthetic fortitude.

Andrew Scott and Paul Mescal star as two gay men living in a nearly abandoned high-rise tower block in London, and the two gradually become involved as they realize there’s not really anybody else around to lift their feelings of loneliness, a commentary both on contemporary urban malaise and the solitude of being a single gay man living in a sprawling cityscape. The movie’s tone and tactics operate on several levels as a form of magical realism; it’s a love story in which the passage of time slips backward and forward, as well as a ghost story in which the dead can fairly freely commingle with the living. The net of that device gets cast suddenly wider as the film moves toward its sad and gentle finale, after plumbing the depths of a serious childhood trauma that Andrew Scott’s character Adam, a writer who’s struggling to mine that exact material for a new screenplay, has endured for years but never fully outgrown.

Early in the movie, Haigh uses a clever device to draw us into Adam’s closer inspection of the tragic loss he faced at age 12. After he takes a train to the outskirts of London, a seeming cruising encounter on a suburban heath with a handsome man who beckons to him from the trees turns out soon after to be his own deceased father, at the same age as when he would have died, coaxing Adam through a kind of time portal to come back to his childhood home. Adam’s father and mother were lost in a fatal car accident, so he’s able through the intervention of these ghosts to re-examine his past wounds and converse with his parents about what his life has become since their death: as a creative artist and as a single gay man who at age 46 has just begun a tentative relationship with Paul Mescal’s younger and somewhat less conflicted character Harry. Jamie Bell and Claire Foy are excellent as Adam’s parents, stuck in time yet earnestly reaching across decades to try to comprehend how the world has changed since they exited it during the worst years of the AIDS epidemic, in a time before being a gay man in the United Kingdom had become a more mainstream phenomenon.

Andrew Haigh orchestrates the maneuvers of his central ensemble quite admirably throughout, directing the film with a delicate grace that maintains just the right amount of distance, giving Andrew Scott especially the space that his carefully calibrated performance requires to go where it needs to go. Scott keeps us intimately by his side as audience members, with the camera often gazing closely at his face, which makes the more emotional scenes work overall. It’s worth pointing out that the “flashback” scenes between Adam and his parents were filmed in the same Croydon house that Andrew Haigh himself had grown up in, so there’s an authenticity to how the three characters begin to re-connect and discover their tensions, empathies, and occasional disconnections from one another. Throughout all of it, Adam is returning to Harry at their empty tower block in London, until a ketamine-fueled scene with the two together out at a nightclub goes careening off the rails due to Adam’s pain and grief over preparing to lose his parents for a second time, as the return-to-childhood fantasy proceeds toward its inevitable end and begins to overwhelm him, along with threatening his newfound relationship with Harry.

It's an interesting experience, to say the least, to sit in a cinema and realize while looking at the people sitting around you that you’re the closest person in the audience to the film’s protagonist, and nearly an exact match for him: a writer, a gay man around 50 who came of age in the 1980s, and also one who hasn’t had a family at all since his teenage years. (I totally felt the precision of Haigh’s ’80s UK pop song choices for the movie’s soundtrack, from Fine Young Cannibals’ “Johnny Come Home” to Pet Shop Boys’ “Always on My Mind,” and especially The Housemartins’ “Build.”) Having been disowned at age 16 myself in part for being gay, I probably related a bit too closely to Adam’s predicament, even though his character’s loss happened in such a different way from my own. His disowning was accidental while mine was more intentional, though I think the effect is probably much the same. What does the idea of being disowned mean to most people, if they can even relate to it at all? It’s the experience of being cut adrift, which at once liberates you from the past while also binding you to it permanently since all of us must live connected somehow to ourselves as children and then as teenagers. Perhaps that’s one reason why I just sat there still and silent during the big emotional climax between Adam and his parents before their final departure, accompanied by scattered sniffles from around the audience. I’d already felt that myself long ago as a much younger person and had to steel myself against it back then, in order to survive what I’ve since survived.

There’s a muted quality to many of the movie’s scenes that I think serves the actors more than it serves the narrative or the audience, and maybe that’s part of why the last quarter of the film underwhelmed me in its final act. Though it cohered overall, both with the earlier parts of the film and within the final stretch, I’m not certain if it really aligned. The alignment might be with the source material itself, with which I’m unfamiliar, and the film ultimately didn’t inspire me to familiarize myself more with the source material either. I also noticed how clearly the movie’s closing image, as the camera slowly ascends into the dark night sky far above Adam and Harry embracing each other in bed, gives a hard visual nod not only to the opening of the music video for Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s “The Power of Love,” the song selection that closes the movie, but also to the same final image in Gregg Araki’s 2005 film Mysterious Skin, in which two characters embrace and comfort each other alone together in the wake of re-connecting over their own deep and shared childhood traumas. Some viewers, of course, will find the ending somewhat bleak in our current era. (I’ve avoided tossing in the big spoiler.) I found it fitting, even if I wasn’t as markedly moved by it as I’d expected I would be.

