Queer Film Blog-a-Thon: The Joy of Life
The Joy of Life is not just the title of the movie I am reviewing for QTA's Queer Film Blog-a-Thon: it also names the sensation I feel whenever I'm watching a queer film (even, in most cases, a bad one) or writing about queer films or reading about them or just thinking about them and appreciating that they exist.Queer movies are the most important things in my life that aren't people. They are better than food, way better than drink. For me, they rank right up there with shelter and oxygen. I applied to graduate school so that I could write about them, and I devoted my entire Ph.D. dissertation to queer cinema: an ecstatic pleasure in itself, at least insofar far as "ecstatic pleasure" is the right framing concept for dissertation writing, but also a rare case of actually realizing a clear goal without wavering, after seven years of work. That's how much devotion and renewable wonderment they inspire in me.
I teach courses in queer cinema, around seminar tables and more recently in lecture halls, and many of my most delirious moments of professional joy come from the fresh discoveries of revisiting these movies, and from the ardent and sometimes unexpected enthusiasm—and even, just as much, the frustration and bewilderment and intellectual calisthenics—that these movies inspire in my students. I love that queer movies, truly queer movies, invite the viewer to delectate in style and aesthetics while simultaneously demanding intellectual engagement and exercise. Just like my favorite people, my favorite queer movies are smart and fun, and they never stop surprising.
Anyone in academia has surely had his or her moments of worrying about the potential gulf between scholarly theorizing and everyday life, and another reason I treasure queer cinema is not only that they bridge this gulf, but that they do so by insisting on the overlaps and contradictions and seductive connections between the scholarly and the everyday, instead of diluting them so much that they can neutrally get along. Queer filmmakers were and are often the same people as queer activists, and queer theory and filmmaking have influenced and challenged each other more consistently and more explicitly than one finds in almost any other vein of contemporary cinema, especially the commercial cinema. You don't get Velvet Goldmine or Boys Don't Cry or Brother to Brother or Swoon without Michel Foucault or David Halperin or Kobena Mercer or Judith Butler, but you also don't get, say, Judith Butler without Paris Is Burning—a film that almost single-handedly clarified her field-defining arguments between Gender Trouble and Bodies That Matter but also highlighted the continued controversy and ideological aporia within her own thinking.
And I love that there are always more queer movies around than we think. Well beyond the greatest hits that we all think of quickly, "queer" cuts so deep and wide as a concept, in such brilliantly category-shifting fashion, that seemingly "straight" movies, "classic" movies, even "weird" movies can turn out to be queer. Also, sexual daring and erotic insight and intellectual vitality are really inexpensive as far as filmmaking assets go, so queer cinema drives as much energy from local, university, amateur, and do-it-yourself filmmaking as it does from big crews with (comparably) big budgets. To celebrate that legacy of new talents and exciting discoveries, I wrote my review for this Blog-a-Thon about Jenni Olson's The Joy of Life, a movie that's still working out the kinks and limits of a distinctive and promising approach to form, but well worth a rental and a rah-rah for future work by this director.Enjoy the rest of the Blog-a-Thon (I confess that ModFab's piece is already a favorite for me), thank Queering the Apparatus for hosting it, and thank all the queer films and filmmakers in this universe for giving us so much to love and reconsider and be inspired or angry or gleeful or mournful or informed or enlightened or troubled by.
