28th Annual Provincetown International Film Festival (June 10th - 14th, 2026)

I’m happy to report that this was a routinely strong year at the annual film fest in Provincetown, with documentaries again leading the pack for me, along with a variety of distinctive narrative features. I even laughed along with spirited audiences at the campy sex comedies on Friday and Saturday night; past audiences have sometimes asked for some lighter fare to be included in the line-up, and well, they got it. Even this year’s Filmmaker on the Edge award recipient, Ryan Murphy, fulfilled that request as the first recipient of the award to receive it mainly for a body of work in mainstream television rather than cinema, a feat that John Waters commented on in their conversation on stage at Town Hall on Saturday afternoon. If getting to ask Ryan Murphy some questions about TV shows like Glee and American Horror Story doesn’t appease the masses, then it’s unlikely that anything else will.

That pivot into the realm of television marks a particular moment in the current trends and evolution of cinema as well, perhaps. There’s plenty of discussion at the moment about the surprise runaway success of Backrooms and Obsession, horror films by young directors that have drawn younger audiences back to theaters. John Waters asked Ryan Murphy about that, too, of course, and they both agreed that getting a successful film made for relatively little money while exponentially increasing ticket sales at cinemas certainly must be seen as a commendable endeavor, though Murphy also remarked that a phenomenon like The Blair Witch Project turned out to be less an innovative pivotal point artistically and more of an inspiration for plenty of insipid copycat movies that simply ripped off its artisanal hand-held camera, perspective-based concept.

All of that industry-level talk aside, I was glad that my first film out of the gate at the festival last Wednesday afternoon, Matty Wishnow’s insightful documentary The Last Critic, was so enjoyable since it was the first time that the festival has held film screenings prior to the opening night feature. I wrote a weekly music review column for a newspaper a little over twenty years ago now, so it was fun to hear Christgau as the “dean” of American rock critics comment at length on the development of his own tastes and critical style. Famous for his Consumer Guide and its graded capsule reviews of significant albums, and equally infamous for his trenchant takes on albums that he deems insignificant, Christgau is more humorous and self-effacing on camera than the tenor of his reviews may imply. Because he’s a voluminous collector and a true music fan, the film works to boost the viewer’s trust in him as a guiding critical source. Christgau claims there are only two criteria to become a critic: you have to know what you like, and you have to be able to explain why you like it, no matter how "completely disgraceful" the reasons are. Therefore, the most useful commentators in the documentary are often other music critics such as Ann Powers, maybe even more than the musicians who are interviewed, from the great Randy Newman to Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore.

For instance, when the discussion turns to Joni Mitchell’s masterpiece Blue, for which Christgau knew to dispense the highest praise and an A on his graded scale, a female critic points out that it was Christgau's chance to demonstrate how deeply he understood Mitchell's aesthetic mission to prove that the material of women's inner lives could be the full focus and basis of art. He's still shrewd on camera, but not nearly as intimidating as the intricate concision of his playfully rude capsule reviews and D+ (and lower) gradings of albums by artists like The Eagles, Billy Joel, and Bryan Adams might suggest. Part of what makes the documentary enjoyable to watch and listen to is the true enthusiasm of the commentators for Christgau's decades of tireless, influential work. The film ends with Christgau contemplating his recent flashes of memory loss, and even more than his mortality, the potential loss of his intellectual faculties as he continues to age into his 80s. His closest supporter, reader, and editor is his wife, the music critic and novelist Carola Dibbell, who also movingly recalls her diagnosis and successful treatment for cancer via the lens of Robert Forster's contemplative song "It's Only Poison" in the film's final stretch.

The beloved poet and essayist Mary Oliver lived in Provincetown for the majority of her adult life, so it makes perfect sense that Sasha Waters’ new PBS documentary Mary Oliver: Saved by the Beauty of the World screened to a packed house at Town Hall. As celebrated as Oliver’s inspirational poetry about the natural world and our human relationship to it has been, it also makes sense that plenty of celebrities (Oprah Winfrey, Stephen Colbert, etc.) comment on and read her work in the film. It’s to the movie’s credit that there’s a healthy focus on the poems themselves, which helps to prevent the documentary from devolving into a formulaic approach to a poet whom some critics have argued became somewhat formulaic over time as well. I always liked the darker, more mysterious, and less certain angles in a book like Oliver’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 1984 volume American Primitive, which was the collection that ultimately helped her cross over into the mainstream.

