Film festivals traditionally tread more than a few fine lines, beginning with the all but impossible imperative of pleasing crowds while providing something genuinely interesting to chew on. The best and the longest-running festivals tend to make their never-ending balancing acts look effortless or even invisible, less like compromise than some elegant alchemy.
And over the years, few events have managed this most fundamental fact of festival life better than the Tampa International Gay and Lesbian Film Festival.
The 17th annual fest will present more than 130 films between Oct. 5 and Oct. 15, which, any way you look at it, is a lot of movies. What’s particularly noteworthy about a cinema serving this sizeable, however, is how cohesive it winds up feeling. Even though these films cover an awful lot of bases (and in some cases, exist at opposite ends of the aesthetic spectrum), there are enough common denominators to be found in this year’s selections that it seems perfectly natural that they should all be part of the same program.
And it may surprise you to hear that by common denominators, I am not just referring to the whole, you know, “gay thing.”
Yes, the bulk of this year’s lineup can (and, undoubtedly, will) be roughly divided into the old standby categories of “men’s films” (flicks for guys who like guys) and “women’s films” (for girls who like girls), with a few side trips into the somewhat fuzzier realms of the transgendered. But, at its best, TIGLFF 2006 turns out to be considerably more, too. A surprising number of movies at this year’s festival blur and reconfigure notions of sexual identity in new, interesting ways that suggest erotic/romantic appetites are a lot more complicated — and a lot more fluid — than we might be inclined to believe. A few of this year’s films (notably, the Dogme-esque Gypo) even tell stories where we have to practically read between the lines to discern any sort of queer content at all. And one, the already-notorious Shortbus, may turn out to be the most controversial movie of the year, mainstream or alt, gay or straight. The sex-as-metaphor-for-whatever-ails-ya epic features full-on intercourse both hetero and homo, and has been called by one critic “the kind of movie that keeps Rick Santorum up at night.” Directed by Hedwig and the Angry Inch‘s John Cameron Mitchell, it was a sensation at Cannes and Toronto; that TIGLFF is showing it only a week after its theatrical openings in New York, L.A. and San Francisco is quite a coup. (Screeners weren’t available before the fest, so I’ll be discovering right along with you whether the film’s impact lives up to the hype.)
Much as we all love sniffing out new trends, I wouldn’t necessarily assume that these less-easily pigeonholed, pansexual, bisexual and huh?-sexual movies signal any sort of sea change for TIGLFF. But it sure is refreshing to see a gay film festival secure enough in its identity to showcase movies where a character’s homosexuality simply becomes part of the overall texture of life rather than key to some contrivance of plot.
That said, what better way to jumpstart this year’s event than with a movie about nothing but contrivances of plot, unapologetically outrageous behavior and gaudy, candy-colored decors? Things kick off Thurs., Oct. 5, with a 7:45 p.m. screening of the Spanish screwball comedy Queens (Reinas), directed by Manuel Gomez Pereira and featuring a gaggle of Spanish screen divas who’ll be familiar to fans of Pedro Almodovar, all wallowing merrily in the chaos surrounding a trio of same-sex marriages. Show up early and take part in the gala street party beginning at 6 p.m. at TECO Plaza in front of the festival’s primary venue, Tampa Theatre.
Things simmer down a bit on Fri., Oct. 6, with three terribly serious, back-to-back dramas screening at Tampa Theatre, the most notable of which is probably A Very Serious Person (7:30 p.m.). This is the directorial debut of playwright-iconoclast Charles Busch (who also wrote it and stars, sans drag), but the movie is by all accounts an atypically subdued slice of nostalgia, so don’t come expecting any of Busch’s high-camp fireworks. High rollers seeking a bit more pizazz might decide to skip tonight’s films altogether and elect instead to shimmy up to the bar at the festival’s extravagant Gala Party at the Tampa Museum of Art. The $50 ticket price may seem steep, but it includes great live music and all the fancy chow and “adult beverages” you can consume. Showtime is 9:15 p.m. and proper attire is requested.
Saturday, Oct. 7, is probably the festival’s biggest and best day for film lovers, so let’s get right to some of the highlights. 1:20 p.m. may seem a bit too early for something as raw as Cruel and Unusual, a devastating account of the abuses heaped on transgendered women in prison, but if you can stand the heat, this is one amazing documentary.
You may well feel the need to chase Cruel and Unusual with something lighter, in which case there’s Fat Girls (3 p.m., Tampa Theatre), a crude and enjoyably amateurish comedy about a recently de-closeted teen and his misfit pals trying to get by in a small Texas town. There’s barely a plot and a plentiful supply of overtly cartoony characters (many of whom either think they’re in a John Waters movie or sit around with their mouths wide open like rejects from Napoleon Dynamite). But there are enough moments that ring true to make us smile and wonder what baby-faced writer-director-star Ash Christian might do next.
