San Francisco International Lesbian and Gay Film Festival

The 28th annual San Francisco International Lesbian and Gay Film Festival runs June 17 through 27. Venues are the Castro Theatre, 429 Castro, S.F.; Herbst Theatre, 401 Van Ness, S.F.; Roxie Cinema, 3117 16th St., S.F.; Grand Lake Theater, 3200 Grand, Oakl.; and Parkway Theater, 1834 Park, Oakl. For more information call (925) 866-9559 or go to www.frameline.org/festival. For this week's schedule, see Film listings.

A new queer century
Finding reasons to believe in the newer queer cinema of the '00s.

By Dennis Harvey

THE RECENT DEMISE of that elder statesman whose malady assured he'd never suffer one pang of conscience for all his crimes – if he taught us anything, it's that fate's justice is particularly blind – reminded me that the jury remains out on an important topic. To wit: which sucked worse, the '80s or the '90s? To think the '70s once seemed like such a disappointment. Who knew how much worse it could get?

And who knows when we'll get a break from asking that question?

Anyway, it's a tough call. But one improving element the latter decade had that the former didn't was New Queer Cinema, that hothouse flower that bloomed briefly and very coolly, its moniker coined by our very own beloved B. Ruby Rich in an article for the Village Voice.

The '80s, neatly bracketed by Cruising and the early-'90s Basic Instinct, was the last decade – one hopes – in which a Hollywood feature might safely blame every scripted evil on some demented "perv," i.e., homosexual perv/homosexual. The likes of Parting Glances, Desert Hearts, and Novembermoon were breakthroughs that led exactly nowhere for their filmmakers, in addition to being appropriations of mainstream entertainment conventions for mainstream gay audiences. Ghetto-demographic movies. Nothing wrong with that, but it resulted in films largely more important as lifestyle advances than as art. AIDS was a tunnel with absolutely no light at the end, thanks in part to a grandfatherly audio-animatron we elected to the White House – twice. Queer cinema certainly fought the good fight, but most of the time it felt like a losing battle.

By contrast, right away '90s gay filmmaking felt bolder, less inclined toward comfort and/or apology, so over being agenda-driven. The new directors had distinct personalities, talented-film-school-grad ambitions (nothing wrong with that either – though it does depend somewhat on the film school), and actual careers ahead of them. Within a couple years there was Swoon, Poison, Go Fish, Young Soul Rebels, The Living End, Paris Is Burning, Watermelon Woman, The Incredibly True Adventure of Two Girls in Love, My Own Private Idaho, and Edward II (Van Sant and Jarman being veterans who always smelled like New Queer Cinema spirit).

But the moment did dwindle rather quickly. Its official service-canceled note was the dissonant one accorded by the general loathing toward 1995's feel-bad legend, Frisk. The decade's remainder was spent wondering just where New Queer Cinema went. Perhaps the simple answer is: everywhere, absorbed into the general zeitgeist, subtly ongoing though startling and distinct no more. High-water cultural marks can't last forever. They must die so the next ones can look equally good against the eternal backdrop of everyday mediocrity.

"Repressive times do engender really good art," San Francisco International Lesbian and Gay Film Festival cofounder and local gadfly Marc Heustis noted three years ago, hoping a stint under W. might kindle creative sparks similar to the ones that greeted Bush Sr. in the form of NQC a decade before. This year's festival may or may not signal the start of some freshly minted new school with its own cute title and slogan. But 2004's program suggests there really is something happening out there again, this time a little more globally than before, with better budgets involving fewer maxed-out personal credit cards.

Conveniently, Frameline, as the fest is called, has not only rustled up a herd of very good movies for your 11-day delectation (mercifully, that three-week expansion of recent years has been given a rest), but it's also provided something of a "Whatever Happened to the Class of '92?" primer. The news is generally encouraging as well as instructive.

What this year has in surplus is a mix of better-than-hitherto quasi-mainstream entertainments and dashing new auteurs. Primary virtues of '80s and '90s gay cinema, together at last! Topicality (there are so many titles about marriage that they rate their own sidebar) meets fluff meets accomplished high art like never before, with ye olden virtues – experimentation, political nonfiction, subculture specificity in shorts – duly accounted for as well. If there are no real revelations, maybe that's because the overall confidence level seems such that good work in all directions need no longer surprise us.