After closely tracking that rise to literary prominence, the documentary then adds some openness to Oliver’s famed privacy, which it’s now more possible to do after her death. Dedicating herself to devotion and affirmation ran into difficulties for her poetry eventually, and so the film reserves the more challenging biographical details (sexuality, gender, childhood abuse, addiction, estrangement from her family of origin) for later in the documentary. Oliver’s partner and business manager of over forty years, the photographer Molly Malone Cook, remains intriguing as always, and the film also gives her due attention. I reviewed the collection of her photographs Our World (with text by Mary Oliver) for a magazine back when it came out, so I had less to learn about them as a couple, but the majority of Mary Oliver’s readers won't know about those aspects of her life, so of course there will be an audience for the movie regardless.

Since I loved Aaron Brookner’s documentary about his filmmaker guncle Uncle Howard in the festival a decade ago, I knew that I’d also love Keri Pickett’s new documentary Uncle Roy, which is about her photographer (and former figure skater) gay uncle Roy Blakey, who died in 2024 at age 94. Blakey grew up in Oklahoma and became a well-known photographer and celebrity portrait artist in New York City in the 1960s and 1970s. He captured some of the most iconic images of drag artists and performers like Divine and Candy Darling, in addition to taking headshots of many actors and actresses who were on their way up in the worlds of film and television into the 1980s. His prior career as a figure skater during the height of ice-capades shows was previously documented in Pickett’s 2015 film The Fabulous Ice Age, and his extensive collection of ice show memorabilia is now housed (along with his photography archive) in the Jean-Nickolaus Tretter Collection of GLBT history at the University of Minnesota, the largest repository of queer historical materials of its kind in the Midwest.

Roy Blakey, as presented in the film, was a beacon of positivity throughout his youth and adulthood, even into very old age, with nearly every photograph we see of him in the documentary showcasing his beaming smile. He comments on his bright disposition himself in the film as well, an attitude that he maintained during an era when where he grew up in the middle of the country was a time that was often unkind and sometimes downright hostile to visible gay men. Being drafted into military service for two years took him to Europe (and eventually to Japan as a figure skater), and he expresses gratitude for that fortunate relocation many decades later as he reflects back on where his life had taken him. Escaping to New York from the middle of the country as a gay man might not be such an unusual story anymore, though what Roy Blakey did in the city distinguishes it, not only for the vast archive of celebrity portraits that he preserved, but also for the lunchtime entertainment that he provided as a figure skater on the ice rink at Rockefeller Center. He found ways to pursue all of the things that he enjoyed and integrated them into who he was as a fun-loving and hopeful person.

His niece Keri Pickett’s engaging and heartfelt homage to him in Uncle Roy invites the audience as close as it’s possible to get to the subject of a documentary. Since they shared photography as a profession, they opened a large studio together in Minneapolis, a space in which they both lived and worked together well into Roy’s later decades. She helped him to place his archives at the Tretter Collection, a deal that he signed just five weeks before he died. Although Roy remains sharp and alert right up through to the very end, Pickett does bravely document his decline across the border into memory loss as well. Late one night at 3am, she films him opening up a door to another room, and he says he’s looking for the entrance to the arena, in a sadly moving flashback to his figure skating days. She helps him through the moments of his transition on his deathbed in difficult scenes that we are also right there for. Halfway through the film, Roy mentions that he had never found a partner and so never knew love in that way. A few times when he thought he had, “it turned out to be only lust,” he recalls, in a scene that reminded me of a nearly identical moment in a documentary about the gay street fashion photographer Bill Cunningham. When I told Keri Pickett that I’d definitely be writing about her movie after our screening’s Q&A, she gave me a very kind hug, and I said that even though her Uncle Roy hadn’t found a longterm romantic partner, her beautiful film will now offer a way of giving the entire world a chance to love him in memory.

A couple of summers ago, I enjoyed writing about Jane Schoenbrun’s film I Saw the TV Glow, so I was excited to watch their latest movie Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, a cleverly deconstructive send-up of the slasher genre, with specific reference to Friday the 13^th and its many sequels, not to mention even trashier movies such as Sleepaway Camp. In a bold and immersive performance, Hannah Einbinder (of the TV show Hacks) plays a writer/director named Kris who’s been hired to re-boot the Camp Miasma franchise, setting off into a moody wintertime wilderness to find Billy Presley (an all-in bewigged Gillian Anderson, with a lilting Dolly Parton accent), the actress who played the final girl in the original film from the series and who lives at Camp Tivoli where the first movie was filmed, complete with an empty snowbound cinema that Billy also hauntingly inhabits. Instead of the dreaded hockey mask worn by Jason Vorhees, the killer (who’s slyly named “Little Death,” portrayed by Jack Haven from Schoenbrun’s last film) in the Camp Miasma movies wears a comically large square air vent over their head, an eerily disjunctive symbol that makes them no less menacing. From the brilliantly referential opening credits sequence onward, the film is an intentionally extreme jumble of symbols and horror-related “Easter eggs” that are meant both to make the audience laugh and also to question the stereotypical slasher tropes and signifiers within the genre that has relentlessly produced them, particularly with regard to sexual twists and gender identities. We hear several times that the movies come from “the hole at the bottom of the lake” where Little Death seemingly dwells.