The blessing and curse of big film festivals like TIGLFF is that there really can be too much of a good thing; we simply can’t see everything we want to see, and sometimes we’re forced to make hard choices — especially when films wind up playing at pretty much exactly the same time. That’s the case with two of this year’s best bets, The Gymnast (8 p.m., Channelside) and 20 Centimeters (7:15 p.m., Tampa Theatre).
These movies couldn’t be more different, but both are uniquely entertaining and highly recommended. Half gritty street-trash saga and half smoothly tuneful, Busby Berkeley song-and-dance extravaganza, 20 Centimeters is an outlandishly fractured fairy tale about a narcoleptic Spanish transvestite saving up for a sex change. The characters are mostly Fellini-esque grotesques but are handled with a convincing tenderness that makes the film’s outrageous and often pitch-black comedy surprisingly easy to swallow (no pun intended).
At the other end of the spectrum, The Gymnast is the essence of sober good taste. An elegantly crafted and surprisingly nuanced mood piece, the film details what happens when a frustrated, middle-aged housewife unexpectedly finds bliss (hanging upside down in some Cirque du Soleil trappings, as luck would have it) with a comely young Korean punkette. The imagery is glossy but always attractive, the performances unusually strong, and the movie is smart enough to take its sweet time making us wait for the inevitable soft-focus groping we know is going to occur.
The international focus of TIGLFF is stronger than ever this year, with films from some 20 countries represented; Time to Leave (9:40 p.m., Tampa Theatre) is one of the most memorable of the lot. This is the latest from French auteur Francois Ozon, a gifted gay filmmaker who almost never makes overtly “gay” movies. Time to Leave is no exception. A minimalist meditation on life and death, Ozon’s new film depicts a terminally ill photographer (yes, he’s gay, and no, it’s not AIDS) who seems to be simultaneously experiencing all the stages of grief in preparation for his actual demise. The film is tough going but also, uncharacteristically for Ozon, curiously sentimental — no small trick considering that its hero spends so much time burning bridges and acting the jerk — and the poetry is palpable in every frame.
The final film on Saturday’s schedule, Sun Kissed (11:15 p.m., Tampa Theatre) is not one I can in any way recommend, except possibly to connoisseurs of truly and deeply bad cinema. This low-budget indie (directed by Patrick McGuinn, son of Roger the Byrd) has all of the flaws that go with the territory (stiff performances, clumsy camerawork, intrusive soundtrack), but its problems go way deeper. The script is so poorly written that I honestly had no idea what was supposed to be happening much of the time — two guys appear to be having an affair out in the desert, although one may have killed the other, or his wife, or something like that — and when we’re not being bombarded with dumb and/or pretentious dialogue, we’re given endless shots of tortured faces looking into the distance while listening to mopey rock music. I know it’s tempting to see for yourself just how bad something like this could possibly be, but trust me on this one. You really don’t want to go there.
Sunday, Oct. 8, is another big day for the festival, beginning with the documentary My Name Is Jackie Beat (3:45 p.m., Tampa Theatre), an overly flattering but nonetheless engaging character study of an abusive, self-deprecating drag queen who learns to channel anger into art. Interestingly enough, this slice of drag-queen-life turns out to be less about gender politics and more about the sort of self-image problems that almost everyone faces, making Jackie Beat a curiously universal entertainment.
One of the festival’s more unique events takes place at 5:45 p.m., when author/critic Alonso Duralde shows up at Channelside with an informative and reportedly very funny audio-visual presentation entitled 101 Must-See Movies for Gay Men. The films span the gamut of possibilities, rather than just the obvious Boys in the Band route, and Duralde’s wide-ranging “Just what makes a queer movie queer?” theme couldn’t be more appropriate for this year’s TIGLFF. Expect Fight Club and Xanadu to be among the films on the table, along with Mommie Dearest and Valley of the Dolls.
Another crowd-pleaser, albeit a quirky one, shows up later that evening at Tampa Theatre with Rice Rhapsody (7:45 p.m.). The movie’s credentials are as high-profile as they are unlikely: Action icon Jackie Chan is the producer and TV chef Martin Yan (Yan Can Cook) one of the stars of this good-natured homage to the joys of being young, gay and Asian.
The movie lopes along, not particularly well-organized but always amusing, telling the story of a progeny-craving, Singapore single mom who, after making peace with the fact that two of her sons are gay, jumps through hoops encouraging the heterosexual inclinations in Son Number Three. Don’t expect anything profound here, but do expect lots of charm, some good local Singaporean color and a sprinkling of mouthwatering sequences revolving around culinary delicacies like chicken fried rice.
