LGBT

Moonlight (2016)

André Crous

In Barry Jenkins’s Moonlight, three fragments of a life make up a fragmented whole that is beautiful to look at but remains opaque to the end.

USA
3*

Director:
Barry Jenkins
Screenwriter:
Barry Jenkins
Director of Photography:
James Laxton

Running time: 110 minutes

Despite the fat, the muscle and the facial hair they put on over time to create a facade of machismo or of adulthood, many a man is still the same scared little boy inside he was when he was growing up. This is about as deep as Barry Jenkins’s Moonlight goes, unfortunately, and while this observation is a constant theme throughout the film and comes through in various ways, there is less to this widely praised coming-of-age film than one might have hoped for.

Moonlight is a three-part story depicting the life of a sensitive young man, Chiron, who is prone to bullying and grows up in a single-parent household in Miami. In the three parts, which sketch his life as a boy, as a teenager and finally as a young man, Chiron is played by three different actors (Alex Hibbert, Ashton Sanders and Trevante Rhodes), all of whom bring sensitivity and a slight awkwardness to the role.

But the film’s most potent portrayal easily lies in the first part, and Jenkins seems to acknowledge as much in the opening shot: Juan (Mahershala Ali), a calm Afro-Cuban drug dealer in his late-30s, leaves his car to cross the street and speak to Terrence, an 18-year-old boy who works this street of the rundown Liberty Square neighbourhood for him. Terrence has clearly had his fill of drugs already and appears slightly dazed, but while he fidgets out of nervousness or fearfulness, Juan lazily puffs on his cigarette and asks him how his mom is doing. All the while, the camera drifts around them in an unbroken take, clearly suggesting that Juan is a bringer of peace and tranquillity, an idea quickly made vivid when he sees and then saves Chiron, who is being chased by a group of bullies.

This initial encounter between the drug dealer and the taciturn boy, whose mother depends on drugs and makes money spending her nights in the bedroom, is unexpected, but Juan’s care is soon complemented by the evident compassion that his girlfriend, Teresa, has for the boy. This concern for Chiron’s well-being, which obviously helps him on his way to becoming an adult, is most pronounced in a beautifully written yet highly improbable scene in which Juan and Teresa explain, with the greatest tact imaginable, the meaning and implication of the word “faggot”, a word Chiron’s own mother used to dress him down: “‘Faggot’ is a word used to make gay people feel bad.” Although the intent is admirable, this moment set around the dinner table of a low-income drug dealer in the 1980s is wholly improbable – wishful thinking in a story that in all other respects clearly strives for realism.

Moonlight‘s most glaring fault is also its most appealing aspect for a wide audience: It tackles the issue of homosexuality very gingerly by using only one incident in each of the three parts to remind us that Chiron is gay; if not for these all too fleeting moments, we might have completely overlooked his struggle. The film includes only one sexual act, and it is shot from far away so as not to offend the non-converted. In this regard, the climax is particularly vexing because a nearly 20-minute build-up does not get the dramatic release we expect (and seek). Instead, it fizzles out entirely, and we’re left with nothing more than a very unsatisfying head-on-the-shoulder moment of intimacy.

The spectre of Juan, who only appears in the first part, hangs over the entire film, and in the final act, upon seeing how buff Chiron has become, dealing drugs and sporting the same gold grills as his late father figure, this moment of recognition hits the viewer with a pang of compassion. However much he seeks to emulate his hero, however, we quickly learn that inside the muscled body an emotionally insecure is still hiding, unwilling to engage intimately with those closest to him.

Except for the dialogue, which is so authentically rooted in lower-income Miami that is not always easy to follow, the film is immediately accessible thanks to its focus on a single character who ages in front of our eyes, albeit not as seamlessly as in the equally superficial Boyhood. Jenkins’s soundtrack raises the beauty and the grit into the artistic thanks to the inclusion of the Laudate Dominum movement from Mozart’s gorgeous classical piece “Vesperae solennes de confessore” and – at a pivotal moment – Caetano Veloso’s performance of “Cucurrucucú paloma”, best known from its appearance on the soundtrack of Pedro Almodóvar’s Talk to Her (Hable con ella).

In the end, the film belongs to the actors, who emote and elicit our empathy thanks to their faces, their silences, their hesitation and their humanity. Surprisingly, one of the best-known players, Naomi Harris, who stars as Chiron’s drug-dependent mother, Paula, is the only one whose acting veers into over-the-top histrionics as she momentarily portrays a character we’ve seen all too often before from characters who are drug addicts.

Moonlight is a well-intentioned, meticulously shot film whose rich colours and sense of place unfortunately never translate into sustained action or robust character development. Chiron gazes without interacting, is diffident to a fault and (except for mimicking Juan) shows little appetite for opening himself up to new experiences. This reticence ultimately leads to precious little progress and produces a film that merely pretends to be complex but is nothing of the sort.

The Danish Girl (2014)

André Crous

Tom Hooper’s Danish Girl, which tells an important story about a historic, groundbreaking gender transition, struggles to confront its own identity crisis.