Despite the chemistry of its leads and their obvious investment in their roles, the film didn’t quite match for me the daring synergies in the first three-quarters or so of I Saw the TV Glow, nor was there as much of an analytical payoff. This new film is well-made overall and looks great as it swerves from outright macabre horror to dark fairy tale to the crazier lesbian underside of a classic like Sunset Boulevard, but something about it felt to me both underdeveloped and overwrought, which I suppose is part of the point. Transgender motifs again emerge through the figure of Little Death specifically as the movie progresses, and the character’s name circles around and around the orgasmic fear and desire captured in the original Camp Miasma film’s pivotal and violently transgressive moment, which is recreated in a way in the reboot-in-action as we’re watching it that’s excessively over the top, so that what this movie imagines to be its core audience can then simply just laugh it all off and feel like things worked out just fine. The first half of the movie is very carefully structured, whereas the second half loops into some obvious redundancies just as I was hoping that it would move into deeper or more illuminating territory, which gets kind of shrugged off for an easily pleasing sort of resolution (though I loved hearing the voice of Paul Buchanan of The Blue Nile singing a new song “Pain Is the Heart” during the film’s emotional climax).

Nonetheless, it was fun to hear Jane Schoenbrun and Hannah Einbinder interviewed on stage at the festival by legendary producer Christine Vachon the day after I saw the movie. As I’d anticipated, Jane was cool, quirky, and also clearly very knowledgeable industry-wise from doing film production work themselves in their twenties. Jane was also hilariously honest about the business. When asked how it feels to get to spend the funding for their movie, their half-joking reply was, “It's always like a bank heist.” And when the subject of “new queer cinema” arose, Jane again half-joked, “I think I’m done with queer cinema.” Still, Schoenbrun is also very conscientious about making an emotional connection and enacting social change through their body of films, which again, I feel I Saw the TV Glow did a bit better than their latest film, even if this one will obviously be more popular in riding the current cinematic horror movie wave.

Finally, since I’ll always watch at least one love story about gay men at the film festival in Provincetown, I was moved by novelist-turned-filmmaker Helen Walsh’s film On the Sea, which was especially moving to watch in a historical gay seaside town. While waiting in line to enter the venue, attendees were buzzing about how it’s a version of Brokeback Mountain set on the northern coast of Wales, or more appropriately, a version of God’s Own Country set on the Welsh coast instead of in the Yorkshire Dales. Jack (Barry Ward, ruggedly handsome and telegraphing everything with a gorgeous pair of eyes) harvests clams and scallops from the cold ocean shallows in a family business that’s been handed down to him through three generations of mussel farmers, and he’s trying and somewhat failing to hand it down to his own son’s generation as well. Married to a woman and closeted for his entire life, Jack hesitantly falls under the spell of an alluring itinerant worker named Daniel (Lorne MacFadyen, fittingly alluring), who’s thirty-ish and therefore more adept at cruising and signaling interest, and relatively open about being gay in light of his fortunate youth and enough cultural change that’s reached even the northernmost outskirts of coastal Wales, apparently.

In spite of those societal shifts, traditional masculinity (alongside religion and heteronormative sexuality) still reign in Jack’s time and place, though Daniel’s subtle advances and flirtations gradually wedge their way inside of Jack’s closed-off spaces. What works best in their characters’ interactions is what’s silently suggested since their eventual physical surrenders to each other must take place in quieter far-flung locations: out on a boat in the ocean, swimming together in a secluded tidal pool, or inside Daniel’s rented caravan with the curtains drawn. Daniel notices a surgical scar on the side of Jack’s abdomen that he asks him about, and we see Jack’s examinations at his doctor’s office at intervals throughout the film. Luckily, therefore, the looming tragic ending is built into the narrative and not simply a punishment for the two men’s secret once it’s uncovered. Ultimately, though I was worried at first that things might get clunky or sentimental, what unfolds in the film’s final stretch is handled quite sensitively. Sure, the wife kicks Jack out of their home, Daniel moves on to his next destination, the town turns on Jack, and then he moves into a local hotel while trying to keep his work going as his health devolves. Yet everyone comes around in ways more quiet than dramatic. When his wife shows up to let Jack know, “There’s someone here to see you,” cue the audience’s tears as Daniel snuggles up behind Jack in his bed. Sometimes a man, regardless of who he is or what he’s been through, gets the tenderly bittersweet happy ending he deserves.

Monday, June 16, 2025

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

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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Jason

Boston, United States

Pop culture aficionado.

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