Labels: Blog-a-thons, BlogBuddies, QueerCinema
posted by Nick Davis at 11:24 AM
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Continuing 
Number of nude men in Men in the Nude: Zero. Aside from some glimpses of backside and some female bosoms, the title of Károly Esztergályos' movie doesn't denote anything except some marketer's cynical attempt to hustle an audience looking for a thrill. Clearly, I was such an audience, but since I don't care about the baseball playoffs or the new fall season on TV, you can't be too hard on me. Plus, as 
Finally, apologies for burying the lead, but if you've got a multiregion player—or even if you don't, because here's a reason to buy one—Chantal Akerman's legendary feminist opus 
In 
I had a Season-One-of-Project Runway 
The movie version of The Hours shares the arresting ambitions and the psychological acuity of the book, as well as its prosaic and vaguely elitist excesses. To my mind, in recent popular cinema, American Beauty is the movie's closest cousin, both of them built atop scripts that can seem courageously lucid and dismayingly glib within single scenes or transitions, both directed in a glossy, theatrical, actor-friendly style that serves and also sabotages the material by playing up the artifice. You can hold your ear up to American Beauty or The Hours and hear a worrying howl from deep within the upper bourgeoisie, demanding and deserving to be taken seriously, but you can also somehow hear the production teams slapping their own backs about the casts they've hooked, the certainty of prizes, the Big Issues they broach. However, while the moods and structures of American Beauty, for all of its technical audacity, feel smaller and more market-tested as the years go by, The Hours totally engrosses me. I keep sitting before it, open-minded, sometimes open-mouthed. It becomes clearer, for one thing, that the movie has darkened the book considerably. Disapproval of Richard Brown's esoteric, self-obsessed novel is more general. Vanessa Bell is more unhinged, almost repulsed, by the ravenous loneliness of her sister Virginia Woolf. Laura Brown already intends suicide as she drops her son with an indifferent neighbor. Clarissa Vaughan lets slip a major, unwitting insult to her daughter, and instead of nursing a fond, fumbling reminiscence with Louis Waters on her comfy living room couch, she erupts and nearly dissolves in her cold kitchen, where the light is the color of frost, the faucets detonate for no reason, and Louis looks on, agitated and annoyed, from practically a mile away across the countertop. This last scene is my favorite in the movie: its scary unraveling of Meryl Streep, usually so composed and sometimes to a fault, encapsulates the wholly credible and almost lymphatic unease beneath the film's mannered language, the roiling score, the sometimes precious match-cuts.
And so Kiss of the Spider Woman, a film in which I had recognized glimmers of myself with such early and total astonishment, stunned me just as much by calling out my naïvetés and myopias—not from some new or rejected frontier of knowledge, where I was used to being shocked or upbraided by life, but from an already treasured and intimate object. It's no mystery to me how Babenco's film sets this sort of trap, at least for a certain kind of viewer. Where the early sequences are lusciously cinephiliac, with their mocking but affectionate recreations of dubious melodramas, and their willowy transitions from that universe of screen memory to the clammy, witty, and exciting reality of the jail cell, the later sequences assert their politics more forthrightly, with the hard lighting, strained faces, and tightened editing of other Latin American political dramas, like Luis Puenzo's The Official Story or Babenco's own magnificent Pixote. Fans who take Molina's epicurean escapism at nearly face value, as I did, are likely to feel like the second hour sells them out. The seductions of John Neschling's music or Patricio Bisso's versatile costuming don't evaporate as the film reaches its grave climax, but they shape-shift in a way that requires a full immersion in every side of what Babenco, working from Puig's ingenious template, has constructed up to that point. Almost by definition, the movie divides its sympathetic audience of marginalized liberals, forcing them to recombine by movie's end in a richer, more expansive spirit of solidarity: quite literally, and purposefully, less fabulous than the earlier chapters. It's a hugely ambitious journey that the movie takes, with impressive if erratic artistry. Nothing in the movie, not the acting or the editing or the camerawork or the story structure, is immune to miscalculation here or there, but Kiss also achieves substantial, flavorful successes in each of these areas. Best of all, because it is subtle and intelligent in raising questions about storytelling, spectatorship, sympathy, borderzones, clichés, stereotypes, and sexual politics—terrains where a great many movies start bonking you over the head, or else just flee in all the wrong directions—Kiss of the Spider Woman consistently surpasses its own flaws, challenges your own sureties, turning them all into productive questions rather than simple blemishes.
