Despite the inevitable winds of change, the Tampa International Gay and Lesbian Film Festival rolls into town this week looking very much like the festival we've grown to know and love over the past 18 years.
Longtime festival watchers were wary when former festival programmer Joseph Cook tendered his resignation last year amid rumblings that board members were considering taking the festival in a more commercial (read: subtitle-free) direction. But from the looks of this year's schedule, TIGLFF 2007 is as committed as ever to the word "international" in its title. Even more crucially, the all-around quality control continues to be high.
Films — many of them really good films — from France, Italy, Israel, Germany, Japan and other ports of call fill this year's weekday slots, while the coveted weekend slots, as in year's past, are understandably reserved for mostly upbeat, English-language crowd-pleasers, many of them just as predictable as any hetero-centric Hollywood product. But that's not always such a problem. It might be a stretch calling some of these same-sex riffs on boy-meets-girl "subversive," but more than a few of this year's gay and lesbian films have enormous fun rooting around in romantic formulas while coloring them in entertaining new ways.
In all, this is a surprisingly good year for TIGLFF. No less than 20 filmmakers will be in attendance; the parties are as elaborate as ever; and my only serious complaint is that the panel discussions so integral to past years have dwindled to a solitary event this time. But film-wise, which is where it counts, things are basically copacetic. Granted, there's nothing here as electrifying as Shortbus, Claire, Hustler White or numerous other highlights of TIGLFF's past — but even if the highs aren't quite as high, neither are the lows as low, making this one of the most consistently solid festivals in some time.
The 18th annual Tampa Gay and Lesbian International Film Festival kicks off on Thursday, Oct. 4 with Kiss the Bride, one of those aforementioned crowd-pleasers that at least has the good sense to poke fun at its own clichés. A screwball comedy loosely modeled after My Best Friend's Wedding (a fact the movie itself happily brings to our attention), Kiss the Bride's tale of a guy dumbfounded by his ex-boyfriend's impending marriage (to a woman!) features enough appealing characters and witty dialogue to almost make us forget the film's narrative shortcomings — but not quite enough to let us get past Tori Spelling's cosmetically tweaked train wreck of a mug. Starting time is 7:30 p.m. at Tampa Theatre, the venue for all of this year's Tampa screenings. (The festival will also be holding screenings in St Pete, and those will take place at Muvico Baywalk.)
Things get rolling in earnest on Fri., Oct. 5 with a 7:30 p.m. screening of Love and Other Disasters, another big, fat romantic comedy (this one, according to the festival notes, supposedly recalls Four Weddings and a Funeral). Following at 9:45 is Fat Girls, a quirky little offering that's being granted a second life since its screening at last year's festival was cut short by a technical malfunction. Writer-director-star Ash Christian's gleefully crude comedy about a group of teen misfits in a small Texas town owes a bit too much to early John Waters, and the movie over-dabbles in caricatures who sit around breathing through their mouths like rejects from Napoleon Dynamite.
Still, there are lots of moments that ring true in Christian's enjoyably amateurish effort, all but ensuring our leaving the theater with large grins. Incidentally, the festival's black-tie gala also takes place this evening, from 9 p.m. to 1 a.m. at the Tampa Firefighters Museum.
On Sat., Oct. 6, an extremely eclectic mix of movies kicks off with a 1 p.m. program of short films (see this week's Outtakes section for reviews of the festival's shorts programs). The award-winning Italian drama Riparo follows at 3:15, and at 5 p.m. there's DL Chronicles, a look at nominally straight black men secretly hooking up with other guys on the "down low."
Saturday's 7 p.m. primetime slot is filled by Out at the Wedding, another supposed crowd-pleaser, but this one turns out to be pretty tough going. A comedy of mistaken identity that plays like a thoroughly disposable TV sitcom, Out at the Wedding is one of those movies where supposedly smart people do very stupid things simply to move the plot along. The heroine — a straight woman with an obligatory gay best friend and an even more de rigueur dysfunctional family — feels compelled, for reasons that make absolutely no sense, to pretend she's a lesbian (don't ask, please).
One lame thing leads to another as the film skates through an assortment of breezy stereotypes, managing a hysterical outburst every 15 minutes or so and culminating in an entirely unsurprising plot twist in which various straighter-than-straight characters turn out to be gayer-than-gay (a phenomenon many of the films at this year's fest can't seem to get enough of).