UK
3*

Directed by:
Tom Hooper
Screenwriter:
Lucinda Coxon
Director of Photography:
Danny Cohen

Running time: 120 minutes

The Danish Girl, which was 2014’s much-talked-about transgender movie, puts on a very strange face right at the outset, for no apparent reason. Given the title, one would expect the film to open in Denmark, and indeed it does, except the landscape is about as un-Danish as one can imagine. Instead of the ever so slightly rolling countryside, we see giant mountains rising up from the coast. In fact, despite the plot (and this scene!) being set in Denmark, these mountains are in western Norway’s Møre og Romsdal county. For a film that is supposed to be all about its main character’s true nature, this is an absolutely unforgivable and truly puzzling moment.

The sudden fame of Caitlyn Jenner over the year immediately preceding the release of the film had catapulted transgender individuals onto centre stage at about the same time as the rest of the LGBT family was finally granted the opportunity to marry, on an equal footing with all the rights and responsibilities of heterosexual marriage, in the United States. Jenner was praised in some quarters and reviled in others by both gay and straight people alike, but it is rather obvious that the central character in The Danish Girl, Lili Elbe (born Einar Wegener), was chosen because she was the first person ever to undergo sex reassignment surgery — nearly 90 years ago — and because she is much more likeable than Jenner.

Even if the film stupidly deceives us with its opening (and closing) visuals, the story of Einar (played by the very suitably delicate-featured Eddie Redmayne) accepting his inner Lili has the advantage of being both true and topical. It is a story that will find a certain audience, but the reasons are unfortunate. For one, there is very little drama, both internal and external. The film contains only a single scene of violence committed against Einar because of his sexually ambiguous features and provides precious little insight into his moments of self-doubt or self-reflection. He writes a diary to make sense of his feelings, but we never discover what he writes.

Luckily for him, but unfortunately for the film, there is surprisingly little drama in his marriage, too. Einar, an artist, is married to a fellow painter, Gerda (Alicia Vikander), who appears to care for him so deeply that she simply accepts her husband’s transition almost without blinking an eye. While her response is unquestionably loving and beautiful, it also removes any drama that might result in a better understanding of the situation from either side.

The major challenge here is to get the audience to fully appreciate the situation from Einar’s point of view. Despite his feminine features, he appears to be living a happy life with Gerda in the early 1920s, even though they have been trying without success to have a child of their own. Early in the film, Gerda asks Einar to pose for her in women’s clothing so that she can add a final touch to one of her paintings. Embarrassed, he acquiesces, and then he suddenly has a eureka moment with the fabric as he is stroking it across his skin.

Before long, he is wearing his wife’s clothes under his own, putting on makeup and dressing up to go out into the world as Lili. Gerda is a little surprised but not entirely shocked, until she discovers Lili has been seeing a young man, Henrik (Ben Whishaw), for companionship. While the viewer can come up with reasons for this behaviour, the film does not provide them and instead glosses over any discussion of them entirely.

We get small but very simplistic hints to fill in Einar’s back story — for example, Gerda relates how she propositioned him on their first date, how she kissed him, instead of the other way around, and how it felt like she was kissing herself. The writing here is utterly transparent and about as helpful as having a gay character say he once played with a doll when he was a boy.

The story starts to pick up once the couple relocates to Paris, where Einar gradually starts to mimic the gestures of the women around him in order to appear more feminine when he behaves as Lili. Here, Einar/Lili and Gerda also meet up with Hans (Matthias Schoenaerts), a childhood friend of Hans’s, who brings some much-needed complexity to the storyline.

The film’s desire to be accessible has watered down the emotional turmoil that one would expect from Einar/Lili and Gerda. Its depiction of the many doctors who fail to understand Einar’s condition, each of whom comes across as vile if not sadistic, is just as ridiculous. At other times, shocking revelations are not followed by the expected conversations but rather by ellipses that are incredibly frustrating because the director does not have the stomach to show us how the couple argues.

The Danish Girl brought the world the story of a groundbreaking icon of the movement for acceptance of (unconventional) sexual identity, but its reliance on suggestion rather than a rich narrative and sturdier characters undermines its own significance. While the film is far more capably directed than Hooper’s laughable Les Misérables, it never comes close to the sheer whirlwind of passion that so vividly brought his The King’s Speech to life.

From Afar (2015)

André Crous

On the streets of Caracas, father issues push two men – the one in his late 50s, the other barely out of school – together into an ambiguous relationship that defies explanation until it’s too late.

from-afarVenezuela/Mexico
3.5*

Director:
Lorenzo Vigas
Screenwriter:
Lorenzo Vigas
Director of Photography:
Sergio Armstrong

Running time: 90 minutes

Original title: Desde allá

He doesn’t blink. Almost never. He has money; they don’t. But for them to get the money, they have to expose themselves to his gaze until climax.

“He” is Armando (Alfredo Castro), a dental prostheticist in Caracas, Venezuela. “They” are young boys in wife-beaters who hang out on the street and can always do with an extra buck. One of them is Élder, who has a girlfriend but gets lured into Armando’s flat before violently taking the money to establish his manliness, or rather, his non-homosexuality (he constantly refers to Armando as an “old faggot”), and then fleeing the scene.

Armando, one of the two leads in Lorenzo Vigas’s From Afar, is an enigma. His apartment is immaculate but very quiet, and visitors are always for-pay. He has established a certain rhythm, and even when things don’t go as planned, he merely executes his plan as before, convinced that this time, somehow, the result will be different. But the viewer has good reason to be on edge, particularly because of the ominous but absolutely ravishing opening scene, shot in very shallow focus out on the streets of the capital, where Armando is on the prowl, visually isolated from everyone around him. This opening scene bookends strikingly with the deep-focus final scene, also set in downtown Caracas.