...to go back in the water, M. Night Shyamalan 
Michael Winterbottom and Mat Whitecross stunned the Berlin Film Festival and copped the Best Director prize with this concise and searing picture, which might rightly be described as a travelogue of the War on Terror. Appearing as themselves in tightly framed, neutrally photographed interviews are Asif Iqbal, Ruhel Ahmed, and Shafiq Rasul, three Pakistani-born English lads who were seized as suspected terrorists in Afghanistan in 2001 and then detained for two torturous years in the U.S.-operated Camp Delta and Camp X-Ray facilities at Guantánamo Bay. Intercut with the on-camera testimonies of the "Tipton Three" are narrative restagings of their story, with nonprofessional actors both re-enacting and rounding out the dizzy, almost impromptu trip from the U.K. to Pakistan and then to a blood-chilling vision of a bomb-struck, chaotic Afghanistan. The conception doesn't work perfectly; the interview subjects gloss or withhold important information, probably to leave room for the fictionalized version to stand on its own, but it doesn't quite. The actors aren't given enough freedom or distance from the persons they are playing to fully emerge as personas in their own right, and somewhere between the "docu" and "drama" planes of the picture, some major questions and specifics get occluded. Still, the film is muscular, persuasive, and necessary without being exploitative. As in all of his recent films, but especially in the seminal In This World, Winterbottom captures the nervous, dust-streaked placelessness of our age as well as the stories and horrors unique to specific locations. Despite the superimposed captions and geographical markers, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Cuba all appear as interchangeable, dehydrated zones of threat and disquiet, where no one quite seems to know how to get from A to B. Over and over, people hop onto trucks and buses without checking where they're headed, and while such behavior makes sense at each moment, the larger ethical metaphor is suitably sobering. Guantánamo itself is not just an emblem of deliberate martial cruelty—though the movie captures that cruelty more forthrightly and powerfully than any other recent release has had the gumption to do—but an almost inevitable outgrowth of a world where maps, histories, and identities have all been subsumed beneath hasty political fictions.
The best news about A Scanner Darkly is that is isn't as restive and driftless as Waking Life, Richard Linklater's last foray into rotoscope animation and the Big Questions of Existence. The animation effects here are engaging in their impressionism without smothering the pulse of the film's characters or standing in the way of any trajectory from scene to scene. Speaking of trajectory, Scanner also charts a solid balance between conveying the particulars of its own paranoid, Philip K. Dick-derived story and miming the atomized dispersal of a doomed, drugged-out personality. Motivations, relationships, even the confidence that one is who one thinks one is: they all fray over the course of A Scanner Darkly, and without being quite so distastefully show-offy in its formal devices as Requiem for a Dream—you take the film's look for granted after a while—the film succeeds as a movie about drugs that addicts as well as total non-users will probably recognize and understand. But, the down side? For all of its ambitions and technical complexity, and for all the apt reasoning behind its storytelling decisions, the narrative of A Scanner Darkly is never particularly engrossing. I was never glad I was watching it, or even very appreciative of the fact that it was made. Reeves, Ryder, and Harrelson all bespeak their customary limits as actors, especially in a story as complex as this one, but even the nimble Robert Downey Jr. can't transcend a tale where "dystopian" futures, sinister corporations, and an undercover narc turning into his own target all feel like overly recycled tropes. One admires Dick's prescience in seeing all of this coming, but the world has so deeply corroborated the tones and even the details of his visions that they now feel a tad redundant, and maybe even clichéd.