Sunday, September 24, 2023

Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe (dir. Aitch Alberto, 2023)

Over the past couple of weeks, I watched Aitch Alberto’s film Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe a total of six times in cinemas, and I cried my eyes out three of those times. Between viewings when I wasn’t watching the movie, I was thinking about the movie. The movie never left my mind, and my heart remained right in the zone of the movie, too. The movie showed at only one cinema here in Boston, at AMC Boston Common, so that’s where I saw all of my screenings except for one last Sunday, which I watched from way at the top of the balcony of the gorgeous Art Deco cinema up in Brattleboro, Vermont called the Latchis Theatre, where I thanked the manager through my tears after the movie for showing it on the big beautiful screen in the historic main moviehouse. And now, before I say what I have to say about the film (which is quite a lot), I’ll make one really big statement: for me this movie is even better than Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain, which is a movie that I still adore today, and as much as I totally and unendingly love Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal in that film, the two young actors in this new movie, Max Pelayo (as Aristotle Mendoza) and Reese Gonzales (as Dante Quintana), give performances that are even deeper and more significant than those in Brokeback Mountain.

The film is adapted from Benjamin Alire Sáenz’s popular and groundbreaking 2012 young adult novel of the same title, which I read several years ago at the online suggestion of the gay novelist Garth Greenwell, who really championed its importance. The movie’s screenwriter and director Aitch Alberto, a Latina transwoman, has perfectly distilled what’s necessary to retain from the novel on every single level and translated it to film exactly in all of the right ways, stylistically and otherwise, and I honestly don’t think that the book could have been adapted any better than it is in this film. Apparently, there’s a much longer director’s cut, and although I could feel a few of the missing parts that trimmed the movie down from nearly three hours to about 90 minutes, I still felt that it all fit together admirably despite the standard commercial compromises that producers and studios often force upon directors. Aitch Alberto’s director’s cut will make its way to us someday, I’m fairly certain of that. What’s clear is that this director poured her entire heart and soul into making this movie, and into walking the slim tightrope to craft it in ways that will not only move a wide array of audiences internationally for decades to come, but will also actually help to save and reconfigure the lives of young LGBTQ+ viewers. Yes, this movie is that important.

At the film’s delicate center is Max Pelayo’s Ari Mendoza, a conflicted yet still hopeful young Mexican-American guy in high school in El Paso, Texas in 1987. He meets Reese Gonzales’ more outwardly cheerful and (semi) well-adjusted Dante Quintana that summer at a local swimming pool, where Dante teaches Ari how to swim since he’d never learned. The tenderness of those opening scenes, leading up to and including the film’s opening title card, could not be more flawlessly balanced and conceived. The year 1987 happens to be my favorite year in pop culture, and I was whisked right back to my own youth as a struggling soon-to-be-gay kid in Cincinnati, Ohio by the film’s details and specificities. All of this is done in a very gentle way, so that we’re immediately invested in the complicated interplay between these two characters. Pelayo and Gonzales expertly (especially as younger actors) set up their dichotomy, and what’s fascinating is how the relationship of the two boys in the film develops gradually and intimately but not necessarily along the definitive lines of sexuality itself, though that does eventually arise as the two boys come of age via a series of letters that they write back and forth to one another when Dante’s English professor father Sam (Kevin Alejandro, an adorable dad if ever there was one) takes his family away from El Paso to Chicago due to a university teaching gig for a year.

By that point in the narrative, Ari and Dante have already cemented their intense friendship. Dante shares with Ari some poetry and art to try to open him up. Ari’s heart has mostly clamped shut because his parents’ hearts have also closed somewhat, for tragic reasons that are revealed to us later in the film regarding Ari’s older brother Bernardo, who’s in prison. I wish that the amazing Latinx cast of older actors who portray the parents and guardians of Ari and Dante, actors who are all so excellent in finely calibrated roles — from the wonderful Eva Longoria as Dante’s caring mom, to the remarkable Eugenio Derbez as Ari’s distant yet loving father, to the touching Valerie Falcón as Ari’s deeply supportive mother, to the luminous Marlene Forte as Ari’s doting lesbian aunt, Tia Ophelia — would receive the kind of attention they so fully deserve for their performances (such as a Screen Actors Guild Award for Best Ensemble, to be honest).