Armando has almost no social interaction with anyone except those he solicits with a heavy wad of cash – often in public. In an early scene, he shows up at his sister’s apartment. There is a short, hazy conversation about their father, who is back in the city, and the tension between Armando and his sister is thick enough to cut with a knife. But the rage remains pent-up, and the father, whom we never see up close but always “from afar”, wholly unapproachable.

In the meantime, Élder develops a relationship with Armando that is neither sexual nor friendly but rather one of convenience: Élder, who works in an auto shop and has no problem bringing in business directly from cars parked on the streets of Caracas, gets a sugar daddy who pays for whatever he needs, while Armando has some real human contact for what we assume is the first time in years.

Both of these characters suffer from a lifetime of daddy issues, however, and it is impossible to ignore Armando’s role as a father figure in the young man’s life. At the same time, however, Venezuela does not appear to be the most hospitable area for a relationship between two men, and they both have their ways of hiding their emotions and interest when in public. Unfortunately, this reservedness extends even into the private sphere, and we rarely get a glimpse into their thought processes.

For an extended period of time, one question hangs in the air: What does Armando get out of this? His emotions are suppressed to the point of being completely pulverised, so we won’t get an answer from him, but will this relationship manage to reinvigorate him? By the time the end credits roll, it would appear that Armando only used Élder to expel some of his own demons, but the fragmentary presentation of the film’s narrative helps very little in making sense of the events and the characters.

In his acting début, the young Luis Silva is a revelation. Although his character has a devil-may-care attitude at the outset, presumably a defence mechanism against a life that was not always easy, Silva’s deep dark eyes imbue him with a darkness that is ambiguous and keeps up wondering who will ultimately have the upper hand. By the time he cleans up and dons a proper shirt for a birthday party, it is impossible not to notice the seductive young man with the peachy lips who had been hiding in full view the whole time.

From Afar draws out its mysteries, relishing in our futile attempts to make sense of the slowly unspooling relationship, perhaps in the same way that the two characters are, although we cannot know for sure because the one (in part) and the other (in full) are so reluctant to stand naked before us, as it were. With such a short running time, it would be wrong to ask for much more colour, but a handful of scenes seem to be fragments left behind when earlier, fuller scenes were pared down for the sake of artistic obfuscation. But the silences – and Armando’s silent stare, especially – will continue to haunt the viewer long after the final credits.

Viewed at the Be2Can 2016 Film Festival.

The Feast of Stephen (2009)

André Crous

James Franco applies the language of cinema to adapt an Anthony Hecht poem and produces a work of sexual intensity that nicely dovetails with the films of dedicatee Kenneth Anger.

The Feast of StephenUSA
3.5*

Director:
James Franco
Screenwriter:
James Franco
Director of Photography:
Christina Voros

Running time: 266 seconds

James Franco’s The Feast of Stephen, a five-minute short film adapted from the eponymous poem by Anthony Hecht, is about sex, violence, violence as sex and sex as violence. Its ambiguous depiction of homoeroticism makes it difficult to determine whether or not it is a fantasy woven from reality, although the director overplays his hand in the second half with an unnecessarily literal portrayal of what was already quite apparent in the first half.

This wordless black-and-white short dedicated to experimental filmmaker Kenneth Anger has something in common with one of the director’s earliest films, Fireworks, released more than 60 years earlier in 1947. Anger’s film was about a teenager (played by Anger himself) who goes in search of “relief” and finds it after wading through some sadomasochism. Like Fireworks, Franco’s film touches on the issue of shame and violence but also, eventually, sexual gratification, albeit tinged with violence and scatology. Luckily, The Feast of Stephen takes a more serious tack and eschews the camp so often visible in Anger’s oeuvre, as Franco spares us the sight of milk-covered flesh.

The film opens on a basketball court, where four teenage boys – two of them shirtless – are passing the ball and shooting hoops. Along the fence comes a boy, the titular Stephen, wearing long trousers, a long-sleeved T-shirt and glasses – clearly, at odds with the rest of the group. Stephen stares at them, and something they look back at him, straight into the camera. He stares at them, and they start moving in slow motion, their youthful torsos rippling in the afternoon sun. He stares at them and notices how their hands playfully touch each other’s taut bodies. Suddenly, his desire is made manifest by more carnal images of the boys’ genitals. Now, Stephen is staring even more intently, and when one of them looks back, and the camera rushes towards him, it is clear Stephen has been caught out. He bolts off, his secret now out in the open, but the violence that ensues when the quartet of boys catch up to him also makes his innermost thoughts a reality.

The pounding that he gets all over his body, experienced most acutely in his groin, gradually becomes a pounding from behind. At this point, the implication is clear, but this is also the moment at which Franco goes too far in order to emphasise beyond a shadow of a doubt that this act of violence has a strong sexual undertone, as a cut suddenly removes all clothing, and we see Stephen being penetrated by the boys over whom he’d been tripping out. Of course, this moment is as imagined as the earlier moment of nudity that had briefly revealed the boys on court in the buff, and perhaps this prior image forms a sturdy means of support for the later scene, although both intellectually and emotionally it would have benefited from much tighter editing during the sodomy scene.