Portuguese provocateur João Pedro Rodrigues joins Shyamalan at the fable-spinning table, but unlike Lady in the Water, Two Drifters is about something, it has a plucky and consistent sense of humor about itself, and both its characters and their secrets are allowed to exceed the grasp of the director-screenwriter. When Pedro (João Carreira) dies, he is grieved extravagantly by three people: his lonely mother Teresa (Teresa Madruga); Rui (Nuno Gil), his boyfriend of one year, though no one in the family appears to know about him; and Odete (Ana Cristina De Oliveira), a young and tempestuous gal who lives downstairs in Pedro's apartment building, and who in fact never knew Pedro while he was alive. Rui, whose bereavement has a powerful basis in adoration as well as guilt, can't summon the energy to do anything. By explicit contrast, Odete, whose link to Pedro is either mystical, insane, or non-existent (or all three), finds it all too easy to sculpt a bold new life in his memory: leaping atop his coffin during his funeral, tending to the gravesite, claiming him as the father of her unborn baby, though she may not even be pregnant. As a piece of Iberian queer cinema, Two Drifters fuses the seductive and disturbing metaphysics of Talk to Her with the frank, tacky energy of Law of Desire; not for nothing is "Pedro" the name of the ghost haunting the movie. And yet, Rodrigues navigates kitsch in very different ways. Unlike what we see in many of Almodóvar's women, there is nothing cozy or romantic about Odete's peccadilloes—she's a bit of a crocodile, like Gael García Bernal or Fele Martínez in Bad Education—and the lighting often has a purposefully garish, almost incriminating look, as in Fassbinder. Despite some imperfect conceptions and story patches that don't work, Two Drifters is an arresting and lucid study of how gay men and straight women often compete for the same objects of lust, the same velvety nostalgias for a certain vision of love.
Granted, the film does not always benefit from Minghella's taste for romantic projections or his fervently literary emotionalism. His best visual and tonal ideas arise in that opalescent monastery where Binoche takes care of Fiennes, but not so his most rigorous concentration on plot or character; in fact, Minghella quite defies the emphases in Ondaatje's novel and inflates the Almásy-Katharine liaison into an erotic reckoning so potent it's almost embarrassing. Other problems emerge from the clash of impulses between aestheticism and political anatomy, and from Minghella's vague, uneven management of key characters like Willem Dafoe's Caravaggio and Naveen Andrews' Kip. But if all of this makes The English Patient a film of moments more than a sturdy whole, the moments are often glorious, and even as I confess my awareness of the movie's limitations, I maintain that its blend of bathos, adventure, contemplation, and cosmetic luster remains hard to beat. Kristin Scott Thomas fuses sexiness and intelligence in such layered, fascinating ways that she almost single-handedly validates the film's entire project of eroticizing ideas (or is it of intellectualizing eros?). Binoche finds an ideal film and character for her translucent style of acting; her early reading of the line "I don't know anything" tells you all you need to know about the character. The sound design is dense and often pristine, doing just as much as Stuart Craig's excellent production design and Ann Roth's typically subtle costumes to mask the film's low budget and, better, to foster its ambitions.
Three years later, Minghella returned with another prestige literary adaptation, and this time he had more money to throw around. But beyond being even more plushly outfitted than its predecessor, The Talented Mr. Ripley is in nearly every respect the more impressive, surprising film. Minghella tinkers with Highsmith even more than he did with Ondaatje, but rather than bend the material in more conventional directions as he did in The English Patient, he warps and weaves Ripley into an object of even more sidewinding, epicurean perversity than the novel is. Where The English Patient is suffused with death and immersed in the impermanence of things, The Talented Mr. Ripley has the guts as well as the chops to turn a story about killing into a parable of invention, of production, illuminating not just how Tom Ripley turns himself into someone else, but how each new imposture and each new murder actually creates something new—a new sense of who and what Tom is, of who and what he craves, of where he is going, of what he has been up to all along, of what the world must be, at essence, if Tom and his story are possible. Even though we, unlike any of the characters, know what Tom is doing and how he's managing it (often barely), we still end the film with an uncanny sense of several Toms existing, of not knowing where or how to fix him, of not quite believing there is only one Tom. And unlike The English Patient, the film takes perfect measure of every character and performance. Cate Blanchett's heartbreakingly gauche heiress and Jude Law's apollonian narcissist are the crowning glories, though Gwyneth Paltrow's seething anger at being so constantly abandoned, underestimated, and ungratified is a more impressive acting achievement than most reviewers admitted. I saw The English Patient four times in the theater, besotted by its conception and by the pure beauty of how it looked and sounded; Ripley, though, is the film I now dip into more often, and the one from which I learn more. Both films offer enticing signs that all is not lost in the territory of the upscale period drama, and that even within our illiterate age, ardent booklovers can both make and enjoy spectacular films. (Click 