What’s subtle and tucked away in the corners of the film is equally as powerful as those actors who are front and center; for instance, the smartly timed reappearances of a pair of birds high above in flight that Dante remarks look “so free” when he first sees them overhead during a scene with Ari early in the movie. Several other intelligent stylistic details it took me all six viewings to finally notice, such as the subtlety with which some Christmastime scenes are framed. Unlike most mainstream movies that make a big to-do about Christmas scenes, mainly for releases later in the year, here we get only a brief “Merry Christmas” in a letter from Dante to Ari, along with a magical faint blue glow at the very edge of the screen during a scene inside Ari’s home, which I finally realized were Christmas tree lights around a silver (and intentionally slightly out-of-focus) ornament nestled in its branches. Some of the El Paso landscapes and multicolor sunsets were clearly influenced by Robby Müller’s seminal cinematography in Wim Wenders’ now-legendary 1984 film Paris, Texas, a great visual touchstone for Aitch Alberto and the talented cinematographer Akis Konstantakopoulos to refer back to.

There’s also a short but pivotal scene in which Ari, who’s sixteen, finds a way to get himself a six-pack of beer by having an older guy buy it for him at a local convenience store. The older guy (precisely portrayed by Marcelo Olivas), who’s clearly gay and playfully says that he’s 45 when Ari asks, has a few moments of interaction with the teenager that reveal more about the deep complexities of intergenerational issues in the gay male community than just about any other scene that I’ve ever seen on screen. The important aspect is that this is accomplished in part through great acting and minimal dialogue, but it’s conveyed even more through mood, as well as through some small yet knowing glances and tiny gestures, something that felt vividly real to me (while bordering on a kind of magical realism) each time I watched that scene again. The subtle intensity of that brief exchange between the two characters captures something that many, many other films have tried to achieve before and never quite accomplished. This scene, in its backlit sense of mystery, as seen from Ari’s younger point-of-view, totally does.

Of course, since Ari and Dante are high schoolers, we get a good serving of nostalgic details that align with mid-’80s John Hughes classics: upturned shirt collars, constant teasing about who fits in and who doesn’t, neon-toned clothing and bangles, plus a beautiful Latina leather-clad goth girl temptress (Luna Blaise’s sweetly realized Elena Tellez) to lure Ari just a bit while Dante is away with his family in Chicago. I will mention only vaguely two more abrupt and violent scenes later in the film, on which the entire narrative depends, and on which its grounding in harsher realities and truths about our world firmly rests. We would not be able to arrive at the film’s cathartic conclusion in a desert landscape outside of Ari’s old 1957 pick-up truck without those more difficult scenes, so it’s important that audiences of all ages endure those two scenes, in order to understand their key purpose in the film.

I haven’t seen a more gorgeous or moving ending to any film in several years now. Though it’s culturally complex in a number of ways, I’ll try to explain why. After Ari kisses and briefly rejects Dante until a tragic turn sends him back into Dante’s hands, the two young men are then forced to confront what their relationship to one another actually is, and with the loving support of both of their families, what it might mean to their futures. Ari Mendoza is the film’s protagonist, tortured and shifting from his closeted adolescence into his more liberated adulthood. To hear him finally express, in so many words, that he was afraid of being gay himself (and therefore also afraid of Dante), and that he won’t be afraid to love Dante Quintana, is a transcendent moment that also cuts two ways, not because it isn’t earnest since it clearly is, but because I think, in the real world outside of transformational fiction, it’s probably incredibly rare, especially between two young men. I’d like to see a mainstream film in which the protagonist is the more openly gay and more outwardly effeminate Dante. Where is his story? And why is this essentially Ari’s story instead? I think it’s because the people who really need to see this film and benefit from watching it are the young guys like Ari all over in the greater world, though of course, they’ll be the ones least likely to watch it in a cinema. Every audience of the six I viewed the film with were nearly all teenage girls, or young women who’d recently been teenage girls when they’d read the book that the film was based on. The guys like Ari out there in the world may be more likely to find and watch the movie a bit more privately when it's streaming online, or at least that's my hope. Our world will change if they see this film and its core message reaches them.

Masculinity and its inherent social expectations entrap both Ari and Dante, along with entrapping the other young men in the film. The movie’s open-hearted, climactic finale (as well as its cosmically beautiful denouement) gives a solid and loving push towards toppling those unfair, damaging, and compulsory gendered expectations. While I have no doubt that there are young gay male romantic couples out there like Ari and Dante, some of whom actually do commit to one another and make it happen together, I’m not convinced that it’s at all widespread amongst the gay male population, though I’d also like to believe that it’s more than just a mere fantasy. Those young men out there who do find any kind of love like Ari and Dante should count themselves very lucky.

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Monday, June 16, 2025

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