Despite its last-minute overreach, The Feast of Stephen is a seriously executed film that is thoroughly enjoyable and – unlike many of Franco’s other works – never overstays its welcome. The camera work has a grittiness that fits its subject very well, and while the lead actor comes across as more of a blank canvas than an actual character, the players’ movements are all beautifully coordinated. The film doesn’t have the grace or the sensuality of, say, Jean Genet’s Un chant d’amour, but the brutality wrapped in fantasy makes for two easily accessible levels on which to process the events, and in a film less than five minutes long, that is not bad at all.

Peacock (2015)

André Crous

Short film about Czech playwright Ladislav Stroupežnický is a period piece like almost no other and has a central character who almost never speaks but evokes passion beyond words.

furiant-peacockCzech Republic
4.5*

Director:
Ondřej Hudeček 
Screenwriters:
Jan Smutný
Ondřej Hudeček
Director of Photography:
Ondřej Hudeček

Running time: 27 minutes

Original title: Furiant

The early years of the 19th-century critical realist Czech playwright Ladislav Stroupežnický are vividly brought to life with a dazzling display of humour and unconventional storytelling in Ondřej Hudeček’s 25-minute short film, Peacock (Furiant). This is the story of a young rebel whose first encounter seemed to have been divinely ordained. And even though the tale also has a tragic component, a warm romanticism that is both affectionate and slightly tongue-in-cheek infuses the presentation of the material.

Borrowing liberally from the visual style of Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon, as is to be expected in any period film worth its salt, the film has another reference that is even more pertinent in terms of eccentricity and playfulness: Tony Richardson’s 1963 classic Tom Jones, which has become regrettably underseen and underknown. Hudeček’s use of a period setting to tell a story that is every bit as energetic as a music video and filled with painterly landscapes yet almost entirely devoid of dialogue is thrilling, and the film’s glimpse of this famous playwright is as witty as it is educational.

The structure of Peacock, which comprises an introduction, three acts and an epilogue, is just about the only aspect that one might label as traditional, as the contents and the presentation of the material are dynamic. Not only does the film deploy animation, droll title cards and a side-splitting extract from a screenplay, but it even does away with dialogue altogether, replacing it with the coherent, ubiquitous and atmospheric voice-over by Lukáš Hlavica.

Book-ended by gorgeous shots of the interior of Prague’s National Theatre, a magnificent symbol of the Czech National Revival to which Stroupežnický would become an important contributor (many of his plays would also be performed here), the film covers 14 years in the author’s early life, from 1853 to 1867. We follow him on his riotous rejection of authority, especially of the Church, and his first love.

Ironically played by a German and not a Czech actor, the young Stroupežnický (Julius Feldmeier) has a tense face that almost never relaxes, except in the company of Jan Aleš, a close friend whom a title card early on introduces as “a poet and a great lover”. This unexpected meeting between the two is anticipated – even endorsed – in religious terms, as the narrator tells us that “Ladislav, rebelling against the supreme authority, was unaware that he would soon receive a great sign from above.” 

This first love very intelligently marks the end, at least for him, of romanticism. In fact, the film suggests that the disintegration of their intimacy – whose melodrama is rivalled only by the climax, in which Stroupežnický attempts to commit suicide but is seemingly (and rather hilariously) spared by divine intervention – was a turning point for the artist and somehow explains his subsequent conversion to critical realism.

The film uses the music of Antonín Dvořák, one of the most famous Czech composers of all time and a contemporary of Stroupežnický, all the way through, and his series of “Slavonic Dances”, in particular, provides a rich and sometimes thrillingly bombastic frame for the emotions at work in the story.

The Czech title appears to be somewhat ironic, too, as Furiant literally means “show-off”, even though Stroupežnický almost never utters a word. The original meaning refers to the type of movements that accompanied, among others, Dvořák’s “Slavonic Dances”. Clearly, the English title is connected to the first meaning, and the attention paid to the film’s absolutely stunning visuals – especially the exterior scenes, although at least one interior shot also draws attention because of its theatrical composition – is highly commendable and helps to immerse us in the beauty of the story.

Hudeček’s work here is absolutely flawless, and his talent for producing splendid images that knock us with emotional hammer blows, often in complete silence, makes the experience of watching the film all the more intense. Filled with sly humour, bubbling with creativity and assembled as a coherent work of fiction that draws on reality for inspiration, Peacock is as colourful as its English title suggests. 

Viewed at the 2015 Karlovy Vary International Film Festival

Loev (2015)

André Crous

In India, where same-sex love is still a taboo (and sex is illegal), uttering the word “love” is a challenge, but Loev signals there is light at the end of the tunnel.

loevIndia
4*

Director:
Sudhanshu Saria
Screenwriter:
Sudhanshu Saria
Director of Photography:
Sherri Kauk

Running time: 90 minutes

If there is one abiding image that is familiar to and may even represent most gay men – especially those who grew up or were ever in an environment that was less than accepting of their sexuality – it is two people awkwardly squeezed onto a single bed. Whether it is at home, where the parents assume their son is sharing a room with a friend, or at a hotel, where out of embarrassment or fear no booking was made for a double bed, the desire to hold each other is one that easily (albeit uncomfortably) overrides the physical restrictions of the single bed.