Matters take a turn for the better, and decidedly darker, with 25 Cent Preview (9:45 p.m.), one of the festival's toughest and most compelling offerings. Like one of Lou Reed's seedier songs come to big-screen life, the film zeroes in on various street hustlers, drug addicts and other damaged goods as they ooze their pan-sexual slime trails through the back streets of San Francisco. The approach here is raw and unfiltered, perhaps trying just a little too hard to locate beauty and poetry within the ravaged characters (many of whose "performances" are so natural they barely seem like acting) as they mumble, slur, rant and screw their way through life. Intense, unnerving and occasionally brutal, this one's definitely not for the squeamish.
Much of Sunday's schedule is devoted to documentaries, the highlights being two fascinating and extremely personal explorations of gender identity: Trained in the Ways of Men (3 p.m.) and Red Without Blue (5). At 7, the festival moves back into narrative mode with Love My Life, an improbably bright and bouncy Japanese love-fest that feels like the cinematic equivalent of bubblegum music (or, for that matter, just plain bubblegum). Based on a popular Japanese manga (comic book), Love My Life follows the ups and downs of two adorably frisky young girls who spend their time consuming sweets, giggling, making love and occasionally pondering — with a minimum of angst — the consequences of coming out to various friends and family members.
Love My Life doesn't run any deeper than your standard comic book, but neither does it have a pretentious (or ironic) bone in its body, making it hard to deny the movie's upbeat and utterly guileless take on modern love.
An even better bet follows at 9 p.m., at least for those with a taste for artsy Euro-mysteries in an existentialist vein. Filled with local French color, enigmatic symbolism and beautiful, naked flesh, One to Another focuses on a group of young friends whose dedicated promiscuity is very nearly a philosophical mission — they engage in sex, they say, to experience the "certainty of existence." At the center of this band of beautiful boys and girls is a bisexual hustler who eventually turns up dead, a murder that consumes his already fragile sister and that provides the tantalizing mystery in which the film revels (without necessarily feeling obliged to resolve it).
Part L'Avventura/Under the Sand anti-thriller, part Les Enfants Terribles incest-tease, One to Another isn't nearly as good as the films it references. But there's some tasty food for thought here, lots of moody, quasi-mystical atmosphere and scattered bursts of French rock that demonstrate those two words aren't always an oxymoron.
One of the happiest surprises of this year's festival turns up on Monday in the form of Tick Tock Lullaby (7 p.m.), in which a lesbian couple ponders the dilemma of how to have a baby born of genes that "crave each other." Despite the cutesy title, Tick Tock Lullaby is tough, smart and often acutely funny stuff — particularly amazing for a movie that bombards us with more nonstop chatter than an Eric Rohmer film (much of it delivered as voice-overs endlessly debating the intricacies of sperm, babies and biological urges). This English import clocks in at less than 80 minutes but packs more of a wallop than most films twice its length.
Not quite as satisfying but still well worth a look is the German brainteaser Vivere (9 p.m.). A story presented as a trilogy of dovetailing narratives, each told from the perspective of one of its three central characters, Vivere follows three lonely women — a pregnant teenager, her cab-driving older sister and a seductive, 60-ish mystery-woman — all looking for love on Christmas Eve. The characters seem to be connected in some vaguely cosmic Kieslowski-lite sense, but the film travels to places we don't quite anticipate, using eloquent silence and painterly imagery to invite us into a universe that initially looks bleak but where everything eventually becomes possible.
Meanwhile, over at Muvico Baywalk, there's more Gallic artistry on display (as well as some glorious views of the French countryside) at the 7:30 p.m. screening of The Man of My Life, a psychologically charged examination of sexual confusion during a summer holiday in the Rhone region. There's a slow-burn intensity to the film, with finely nuanced performances and cinematography that seems to bore right into the characters' souls, but, when you come right down to it, the essence here is pretty basic stuff. Man of My Life's happily married hetero and his gay neighbor are clearly destined to be together — and everything else is just window dressing (albeit often exquisite window dressing). A screening of short films for men follows at 9:30.
Tuesday's lineup finds still more ersatz heterosexuals being jolted to their senses in 2:37 (Tampa Theatre, 9 p.m.), a murky slice of high-school life set in the wilds of Australia. Even if the movie didn't open with an apparent suicide, we'd be sure to realize that doom and gloom are in the air from the characters' perennially pensive glances, not to mention a heavily reverbed soundtrack that includes funereal bells portentously tolling for just about everyone here.