The final film for Sunday is also the strangest, by far. Two Drifters (Odete) (9:45 p.m., Tampa Theatre) is the latest offering from Portuguese director Joao Pedro Rodrigues, an uncompromising and often infuriatingly obscure auteur with a penchant for in-your-face nudity and arty, under-the-radar narratives. Two Drifters is Rodrigues’ most maddening project yet — a long, slow and sometimes painfully enigmatic tale of a lonely gay man and a crazy young girl who are both obsessed with the same recently deceased guy (a scenario that allows for lots of sequences where people wander through graveyards engaged in various unpleasant or incomprehensible activities).
The mood swings from catatonic to hysterical (there’s rarely anything in between), and the film is filled with what I’d have to call “line in the sand” scenes — moments so extreme that we’re practically forced to love them or hate them; nothing less will do. Much as I love it when a filmmaker is willing to take such big chances, I found myself ultimately hating Two Drifters more than I admired it — although the closing image is so insanely beyond-the-pale it almost single-handedly redeems everything that precedes it.
Things calm down considerably at the festival on Monday and Tuesday, although there’s still more than enough going on to keep the faithful happy. A panel discussion with the unassuming title “What is the future of Queer Cinema?” takes place on Monday at Tampa Theatre, with panelists including Veronique Courtois (formerly of Strand Releasing, currently President of Casque d’Or Films); author Alonso Duralde; directors Malcolm Ingram, Mark McCormick and Tom Murray, and myself. Showtime is 5:30 p.m., and the event is free and open to the public.
Things heat up again on Wed., Oct. 11, beginning with Eating Out 2: Sloppy Seconds (7 p.m., Tampa Theatre), a hardbody-strewn sex comedy that’s been receiving mixed reviews (at best), but that has managed to prove pretty darned popular with crowds on the festival circuit. The people are pretty, gay and straight characters are reportedly skewered with equal abandon, and cult entity Mink Stole even makes an appearance.
Meanwhile, for a very different sort of film experience — and one of the best of this entire festival — you’ll have to look to the other side of the Bay, where TIGLFF presents Gypo (7:30 p.m., Muvico BayWalk). Billed as the U.K.’s first official Dogme production (complete with jittery handheld camera and little-to-no artificial sweetening), Gypo is, on one of its many levels, a spiritual cousin to one of those grassroots Ken Loach-Mike Leigh studies of the British underclass, where half the thrill is just getting deep inside the skins of the various characters.
The film is divided into chapters (each a mini-movie, really), with each section seen through a different character’s eyes — a working-class husband, his wife, the titular Czech refugee who enters their home — and each piece reveals new information, until we eventually realize we’re watching the pieces of a puzzle come together. There are few grand Amores Perros linkages or revelations here, just slices of life that give themselves up as the stories unfold, becoming richer as they accumulate. All of which makes Gypo a memorable experience.
Wednesday’s final film, Broken Sky (9 p.m., Tampa Theatre), is way too poetic-and-proud-of-it to be everyone’s cup of tea, but how can we fail to be intrigued by a film that often seems to be a Mexican homoerotic variation on Hiroshima Mon Amour or any number of similarly aestheticized European classics? Broken Sky even opens with a quote from Hiroshima‘s Marguerite Duras, then proceeds to pile on the artfully composed and nearly wordless passages in which two doe-eyed Mexican boys pursue one another through various locations, both mundane and exotic (stand-ins, no doubt, for the chambers of time, memory and desire), all accompanied by a hyper-romantic soundtrack of Latino pop, opera and techno. It’s almost certainly not as deep or mysterious as it wants us to think it is, but Broken Sky is worth a look if only on the basis of style, sensuality and pure chutzpah.
That only brings us through the first week of this almost dauntingly scaled festival, which runs all the way through Sun., Oct. 15. Among the dozens of films still to come are In Dreams Awake (Oct. 12), a brand new documentary about the late and much-admired painter Bill Petrie; the aforementioned Shortbus (Oct. 13); Go West (Oct. 14), a fascinating Romeo and Juliet oddity from war-torn Bosnia, about the surreal and tragic lengths a gay Muslim and his Serb partner go to in order to stay alive and together; the snappy and literate romantic comedy Puccini for Beginners (Oct. 15); and the wonderfully gross and idiotic Another Gay Movie (Oct. 14), a teenage sex comedy that proudly proclaims to the world that queer cinema has every right to its own Porky’s.
And why not? After all, these films are nothing if not reflections of a community that’s every bit as diverse and unruly as its straight counterpart. In its 17th year, the Tampa International Gay and Lesbian Film Festival has wised up enough to know it’s OK sometimes to be dumb, to let your hair down and, with every other bit of yin, bring on the yang.
The faces of TIGLFF are now almost too numerous to count, and these are just some of them. We’ll get to some of the rest in next week’s film column, when we get up close and personal with what’s happening during the second half of this remarkable festival.
This article appears in Oct 4-10, 2006.