Homosexuality is not only taboo but also illegal in India, where an infamous 2013 decision by the country’s supreme court found the Penal Code’s section on “carnal intercourse against the order of nature” did in fact include sex between two individuals of the same sex (technically, men). This fact makes the production of Loev, an Indian film about men who have sex with men, utterly remarkable. Not only does the film’s creation constitute a courageous act on the part of writer-director-producer Sudhanshu Saria, but it is also a very accomplished film in its own right that sidesteps many of the traps into which many so-called pink films from the other side of the world often fall. It also includes that beautiful, recognisable image mentioned above.

In the film’s opening scene, we find Sahil, a 20-something musician from Mumbai, all alone in his apartment. It is pitch black, and as his face is illuminated by the candle he lights, we see he is not impressed. It is nearly 40 degrees, there is no air conditioning because the power is out, and he is in a rush to pack for a weekend trip. His boyfriend Alex arrives and admits that he forgot to pay the electricity bill, but Sahil tells him he had also left the gas running. The mood would be tense if it wasn’t for Alex’s carefree attitude, which is nonetheless rooted in an understanding of his boyfriend’s emotional state. He takes Sahil to the airport, but not before we see him trying unsuccessfully to put his arm around his shoulder.

This moment in the car when Sahil pushes his boyfriend away is key to the film, as it not only underlines his anger but also hints at his feeling of shame when it comes to being intimate with his boyfriend in public. His old friend, Jai, who has become a workaholic businessman in New York City, returns to Mumbai for a short visit, and the two head off to the idyllic countryside of the misty Mahabaleshwar, a night’s drive south of the teeming metropolis.

What makes the interaction between Jai and Sahil so compelling and contributes to the film’s serious treatment of its characters is Jai’s attitude towards his friend. There is no tension or judgement. Jai talks to Sahil about Alexander the same way he would have if his friend had been in a relationship with a woman. The underlying assumption of normalcy distinguishes the film’s approach from the traditional anxiety that tends to accompany gay films, even in more accepting countries. At the same time, however, director Sudhanshu Saria does not ignore the lingering disapproval of homosexuality, especially in the countryside, although such moments are fortunately used for context, not to create some contrived moment of drama. 

Loev‘s many long takes (the camera is very mobile but lets the scenes breathe thanks to extended silences) emphasise the real-world setting of the story and are further proof of the director’s talent as a filmmaker. It bears mentioning that this is his début feature film.

The film’s title is equivalent to the U.S. expression “lurve” and allows the speaker to suggest “love” without saying the word. “Love” is a difficult word to say for those who fear the consequences of such a declaration. Men, in particular, tend to avoid the word, even when their feelings are clearly within the orbit of the definition, and that is certainly the case for Sahil, whose relationship with Alexander is unmistakably filled with compassion and patience even though he refuses to call it by its rightful name.

The final scenes are riveting and reveal a great deal about all three of the main characters. The film comes to a very satisfying conclusion without sugar-coating or glossing over the problems that remain or throwing open the closet door to expose all the secrets hidden inside.

Loev is a timely film that, far from seeking to understand the status of gay men in India, treats them like any other group of individuals with the same problems and desires as anyone else. This approach of normalising their identity is crucial in a country that still struggles to accept people who do not fit the perceived status quo, and in so doing, the film, focused primarily on the tension between a friendship and a relationship, marks an important milestone in the depiction of characters who also happen to be gay.

Viewed at the Black Nights Film Festival 2015

Beauty (2011)

André Crous

A secret obsession that inevitably leads to tragedy is presented in a film moving at a pace and according to a poetry wholly at odds with the life of its main character.

skoonheidSouth Africa
3.5*

Director:
Oliver Hermanus
Screenwriter:
Oliver Hermanus
Director of Photography:
Jamie Ramsay

Running time: 95 minutes

Original title: Skoonheid

There is no question that the man at the centre of Oliver Hermanus’s Afrikaans-language Beauty is deserving of the title every bit as much as the director’s previous, début feature, the stunningly executed Shirley Adams, was about its title character. His name is Christian Roodt, and he is a charming law student whose enigmatic aura intensifies as we realise he has a calmness about him that belies his age and his boyish good looks. It is a persona that sets others at ease and unfortunately allows some people to take advantage of his affability.

One man who sees Christian and cannot get him out of his head is François van Heerden, a friend of Roodt’s parents, who first sets eyes on the young man at his own daughter’s wedding. But even though the title refers to Christian, Hermanus gently nudges us, from the very first moment, to take position next to François, whose gaze the camera shares with us in the opening take.

This particular take – long and produced via a slow zoom in – is a masterstroke, as it not only sets up the extended takes that mottle the film’s visual landscape but also gorgeously encapsulates both the distance and the longing of the main character that will inform our understanding of the rest of the story. Unfortunately, the editing spells out whom this perspective belongs to before delivering the gut-punch of having the object of affection unexpectedly look straight into the camera and thus catching François (and us, already) in flagrante delicto.

The film creates some of its tension by deploying moments of lingering silence, and lead actor Deon Lotz is excellent at conveying the frustration and the inhibition of a middle-aged, homophobic man who is married to a woman but engages in sex with other men on what we assume is a regular basis (the farm orgies in which he participates are depicted as emotionless and decidedly ugly). This father of two daughters, who lives in Bloemfontein, deep in the South African heartland, likes to drink beer and watch rugby. He represses his secret until there is no more space, and it ruptures his bubble of existence.