A representative example of what's going right is Wild Side, a French-Belgian coproduction that's the second feature by Sébastien Lifshitz. His first, the equally misleadingly titled Come Undone, was sold hereabouts as a sexy first-love story, but in truth it was rather more complicated and indelible – a first-love story shading helplessly into a portrait of one boy's escalating mental illness. Wild Side likewise opens out into (literally) wide-screen tender ambivalence from what at first looks very familiar: gloomy and majestic as a transgender Callas, Stéphanie (Stéphanie Michelini) is a Parisian chick-with-dick prostitute who suffers every trick with wounded dignity.

The performances and the film seem pretentiously mannered at first. But as Lifshitz's mosaic structure begins to assume shape, the movie becomes deeply more beautiful than its sensational gist or title suggest. Particularly lovely is the way in which Stéphanie's cohabitation with young hustler Djamel (Yasmine Belmadi) and illegal Russian émigré Mikhail (Edouard Nikitine) emerges as a real, viable, flawed ménage – not a conflict in progress or an exotic soft-core adventure. Lifshitz might become a great filmmaker, one whose queer sensibility (like those of such fellow Gauls as François Ozon and Patrice Chereau) will inform future projects both "gay-themed" and not.

One vast shift that's occurred since New Queer Cinema Edition 1 is the general public's interest in – not just "tolerance for" – gay culture and characters. The most obvious popular U.S. examples are all on TV at present: Will and Grace, Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, Queer as Folk, and other ratings champs. (Though you have to marvel at the misfired new Stepford Wives' blithe insistence on including a gay-couple element just because it can, no matter that it makes no sense within the general concept.)

To what extent Hollywood will get, ahem, behind homo-sex portrayal in the expensive upcoming Alexander the Great bios or Heath Ledger-does-Jake Gyllenhaal cowboy romance Brokeback Mountain should prove to be test cases akin to 1982's Making Love. Can a more tenderized public accept movie 'mos who aren't funny? The worst-case scenario is an old-school compromise like the Frameline inclusion De-Lovely, a melancholy love story between Kevin Kline's Cole Porter and his wife (Ashley Judd), who endures the sketchy parade of boy lovers with "We'll get through this" tragic nobility. In 1946's all-singing, all-dancing, all-fiction Night and Day, Cary Grant played a magically "straightened-out" Porter. Nearly 60 years later, the songwriter is uncloseted on-screen – and so, so sorry about it. Sometimes the old hypocrisy is better than the new "progress."

Outside the States, commercial instincts and queer-content ones are now much less at odds. Grant (played by Kyle MacLachlan, who's great) is again a touchstone (though his own alleged bisexuality is left unreferenced) in Ian Iqbal Rashid's Touch of Pink (Canada), this year's festival opener. He materializes as imaginary-friend advisor on style and comportment to Londoner Alim (Jimi Mistry), who, in time-tested sitcom fashion, feels compelled to fake heterosexuality when his intimidating mother (Suleka Mathew) descends from Toronto with all conservative values a-pressing. This tees off perfect boyfriend Giles (Kristen Holden-Ried) but suits fine Ambassador of Suavity Mr. Grant, whose silver nitrate "experience" propounds discretion as the eternal paramount virtue. So perfectly encapsulated by an Internet Movie Database commentator (as "generic but OK"), Pink glows a plastic hue. But at least it's better produced than such prior feel-good gay dramedies as Trick and The Broken Hearts Club.

Likewise taking aim at the "crossover" box office – why complain? – is You I Love, a first feature by two Russians (Olga Stolpovskaja and Dimitrij Troitskij) who want to be noticed so much they've made a film critiquing consumer culture that often plays like a TV commercial. The concept is also grabby: a high-end Moscow yuppie couple (she's a newscaster, he's an advertising exec) are shaken by the arrival of a homeless, penniless, guileless, and gorgeous lad. That the relationship between them really compels is both tribute to and triumph over this debut's flashiness.

