NEARLY THIRTY YEARS in the making, Sundance remains the world’s most important film festival for showcasing independent films, including gay and lesbian films. Gregg Araki, Todd Haynes, Rose Troche, and many other notable filmmakers came up through the ranks of Sundance. These screenings provided opportunities and perspectives to attendees who may have forgotten how rare gay cinema was just a few decades ago, and how important such films are in maintaining that anti-traditional tradition of filmic storytelling that can rightly be called “queer.”
While there were noticeably fewer GLBT films at this year’s Sundance than in recent years, the festival never fails to recognize filmmakers whose work projects the lives of gay people into the cultural landscape. As a tribute to those groundbreaking artists who defied the crookedly straight mainstream moviemaking industry, the festival pulled out two bold films from the past, Derek Jarman’s Edward II (1991) and Araki’s The Living End (1992), to complement these new entries.
Birds of America. Upholding the typical level of films featuring non-Lisa Kudrow Friends alumni premiering at Sundance, playwright/screenwriter-turned-director Craig Lucas (Longtime Companion, The Dying Gaul) debuted a film that features Matthew Perry as Morrie, a professor living with his wife Betty in the same house where he raised his sister Ida and his brother Jay after their parents died. A man who missed out on his youth, these days the constipated Morrie is looking for tenure as much as for intestinal relief. The last thing he needs is his salivating sister and bohemian brother to come home and hinder his climb up the academic ladder—so guess what happens. Co-stars Hillary Swank as a bourgeois housewife up to no good.
Half-Life. Saura Wu is raising her immature nineteen-year-old daughter Pam and her eight-year-old son
Timothy alone now that her husband has flown away. She has a much younger boyfriend who helps her cope, but he has problems of his own. In the meantime, an adopted son, Scott Parker (Leonardo Nam), goes to considerable comic lengths to make his pious parents openly recognize that he’s gay – something they are not prepared to do. Set in Diablo Valley, another place where urban sprawl is casting its anti-planet miasma, Jennifer Phang’s magical-realist film about a group of people paralyzed by inertia is somewhat uneven. Nevertheless, Half-Life is a thoughtful if bitter film about our civilization’s seemingly inevitable demise, occasionally marred by some terrible acting.
La Corona. Every year, behind the walls of the Women’s Penitentiary in Bogotá, beauty contestants shimmy and shine under the South American sun outlined by prison bars, metal wire, and oppressive concrete structures. Young bodies with tattoos, wounds, and maternal stretch marks are waxed, preened, and posed primarily for the gaze of their fellow inmates and celebrity judges (and how lesbianic is that?). Unlike beauty contestants who can be stripped of a title for some minor infraction, these women have pasts that run deep into the heart of Columbia’s poverty, sexism, Catholic stranglehold, and civil war. Nominated for an Oscar as “best documentary short subject” (it lost to the lesbian documentary Freeheld, which was at last year’s Sundance), Amanda Micheli and Isabel Vega’s La Corona scratches at the contradictions and ironies of contemporary notions of femininity.The Mysteries of Pittsburgh. With one last summer to make up for a life of sorrow and studies before he enters the work force, Art Bechstein is determined to get his kicks. He grabs a job at a bookstore, where his boss grabs him by the loins, falls in love with a woman and her boyfriend (played by Peter Sarsgaard), angers his businesslike father (Nick Nolte), and comes into his own identity. As a period piece, Rawson Marshall Thurber’s adaptation of Michael Chabon’s beloved 1980’s-set novel about bisexuality is worthless. With the exception of the cars (which actually look older), there’s nothing especially redolent of the Reagan decade here. Otherwise the film is sometimes quirky, sometimes stupid, but ultimately dispensable.
A Raisin in the Sun. Produced by gay producers, this film was the first teleplay ever to be accepted at Sundance. Based on Lorraine Hansberry’s famous play, Paris Qualles’ teleplay expands the locations of the play yet maintains the same good old story about a poor African-American family on Chicago’s South Side in 1959 changed by the promise of a new life once a big insurance check reaches the family’s matriarch. Everybody has plans for the money, including her son Walter Lee, Jr., whose plans could destroy his relationship with his mother, sister, wife, and son. While the teleplay lacks the powerful intimacy of the play, there is enough here to revisit the story one more time.
Towelhead. Hands up for the most daring and best film I saw at Sundance 2008, in which screenwriter Alan Ball (American Beauty, Six Feet Under) in his directorial debut deconstructs gender, sexual orientation, race, racism, rape, and a host of other bugaboos. Ball’s audacious film settles in on the character of Jasira (played by Summer Bishil), a thirteen-year-old Lebanese-American girl going on thirty. Males of all ages fantasize about her while Jasira masturbates to glossy images of buxom women in magazines “for men.” As tensions both sexual and racial rise against the backdrop of the Gulf War, urges begin spiraling out of control. While most films only allude to these phenomena, Ball and Bishil (who was eighteen when they shot the film) went deep to bring Alicia Erian’s controversial book to the big screen.
Other reported GLBT titles at Sundance Film Festival 2008 were: Tom Kalin’s Saving Grace, his long-awaited follow-up to Swoon; Issac Julien’s Derek, a documentary on the late gay filmmaker Derek Jarman; writer-director Edet Belzberg’s American Son; writer-director Paul Scheider’s Pretty Bird; director Christine Jeffs’ Sunshine Cleaning; writer-director Tanaz Eshaghian’s Be Like Others; director Amy Redford’s The Guitar: and director Christopher Bell’s documentary Bigger, Stronger, Faster.