But exactly when there ought to be tension, there is none, as happens in the third act when an inebriated François, sitting opposite Christian at an empty diner, cannot stop babbling. We learn nothing, we feel little for him, and we end up feeling sorry for the expressionless, passive Christian who has to listen to this man. And yet, this scene immediately follows a tour de force tracking shot inside a night club that shows us how ill at ease François is with the world of gay men who have accepted their own sexual orientations.

Visually, Beauty is unimpeachable (although the shots themselves may be questionable, as I explain below), and director of photography Jamie Ramsay deserves much acclaim for his stunning, crisp compositions. The intention behind the film is equally noteworthy, as the story of a man whose secret of homosexual attraction ultimately almost destroys him is one that is absolutely necessary for a generation growing up on a staple of mostly uncritically positive depictions of gay characters and lives.

It is not an easy film to watch, as Hermanus’s view of humanity (and particularly of his main character) is unflinchingly pessimistic, and François does not get a moment to relax and be happy. He is always either delusional or suffering because of his desire to get closer to Christian. He doesn’t know what he wants exactly, but he finds himself drawn like a moth to a flame. A comparison to Taxi Driver’s Travis Bickle, or The Searchers’s Ethan Edwards, would not be entirely inappropriate, as the obsession of saving someone who does not wish or need to be saved is central to understanding the character here.

Another reason why Beauty is a difficult experience is because of its contemplative pace, which is not always useful. While the few long takes that project François’s point of view have a clear purpose, others are used less sparingly and are more taxing for the viewer. For example, why do we have to be subjected to a static shot of more than 15 seconds of a dim kitchen, shown in the early morning hours, before a character arrives to do something as captivating as… buttoning his shirt?

Hermanus’s plan to have the viewer slide in and out of François’s position is executed a bit ham-handedly, as Christian sometimes looks straight into the camera (which happens briefly in the opening scene, and at least once more later in the film), but he also looks just past the frame, and at the end, he is replaced by another character who looks straight at us/François. This mishmash signals confusion on the part of the director, who nonetheless handles the rest of his material very assuredly, like an illusionist whose tricks barely engage but still intrigue us because we cannot discern exactly how he performs them so seamlessly, fooling us every time.

In this tragic tale of a man whose unrequited lust leads him to revert to the most primitive of behaviours – fitting the stereotype of the macho guy taking, nay violently grabbing, what he wants with utter disregard for the other party – we are urged to share his point of view, but there is little for us to empathise with. The mood is sombre throughout, and Hermanus’s pitch-black vision of his protagonist’s existence never draws us in through the participatory experiences that small moments of happiness would have brought.

Not a thriller and not really a character study, Beauty’s redeeming characteristic is its director’s firm hand, but a collection of technically flawless pieces does not a great film make. Slow cinema, which this film at times intends to emulate, is the domain of poets whose messages are related to us as dreams that are visionary and not just visual. Beauty, by contrast, has a story with precious little to chew on and that ought to have been told in the most immediate manner possible.

This is a beautiful film that sometimes carefully considers and depicts the life of a man whose secret is slowly devouring him, but the story’s loose ends and the director’s persistent determination to obfuscate instead of answering our questions cannot hide the fact that there is less going on here than there ought to be.

Butterfly (2015)

André Crous

Argentinian filmmaker Marco Berger takes on parallel realities to show characters rising above circumstances and becoming themselves, time and time again.

Mariposa

Argentina
3.5*

Director:
Marco Berger
Screenwriter:
Marco Berger
Director of Photography:
Tomás Perez Silva

Running time: 103 minutes

Original title: Mariposa

The worlds of Marco Berger’s films are almost always happy (though never uncomplicated) places. Going against the tradition of using (anguish about) sexuality as a way to amplify the drama, this Argentine director has consistently — with a single exception, Ausente — presented his viewers with stories where small steps lead the way to happiness. His films have no villains, although a case can certainly be made that the teenager in Ausente is the most (and only) unpleasant character in his œuvre. Instead, he focuses on the gentle tension that exists when people like each other, and this tension is resolved either through satisfaction or through the departure of one of the parties. His bright, optimistic world view is reflected in the atmosphere of his films, filled with sunshine and greenery.

While Berger almost exclusively examined same-sex attraction in his previous films, his fourth and latest feature, Butterfly (Mariposa), which premiered in the Panorama section at the 2015 Berlinale, places heterosexual attraction in the foreground. However, his affinity for one of the central tenets of gay rights is unmistakable: The major theme of the film is that no matter our circumstances, we will fall in love with the person with whom we were meant to fall in love. In the end, it’s always nature, not nurture.

In the very first scene, a butterfly sits perfectly still, and a young mother leaves her infant daughter by the side of the road. A few moments later, we see the mother with her daughter again, just as moments earlier, but she notices the butterfly gently flapping its wings and makes the decision to hang on to her child. The consequences of this single moment will be evident throughout the rest of the film, as we see the effects of her two decisions.

The idea of parallel worlds has been done before on film, with examples ranging from Sliding Doors to Run Lola Run (Lola rennt), but Butterfly, shot in Buenos Aires and in and around Tandil, is much more subtle and much less pure spectacle than those two films were. It is to Berger’s credit that the sexual tension at the heart of his story — between a boy, Germán (Javier de Pietro), and his adopted sister, Romina (Ailín Salas) — is handled with tenderness, understanding, and absolutely no sentimentality or exploitation, and his overarching message is a powerful one. At times, the symbolism of the butterfly does become needlessly belaboured, as the main character inexplicably buys a kind of butterfly snow globe for no apparent reason other than to suggest to us that he is being moved by some force he does not understand: his universal self across all worlds.