Less successfully resolving the struggle between substance and style is June 22 "Centerpiece" presentation Adored: Diary of a Porn Star, which comes produced, directed, written by, and very much starring Marco Filiberti – perhaps the most auspicious personality launch of a particular kind since Pia Zadora. Some have detected ironic intent in this staggering world-class vanity project, but my metal detector came up dead-nought. Adored is exactly the mirrored showcase Helmut Berger might have made in his most egocentric frightmares. It must be seen to be believed.

Some of the festival's best features are notable, by contrast, for their self-effacement. Sachi Hamano's Lily Festival (Japan) – the first "respectable" effort by a longtime female director of erotic "pink" movies – quietly charts the hubbub created when a lone silver-fox gentleman moves into an apartment building full of love-starved widows. He's not quite gentleman enough to forgo taking full advantage of the situation. The movie's lesbian element surfaces only in the last minutes. But this "afterthought" is worth the wait, providing at last an example of deep and mature love. "At our age, the distinction between the genders doesn't matter. Anything goes!" one woman tells another. Well, that's something to look forward to.

In an entirely different way, Father and Son – a new work by Russian Alexander Sokurov, one of the greatest living artists in any medium – confounds notions of what constitutes gay cinema. Why is the titular relationship so over-the-top erotic, physical, and all-consuming? Why are man and manboy so beautiful in face, form, and creamily dreaming photography? So, who cares whether this is gay filmmaking. Boring, pretentious, and vague, this is as rarefied an acquired taste as any Sokurov title. But, sigh – I'd walk across Siberia for that guy.

Closer to home, major talents are announced by some very enjoyable American independents. A flagship amid this year's highlighted fleet of African American features, Rodney Evans's Brother to Brother is a stirringly ambitious construct leaping between a young black gay artist's contemporary New York City and the black-and-white splendor of the Harlem Renaissance. Yesteryear's luxury closets are cleaned in Straight-Jacket, the even more delightful second feature from Girls Will Be Girls director Richard Day. In it, a 1950s Rock Hudson manqué is forced by the studio to marry a girl secretary – just like the real Rock – even as he finally experiences man-on-man love truer than a one-night stand.

Paul Etheredge-Ouzts's disco-lit Hellbent is something we've hopefully evolved enough not to hiss at as a matter of course: a queer slasher pic. Like all slashers, it's dumb; like the good ones, it's a guilty pleasure there's no need to feel guilt over. Dorian Blues is perhaps the definitive funny-if-painful growing-up-gay movie, its high Paul Rudnick-style quip-per-minute rate balanced out by genuine poignancy. That writer-director Tennyson Bardwell happens to be a straight man feels less like opportunism than like a sign of social progress. What of the class of '92? There are tributes to one who got away – Marlon Riggs, the most influential African American gay filmmaker thus far – and to Rose Troche, whose seminal Go Fish is now a decade old. Since then she had to wait too long to make a little-seen follow-up (Bedrooms and Hallways, which was English besides), rebounded with the little-seen but excellent all-star A.M. Homes adaptation The Safety of Objects, and is now seen by everyone with premium cable via The L Word.

There's also excellent or at least in-your-face (we're talking '90s) new work from Frisk's Todd Verow (starring in Anonymous, a sort of self-loathing riposte to Adored), Lilies' John Greyson (the striking if unsatisfying historical love story Proteus), The Hours and the Times' Christopher Munch (the incongruously larky fraternal-incest queasefest Harry and Max) and Super 8 1/2's Bruce La Bruce (still shocking the bourgeoisie in Raspberry Reich). Plus worthy check-ins from such '80s Old Queer Cinema types as Su Friedrich (via the fine personal documentary The Odds of Recovery) and Debra Chasnoff (with another educational gem, Let's Get Real). Plus Resisting Paradise, the latest from '70s (and now seventysomething) pioneer Barbara Hammer. Yeesh. We're talking Living Legacy Cinema here, filmographies that stretch back farther than some current makers' status as sentient beings – and that keep stretching forward. Frameline 28 suggests optimism isn't entirely a delusion.