All the requisite teen-types are on display — stoners, jocks, geeks, bulimic pretty-girls, picked-upon gays (both open and closeted) and, just in case we might not fully realize just how much pain everybody here is in, a talking head pops up every few minutes or so to remind us. Some of the performances are OK, but we've seen this vision of high-school hell a few too many times before, and we know it's all going to end badly. Not exactly subtle stuff.
If you're looking for something that yanks your emotions around with a little more finesse, Muvico Baywalk's Tuesday schedule includes two more promising possibilities: Four Minutes (7:30 p.m.) and Another Woman (9:30). A tougher, mutated Mr. Holland's Opus filtering Madchen in Uniform through the women's prison genre, Four Minutes eschews sentimental bonding clichés in its beautifully acted story of an elderly lesbian music teacher mentoring an angry young female con.
Then there's Another Woman, the emotional but somewhat tepidly directed tale of a transgender woman who returns to the family she left behind before her operation. While not a bad film by any stretch, Another Woman seems more like a made-for-TV production than something suited for the big screen, prompting us to wonder why TIGLFF doesn't simply go to the source and book some genuine transgender masterpieces like Almodovar's All About My Mother or Fassbinder's In a Year of 13 Moons.
Another excellent documentary shows up back in Tampa on Wednesday: For the Bible Tells Me So (7 p.m.), a compassionate, concise and insightful examination of the frictions and possibilities of reconciliation between organized religion, personal faith and homosexuality. At 6, a panel discussion featuring local educators, religious leaders and other members of the community will precede the screening.
Following For the Bible Tells Me So is another film about clashing cultures — The Bubble, Israeli director Eytan Fox's same-sex Romeo-and-Juliet romance between a gay Palestinian and an Israeli Jew. The film is frequently engaging and beautifully captures the essence of the parallel worlds it portrays — particularly the diversity and energy of Tel Aviv's tragically hip youth culture — but the political messages become a little much. Some of the movie's characters eventually begin to seem like mouthpieces for The Bubble's well-meaning demands for coexistence. And for that matter, do we really need yet another movie using suicide bombing as an artistic metaphor for what ails ya?
There's another interesting double feature this evening over at Muvico Baywalk as well, beginning with Spider Lilies at 7:30 p.m. This Taiwanese import fuses a sophisticated pop-art sensibility with a dreamy, nonlinear structure, telling the story of a young tattoo artist reunited with her first love, now a green-wigged "Web girl" specializing in online sex shows. Spider Lilies flits through time so casually that it's sometimes difficult to tell exactly what's going on (the grammatically-challenged English subtitles don't help either), but the film's romantic essence reads loud and clear, and some of its lovely imagery transcends words.
It's too bad about the forced and clunky voice-over that begins, ends and periodically rears its head during Holding Trevor (9:30) — because almost every other scrap of dialogue here is so natural, so witty and winning, that it more than makes up for any shortcomings of plot. The core characters — two gay pals and their straight female roommate (a configuration that seems to figure in more than a few of TIGLFF's films this year) — share a wonderfully bitchy chemistry that makes the movie a delight, even when it indulges in some atypically serious plot machinations or periodically wallows in a romantic cliché or two. This is a first feature for Rosser Goodman, and I can't wait to see what this director does next.
The festival continues through Sun., Oct. 14, past the period we're covering in this issue, but we'd be remiss if we didn't at least mention a few of the highlights from TIGLFF's final days. On Thurs., Oct. 11, there's Finn's Girl (7 p.m.), a taut thriller notable for its political scope, and for one lesbian telling another, "This whole butch-femme thing, it's a bit passé." Then there's Nina's Heavenly Delights (Oct. 12, 7 p.m.), a food and love fusion set in Scotland's Indian community (home to some of the weirdest accents on the planet). This one's so seductive that we can almost forgive the scene where everyone leaps up from the table and starts singing along to "Daydream Believer."
And don't miss the closing-night film Shelter (Oct. 14, 7:30 p.m.), the coming-of-age/coming-out journey of a young San Pedro skate-punk. Featuring oodles of Endless Summer shots of young gods catching perfect waves, Shelter is effortlessly special, even managing to transform grunts of monosyllabic California-ese ("Dude!") into expressions of angst, longing and love. It's a brave and atypically "serious" closing-night selection for a film festival that, even after all these years, demands to be taken seriously.