Film
Indecent Proposal Campbell Scott, Patricia Clarkson and Peter Sarsgaard in The Dying Gaul.
Penguins and gays are the new high-concept thriller. March of the Penguins and Brokeback Mountain may have little in common—besides cute couples—but their unpredicted success has once again shaken Hollywood’s certainties. And even though money usually chases trends, it’s hard to say which seems more unlikely: that studios will start bankrolling more nature docs, or that they’ll push for more serious mainstream examinations of alternative sexuality.
It’s not as if gay-themed cinema parthenogenically appeared with Ang Lee’s cowboy romance. But the last explicitly gay-themed film to connect with mass audiences was The Birdcage in 1996. Mainstream movies rarely pay attention to queer individuals except as exotic window dressing (think The Producers) or as accessories for the leads (hello, Rupert Everett). That has forced companies like TLA, Strand and Wolfe to nurture a niche market for gay/lesbian films, along with a theater and video-rental circuit to support them.
Even a medium-sized city like Nashville will occasionally get a higher-profile queer indie, and during each year’s Nashville Film Festival there are offerings for LGBT, queer and intersexed audiences. No matter the quality of the queer-themed films that play cities like Nashville, though, they tend not to last very long. It’s more a matter of economics or viewer laziness than homophobia, because the same thing happens to countless foreign and arthouse releases too.
But there’s electricity in the air now when discussing gay film, specifically because of the crossover strength Brokeback Mountain has shown. It uses cinematic language that’s in a mainstream audience’s comfort zone: the emotional structure of the classic weeper, the physical trappings of the Western. Ironically, it’s because of this accessibility that viewers unaccustomed to gay cinema feel as if they’ve discovered something new.
So here’s a chance to catch up. Starting Friday, the Belcourt offers a scaled-down follow-up to last year’s underattended Nashville Gay and Lesbian Film Festival, showing four films on a staggered schedule through next week. Factor in the Irish film Breakfast on Pluto at Green Hills (see below), and local audiences have five different opportunities to experience the breadth of queer cinema’s canvas.
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The finest is Pawel Pawlikowski’s My Summer of Love (Jan. 18-22), a tactile romance rooted in detail, color, scent and the stirrings of young love between Mona (Nathalie Press) and Tamsin (Emily Blunt), two Yorkshire girls from different backgrounds. Buffeted about between Tamsin’s absentee family and Mona’s born-again ex-hood brother (Paddy Considine), cruelty and beauty abound. The sensual, suspenseful film benefits from Pawlikowski’s masterful use of the camera as an immersive object rather than just a tool.
Less disciplined but more celebratory, Joseph Lovett’s doc Gay Sex in the 70s (Jan. 13-19) takes a look at the flourishing of gay liberation between the 1968 Stonewall riots and the AIDS crisis in the early ’80s, a time of libertine experimentation that drew from the ’60s’ free-love ethos. Unashamed of their bawdy hearts, Lovett’s subjects (including himself) wistfully regale the viewer with astounding tales of erotic adventure. The film commemorates a time of joyous communal cruising, where no one spoke ill of another because their mouths were otherwise occupied.
Exchanging sexual and physical boundaries for wide-open frontier, Daniel Peddle’s The Aggressives (Jan. 14-17) takes an episodic look at six women who have found their own sense of self and gender. As a study of New York’s lesbian drag-ball milieu, it’s a fascinating complement to Jennie Livingston’s legendary drag doc Paris Is Burning. And yet, of all the films in the fest, this one feels most excitingly new. Whether improvising sex toys in prison or making the most of the military’s Don’t Ask Don’t Tell policy, these women are at ease with themselves, and their ease is contagious.
Bereft of any kind of ease, Craig Lucas’ The Dying Gaul (Jan. 13-19) fuses Greek tragedy and gutbucket revenge pictures into a pretentious yet resonant statement about human cruelty and exploitation. Screenwriter Robert (Peter Sarsgaard) has a script, loosely based on his lover’s AIDS-related death, that interests studio exec Jeffrey (Campbell Scott). The suit offers $1 million, with one catch: Robert must change his male lover into a woman. Jeffrey also has designs on Robert, an arrangement that sours when the scribe befriends Jeffrey’s wife ( the sublime Patricia Clarkson).
Lucas piles on so many contrived twists and unforgivable cruelties that you wait for someone to fall to the ground echoing the film’s titular statue. But The Dying Gaul does feature one of Brokeback Mountain’s not-so-secret ingredients—famous, good-looking people having fake gay movie sex. You can almost hear Hollywood saying, “There’s a newfound audience for that!” And penguins.