Gay film fest lineup is safe and sincere
What a difference a decade makes. In the last 10 years, there have been more and more so-called gay films in big festivals, and while that's a good thing, it's made a gay-festival programmer's job that much harder.
The 21st Annual Boston Gay & Lesbian Film/Video Festival begins Wednesday at the Museum of Fine Arts, and while sincerely programmed, its roster includes numerous works that would be interesting side attractions in a bigger, further-reaching event. But the 17 features and documentaries and two shorts programs are the stars for all 11 days.
Taken together, the films imply that a gay and lesbian film festival is not an artistic bazaar but a self-help workshop. Old tales have new tellers, but if you're not careful, it's easy to think it's still 1995. With a few exceptions, the films in this year's lineup focus on finding love, coming out, and staying out. These often seem like Sisyphean feats, which is often as they are in life, but what you're left longing for is artistry or an original voice to reshape or reflect life. There's little adventure, sensibility, or risk.
What Boston's festival is missing is a film with something powerful to say, a point of view to put across, ground to break, or a need to entertain without apology. Absent from the festival are films like ''Mysterious Skin," ''The Dying Gaul," ''Loggerheads," ''Happy Endings," ''Harry and Max," ''Transamerica," and ''The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things," all of which in some way advance the conversation about what being gay is or can be in the movies. I don't like them all, but each is forward-thinking.
Boston's gay festival circuit might have to head back underground and find new people who can restore the danger and thrill of art to the cinema. The last thing anyone should want from a festival, any festival, is to leave flattered, to feel safe.
The following is an overview of the festival's roster, in order of play dates.
''Saving Face" The women's opening-night film is an endearingly overstaffed intergenerational romantic comedy set amid the Chinese community of Flushing, Queens. For an hour or so, writer and director Alice Wu juggles her stories with aplomb, centering most of the story on a surgeon (Michelle Krusiec), the ballerina (Lynn Chen) she falls for, and the surgeon's mother (Joan Chen), who moves into her apartment. But the usual pileup of deadlines and bad news turns the film too tidy. Still, Wu insists, commendably, that all her characters live without shame.
''Dorian Blues" Any movie that begins with its protagonist's announcement that ''the first thing you should know about me is that I'm gay" should be a cue to about-face. But Tennyson Bardwell's feature manages to wring some zip out of a banal coming-out scenario thanks to some good dialogue and better acting from his star, Michael McMillan, who appears to have gotten his arch boyishness from the same store as Topher Grace and Tobey Maguire.
''The Joy of Life" Dramatically, the festival's best film isn't much: A woman speaks over a montage of various San Francisco spots. But less here is more: The film's loneliness is vividly evocative without turning depressing. Arranged in three movements, writer and director Jenni Olson's hourlong project shifts from the speaker's relationships and feelings about her masculinity to an exquisite account of the making of Frank Capra's ''Meet John Doe" to a musing on suicides from the Golden Gate Bridge. The city's exteriors and facades make a beautiful complement to the narration's interiority.
''Girl Play" Robin Greenspan and Lacie Harmon talk about their couplehood and all the frogs the two aspiring actresses had to kiss before winding up with each other. The two talk at the camera with painful earnestness, while director Lee Friedlander breaks up the onstage monotony with reenactments. But there are moments of truth. When Greenspan says she's sick of learning about herself, it's amazing. I was sick of learning about her, too.
''Jim in Bold" Three out-and-proud young men drive across the country meeting the gay youth of America, many of whom share their poems. It's a valuable inspirational-instructional video that belongs in the school counselor's office before it belongs in a film festival.
''The Aggressives" An all-talking-all-the-time documentary about predominantly African-American macho lesbians. They're thugs and drug dealers who pass, or could pass, as black men. The subject is riveting: women who want to be men dating men who want to be women! (Ricki Lake once devoted an hour to this.) But the director Daniel Peddle, who spent five years with his subjects, goes at them like a social-working anthropologist, not a storyteller.
''The Journey (Sancharam)" In southern India, two girlhood friends become women in love with each other. Of course, it's forbidden. Of course, long faces and an arranged marriage will follow. Ligy J. Pullappally's movie is culturally significant but lacking magic, mystery, and compelling characters.
''Dangerous Living: Coming Out in the Third World" Janeane Garofalo narrates this hourlong essay, directed by John Scagliotti. The movie's subjects are brave for sure, but, distressingly, Scagliotti seems fine leaving us with the idea that the most powerful thing a freshly out gay man can do is love pop music. To embrace Madonna, apparently, is to embrace yourself.
''You I Love" From Russia comes the inscrutable tale of a Moscow advertising executive who invites a Mongolian day worker into his apartment after hitting him with his car. Sex or something like it ensues, then a relationship or something like it. Tossing in a loopy ad-world parody, directors Olga Stolpovskaya and Dmitry Troitsky handle all this with extreme whimsy, as though it were a music video from 1985.
''The Time We Killed" Like ''The Joy of Life," Jennifer Reeves's black-and-white experiment combines random thoughts with incongruous images, but this film, about an agoraphobic writer holed up in her apartment, is longer, more downbeat, and rambling as it skims across a writer's depressed insights. The film exists in a post-9/11 haze that includes the current war in Iraq, but these events don't seem to inform Reeves's project beyond giving it a patina of topicality.
''Superstar in a Housedress" An enlightening if typical documentary about the underground playwright, drag artist, and druggy Warhol buddy Jackie Curtis that's chock-full of photos, footage, and flamboyantly told anecdotes. We learn, among other things, that Curtis could work wonders with a couture gown and a pair of scissors. In the clips of Curtis working and the remembrances of him, we're also treated to more adventure and mischief than anywhere else in the festival.
''The 'D' Word" The only successful comedy in the entire lot. When it's funny, this perceptive parody of Showtime's ensemble lesbian dramedy ''The L Word" is hilarious. But it's also knowingly amateurish and, at about an hour, the lampooning goes on long enough for the sketches to start embracing the cheesiness they mock.
''Making Grace" Another instructional video -- this one about two women trying to conceive. But the New York City-area couple, Ann and Leslie, is winning, and director Catherine Gund tries really hard to let them tell their story.
''Butterfly" Writer and director Yan Yan Mak is deliberately vague in this melodrama about a married mom and schoolteacher and the young singer she falls for. Yan Yan attempts to give the film a sense of purpose, setting it just after Hong Kong's Chinese handover and returning, in flashbacks, to the Tiananmen Square protests. She's put more convincing thought into the erotica, though ultimately even that's not enough.
''Do I Love You?" The program description of Lisa Gornick's exasperating ensemble piece makes an exaggerated comparison to early Woody Allen. But the film, in which Gornick mopes around London prattling on about her professional, romantic, and professional failures, never achieves wittiness or affecting humor.
Wesley Morris can be reached at wmorris@globe.com.
