Films on the Circuit Show a Genre in Flux
This article is only a portion of the full article. If you are already a premium subscriber please login. If you are not a premium subscriber, please subscribe for access to all of our content.

Thom Fitzgerald’s Cloudburst, based on his own play and starring the estimable Oscar winners Olympia Dukakis and Brenda Fricker, by casting alone seems to be reaching for a wider audience. It’s the tale of an aging lesbian couple, Stella (Dukakis) and Dottie (Fricker), who high-tail it to Canada in order to marry and evade Dot’s being put in a court-ordered nursing home arranged by her granddaughter. Coupled for 31 years, tough-bird Stella has increasingly become Dot’s care-giver, as Dottie, large in girth and slowed by blindness, is vulnerable to accident and injury. Like a septuagenarian “Thelma and Louise,” these two hit the road once Stella kidnaps Dot from the nursing facility. In Stella’s battered pick-up truck, they wind along the beautiful Maine coast of inlets and bays heading toward the Canadian frontier, only to be slowed giving a lift to a young hitchhiker named Prentice. The cops are on their tail, and Stella reasons that she and Dot will be less recognizable as a trio. Now they will be two old gals with a young buck with swagger, an exposed chest, and low-slung jeans. Stella quickly cautions him: “You’re barking up the wrong fire hydrant.”

Prentice, played by a newcomer, Canadian Ryan Doucette, is a lost soul whose career as a “modern dancer” seems not to have provided much security. Besides, his mother is ill and he wants to go home to Nova Scotia, providing the story with a detour that mixes unspoken filial emotions with raucous comedy. Ultimately, young Prentice helps the pair of old dykes get to the altar, although Dottie’s granddaughter shows up hoping to foil their plans. While the film flirts with sentimentality, Stella’s foul-mouthed dialogue—and her juicy disquisition on slang words for “vagina”—keeps the first half of the film trotting along. Its pace slows in the second half and the wayward plotting barely prepares us for a change of emotional timbre at the end. What Fitzgerald has created is a credible couple of older women in love, with Dukakis supplying the verbal vinegar as she chews up the scenery, and Brenda Fricker playing the grace notes. The charming landscapes, shot in Nova Scotia, bring us close to a dreamy Acadia.

The sense of place figured prominently in a number of this year’s films. North Sea, Texas is a Belgian film of seemingly modest ambitions about a teenage boy, Pim, living in the 1960’s with his ex-beauty queen mother on the windswept shores of the Belgian coast—to wit, the Noordzee. It is a hauntingly beautiful yet socially barren locale of humble, attached houses and one tacky bar-restaurant—the Texas—that draws the brusque locals and provides Pim’s mother her employment as a waitress and as a good-time gal seeking male companionship.

In early scenes, the cherubic child-Pim fixates on his mother’s beauty queen crown and sash—engaging in private cross-dressing reveries that clue us into his latent sexuality. Catching him at his secret “play,” his mother, Yvette, assures him he hasn’t done anything wrong. Later, as a beautiful though slightly sullen teenager, Pim is drawn to the sensible family life of his neighbors down the beach—another single mother, Marcella, whose son Gino and daughter Sabrina adopt him as a part-time sibling. Gino, fixated on motorbikes, becomes the object of Pim’s attentions. Gino’s enthusiastic friendship with the shy Pim seems no more than standard buddy-bonding—until one night the two camp out on the beach with Gino assuring Pim (after their tented intimacy) that “this is just between us.” This “Brokeback Belgium” moment seems appropriate to the period and to a young man like Gino whose identity is caught up more by the mechanics of motorbikes than the mechanics of gay sex. His sister Sabrina, herself captivated by dreamy young Pim, plays out her disappointment to his indifference with increasingly testy exchanges at the kitchen table and by withholding her previous affection. But Gino’s affections are also non-committal, so for a time Pim must fend for himself.

First-time feature film director Bavo Defurne fashions a somber and tender tale, based on a popular novel, of sexual ardor budding among young people whose adult models are less than sterling. Pim’s mother is seductive and reckless in her loneliness, seeking out the wrong companions, and the long-suffering Marcella, a model of kindness and good sense to the three young people, has nevertheless kept her children ignorant of their long-lost father’s identity. In this seaside dead-end town, Pim and company strain for self-discovery and adulthood. Head-in-the-clouds Pim comes to express his needs with bracing clarity by the end of the film. The movie’s fictional source lends the story a strong psychological and sociological texture. A wonderful cast of veterans and newcomers, and Defurne’s avoidance of melodrama in favor of a steady emotional tension, produces a film that is at once thematically “queer” and also a universal coming-of-age. If it gets commercial release here, it will be interesting to see if North Sea, Texas can be marketed beyond its natural GLBT audience.

We move away from open spaces and into dense urban streets with Sally El Hosaini’s My Brother the Devil, a British entry that won this year’s cinematography award at Sundance. El Hosaini’s high voltage screenplay captures the intense bond of British-born Arab brothers amid the push-and-pull of their tough London neighborhood. Handsome older Rashid stays fit at the gym by boxing; he cuts a seductive figure on the streets as he traffics drugs for a multi-ethnic gang, sharing his take by sneaking cash into his mother’s wallet and hoping to fund his brother’s education. Younger brother Mo, a smart kid with writing potential, looks up to Rashid with pure devotion, copying him by entering gang life at the bottom of the food chain. Living in modern council housing with hard-working parents who manage to maintain a lower-middle-class propriety, the brothers share a bedroom, acquainting Mo with his brother’s reputation as a lady’s man.

An early turf war between local gangs culminates in the murder of an innocent friend of Rashid’s who has advised him to get out of the game. As Rashid attempts to pull away from gang life and get a regular job, Mo begins to waver in his loyalty to his older brother. As we proceed through the film we begin to wonder how the gay element will enter—and which of the brothers, if either, will assume a gay identity. In a world of intense masculine cockiness, none of the other gang members appears to be a likely candidate. By mid-movie, the gay element finally enters the picture, prompting a series of plot maneuvers at once threatening, comic, and philosophical in the context of received gender and cultural norms within this tough immigrant milieu. The question becomes how or whether the brothers will survive—maintaining their love for each other and their parents—and what sacrifices might be required.

The arc of her story is easy enough to follow, but El Hosaini’s dialogue, in the mouths of a professional and non-professional cast, could well have used subtitles. The cadences of British working-class street argot build a blockade to the American ear. Fortunately, the high energy of the performances, the somewhat exotic race and class setting, the aesthetic beauty of the filmmaking, and the rich emotional texture of the story all carry the day. While its actual violence is brief, My Brother the Devil initially threatens greater carnage; this may put off those with delicate sensibilities. It certainly made me nervous. Yet soon enough, we see that El Hosaini has something more unexpected in mind—something more humane—as we navigate a world in which at least two young men seek an escape from circumstances that could easily lead to disaster.

My Brother the Devil is roughly in the territory of Danny Boyle’s landmark Trainspotting. Included in NewFest, it might just as easily fit into a series on the new British cinema or Arab Diaspora filmmaking. Queer cinema, as it investigates GLBT experience fully integrated into various subcultures, encompasses broadening boundaries. The time seems ripe for new audiences to discover it.
Directed by Sally El Hosaini
(United Kingdom, 2012)