In the one story, the bearded, curly-haired Germán, an only child, falls in love with Romina, the girl with the dyed blond hair and the dark roots whom he meets when his parents crash into her in the woods. In the other, the clean-shaven, bespectacled Germán grows closer and closer to his adopted sister, Romina the brunette, whom his parents had found in the woods as a baby, until they both realise they can no longer resist the temptation to be with each other. In the meantime, their relationship to each other in both worlds affect those around them, but only temporarily, as everyone eventually gravitates towards the same people in either story.

One of these people is the handsome Bruno (Julian Infantino), Germán’s friend in the one world and Romina’s boyfriend in the other, who physically and awkwardly gravitates towards Germán. It is obvious Bruno is not particularly attracted to Germán, but there is a conspicuous yearning that — as Berger has shown in nearly all of his films, including his first short film, The Watch, by letting shots of underwear speak volumes — manifests itself as a hilarious, throbbing erection.

Despite Bruno being more or less closeted in not one but two worlds, we always sense that happiness is just around the corner, and when the moment arrived, I started smiling like a giddy teenager. Berger makes us fall in love with his characters because they are thoroughly likeable and their world is one that we want to be a part of. This world seems entirely credible, and while the characters may stumble here and there, most of their desires are ultimately fulfilled.

Berger has stated that the origin of Butterfly was partly personal, as it relates to the time after he was rejected by two film schools in Norway, and he had to choose between giving up on his dream and following his heart. Whether he would have ended up making films regardless is, of course, an open question, but audiences around the world will be enthusiastically applauding his decision to make movies that inspire them by creating wholly plausible worlds we want to believe can be ours, too.

He says he also drew inspiration from the 1998 film Lovers of the Arctic Circle (Los amantes del círculo polar), about two step-siblings falling in love in a world that is so elusive it slips through our fingers at the end.

The separation between the worlds of Butterfly is at once very clear and not always obvious. The characters differ with regard to the colour and the length of their hair or their facial hair, and Berger also uses red and blue in various ways to distinguish the worlds from each other. However, the scenes are often cut in such a way that they start in one world and abruptly change to another when there is a sudden cut. This strategy is mostly successful but sometimes seems unnecessarily overused. The continuous back-and-forth between the two worlds and their stories does require the viewer to pay attention throughout, but this intense scrutiny and comparison pay off handsomely because we recognise that, despite all the obstacles, our characters are slowly moving in the direction that will make them the most happy.

With Butterfly, Berger has affirmed his view of the world as a place we should be optimistic about. The screenplay, built on small moments rather than big ideas, is intelligent but never seeks to outsmart the viewer. Unfortunately, the fast-paced alternation between the two worlds and the focus on two couples instead of one do slightly hinder the depth to which the characters are revealed (Hawaii and Plan B were much more effective in this regard), but even within these constraints, Berger does elicit a great deal of feeling from his situations. His characters have their reasons for acting the way they do, and while some will point to the broken heart of at least one girl in one world, and of another in the other, as evidence that people sometimes do get hurt, the film leaves us with the message that going for what we want often leads to the best possible world. After all, without those two broken hearts, the future may have had exponentially greater heartache in store.

Cupcakes (2013)

André Crous

CupcakesIsrael
1.5*

Director:
Eytan Fox
Screenwriter:
Eli Bijaoui
Eytan Fox
Director of Photography:
Daniel Schneor

Running time: 90 minutes

One would think the world has moved on past the point where putting a man in a dress is a central source of comedy for a film, especially one directed by Israeli filmmaker Eytan Fox, whose 2002 film Yossi & Jagger established him as the most important director of gay films in the region.

But in Cupcakes, which features “five girls and a homo” as an act taking part in the UniverSong contest (read, “Eurovision,” but even trashier, if that is possible), a flaming queen named Ofer (Ofer Shechter) skirts the surface of transvestism to pop up in every second scene with a song-and-dance number, or just another wig-and-dress combination, to remind us he is as gay as the day is long.

All of this is supposedly in the name of gay liberation, and of “being yourself”, but the message is drowned out completely by the absolutely ridiculous behaviour of the only out gay character. By the way, his boyfriend, Asi (Alon Levi), is famous and closeted, despite his wealthy family’s firm trading on the slogan of authenticity while covering up the sexuality of their handsome heir.  Viewers who know very few gay people may come to the disturbing conclusion Asi is better off staying in the closet.

Of course, we want the boyfriend to be out, but why is there all of this anguish? Does Fox really want us to believe that coming out is such a big deal, when he has a major Jewish character (the country’s bombastic culture minister) openly asking for pork while on a business trip to Paris?

This particular scene in the City of Light has one of the biggest laugh lines of the film, but most of the production reeks with desperately low-budget sets that may or may not be intentionally comical. Even if the director wanted us to revel in a kind of lo-fi musical, the characters are terribly one-dimensional, and the development is exclusively — and predictably — romantic in nature.

But the viewer’s enjoyment of (or repulsion at) the film is rooted almost entirely in the character of Ofer, who all but walks around with a giant spotlight trained on him while he rides a unicorn and has rainbows shooting out of his fingertips. It’s not that his outfits are bad (the only inspired moment is an elegant tuxedo-tutu combination toward the end that shows off his legs), but that there are so many of them we struggle to understand whether this is who he is or whether it is all just a show.

There is something admirable about the message to “be yourself”, but for the purpose of the film, the director has chosen characters who, even if they are being themselves, are only there to make us laugh at their bizarre behaviour. For those on the periphery, like the culture minister in Paris, that is fine, but when characters central to the story are vapid and hollow, the thinking viewer should take offence.

Cupcakes may have a musical’s fluffy intentions of pure entertainment, and if that was all it wanted to be, perhaps it could have been mildly interesting. If we know it is a musical, we are willing to suspend our disbelief when characters start belting out an improvised song without hesitation and in perfect unison. But the film has too few songs, and when the genre is less clear, and the production value is this bad, the product is unbelievable and truly dreadful.

One would like to believe a film cannot be this camp unless it is done on purpose. Many of Pedro Almodóvar’s films have outrageously camp moments or characters, but Almodóvar doesn’t expect us to laugh every time they open their mouths or prance around in drag. He feels for them, and he makes us feel for them, too. Fox has no such desire, and his film is a slap in the face of efforts to present complete homosexual characters that don’t simply conform to limp-wristed stereotypes or angst-ridden closet cases.

Not only LGBT cinema but the world at large deserves much better than this silly little film.

Tom at the Farm (2013)

André Crous

Tom at the FarmCanada/France
3*

Director:
Xavier Dolan
Screenwriter:
Xavier Dolan
Michel Marc Bouchard
Director of Photography:
André Turpin

Running time: 95 minutes

Original title: Tom à la ferme

Xavier Dolan is an immensely gifted filmmaker. His début, I Killed My Mother (J’ai tué ma mère), was experimental, visually stunning and inventive, and it had a grasp of rhythm that belied his age — he was 20 years old when it screened in the Directors’ Fortnight sidebar at the Cannes International Film Festival in 2009. Most importantly, it suggested a voice all its own with little recourse to the works of other filmmakers, even if one of the best sequences in the film was very similar to Henri-Georges Clouzot’s The Mystery of Picasso (le Mystère de Picasso).

But his follow-up, Heartbeats, was infused with slow-motion and repetitive music immediately recognisable as being inspired by Wong Kar-Wai. And his third film, Laurence Anyways, about a man who wishes to transition to a female body, had images that brought to mind the perfectly framed visuals of Stanley Kubrick.

Now comes the Hitchcockian Tom at the Farm, in which a young man is virtually held hostage on a farm by the older, homophobic brother of his late boyfriend. But things are not quite as they seem, and the significance of all of Dolan’s personal touches to the narrative are outweighed by the heavy-handed use of Gabriel Yared’s bombastic music that liberally borrows from Bernard Herrmann’s scores for Vertigo and Psycho, in other words: Be prepared to hear a lot of strings played very loudly.

It is a real shame, because Dolan’s story has a lot to work with at the outset. Main character Tom (Dolan) drives to a farm deep in rural Quebec that he clearly has never visited before. He is anxious and upset, and when he arrives at the lonely farmhouse, covered in fog, no one is home. He finds a key on the front porch and enters, but not before we notice the passenger door on his black Volvo is a different colour, obviously recently replaced.

Inside, Tom falls asleep on the kitchen table and is awoken by the elderly woman of the house, Agathe (Lise Roy), asking him what he is doing in her house. Tom was the boyfriend of her late son, Guillaume, whose funeral is the next day. But Tom dare not say anything to her, especially when her eldest son (whom Guillaume, bizarrely, had never mentioned) grabs him during the night and tells him how he will behave if he cares about his own survival, or something like that.

This scene with the brother, whose face is obscured at first and then revealed in a loving close-up as the handsome, bearded Francis (Pierre-Yves Cardinal), is unmistakably homoerotic. But what Dolan wishes to accomplish is far from obvious. The audience will almost certainly expect, because of this confrontation in the dark and many other ambiguous moments, that Tom and Francis will end up together. That is not exactly the case, although because of his physical resemblance to his later brother, Tom forms an attachment to him, and because of Tom’s presence on the otherwise deserted farm, Francis grows closer to him, too. All the while, he continues to bully Tom into fabricating stories about Guillaume’s supposed girlfriend back home in Montreal, which will engender enormous frustration in anyone who values equality and rejects discrimination.

We are taken on wild goose chases, as Dolan seems to suggest Francis is on the verge of revealing some big secret to him before the moment evaporates and we are left with nothing but our imagination. In one bizarre scene, Francis snorts some cocaine and decides to start dancing with Tom in the shed. This is one of the most sexual scenes in the film, but as with all the others, it seems to come out of nowhere and ultimately confuses us more than it answers any questions. Tom’s reluctance to ask some of these basic questions, including the reason for the entire town being openly hostile to Francis, also leaves us shaking our heads.

The worst, however, is a chance encounter right at the end that is almost too ridiculous to stomach and has us wondering how on earth Dolan thought he could get away with having a scene that is so implausible because it neatly ties up a story from an earlier monologue.

Tom at the Farm has some beautiful scenes, and Dolan’s face keeps our interest even when the shots tend to drag on for a very long time, but the film lacks the humour of Hitchcock and the claustrophobia of Polanski to turn his material into gold.