In short, ten minutes into Without You I'm Nothing, everything has already gone wrong—although every viewer will probably cite a different epiphanic instant when the tawdry errancy of the film reveals its brilliant comic design, exposing that the uneasy laugh you're having at Bernhard's expense is actually the laugh she's having on you, and on herself, and on almost everybody. Like Margaret Cho's 
Watching The Crying Game now is nothing like the same experience, for any number of reasons. Both in my personal life and in the wider culture, the film's images of a gay watering hole and its verbal and visual rhetoric around homosexuality seem almost quaint. Maybe in 1992 The Crying Game already looked quaint to people who had actually visited a gay bar or a drag performance, or who had real-life honest-to-God queer acquaintances. As for me, I was watching from a vantage of such conjecture and fantasy that I remember feeling wholly seduced, not by the secrets but by the surfaces: how beautiful Dil was, how much I liked her form-fitting wine-colored suit and Miranda Richardson's heavy cable-knit sweater (thus commencing my 14-year affair with Sandy Powell), and best of all, how capably and, in my opinion, sophisticatedly the film interwove its sexual themes into other political arguments. In a film that, as far as I had been told, pivoted entirely on one big reveal, it seemed to me that The Crying Game was about sexuality only to the extent that it was about everything else that it was about. Captation, friendship across enemy lines, a lover's grief, unwelcome revenants from the past, hot and cool approaches to protest and subversion... The Crying Game didn't deny or derealize queer sexuality, but nor did it divorce sexuality from a bigger, gnarlier knot of human problems, and this, for me, was its Big Twist. As little as I had let myself really think about homosexuality, I had thought even less about terrorism and guilt and secret honor, and even less than that about how sexuality could bleed through, in, around, and as those other ideas. Similarly, as floored as I was by Jaye Davidson's performance as Dil—not his casting but his performance—and as therefore aggrieved as I was by Oscar's preference of Gene Hackman, I also clocked Adrian Dunbar's searing indignation, Stephen Rea's recessive sadness, Miranda Richardson's shifting web of motivations, and Jim Broadbent's unobtrusive whimsy as the barman. The Crying Game, just as much as Howards End the same year, was my introduction to great character acting; understandably, it took another year or two for me to recognize that people outside of Britain knew how to do this.
Despite this spotty track record, Greenaway is a director who interests me tremendously; I'm not easily put off by someone who will work this hard to make such exquisitely eccentric objects, alternately impenetrable and rife with insinuations. Twice, his epic blends of the epicurean and the rectilinear have produced something that really floored me. Go figure, then, that my favorite of Greenaway's movies, The Baby of Mâcon, is the one that's still illegal in the United States, presumably because it's the one that comes close in its esoteric way to saying something that the United States needs to hear. Julia Ormond, happening upon a director even frostier than she is, comes wickedly alive as a hot-blooded French woman in a 17th-century village beset by famine, plague, and fallow fields. The only sign of new life in Mâcon is the pristinely beautiful baby that springs, incongruously, from Ormond's obese and haggard mother; boldly braiding her own self-interest into the town's thirst for a positive omen, she claims the flaxen-haired infant as her own virgin birth, and then seduces the local bishop's icily skeptical son (Ralph Fiennes) with the brazen magnificence of her lie and the voluptuous offering of her body. Every main character is paradoxically addicted to the ideal of holiness and the spark of carnality, leading to the sorts of perverse hypocrisies and self-gratifications that, in Greenaway's films, always get you killed in an especially macabre way. If anything, The Baby of Mâcon is even more lavishly mounted than most Greenaway pageants, and even more Artaudian in its sickening climax of violence. By staging the film as a Jacobean revenge drama—Sacha Vierny's camera glides fluidly but anxiously through the tense action, the offstage grumblings, and the murmuring audience of puffy aristocrats and smudgy commoners—Greenaway poses questions about voyeurism and cruelty that encompass both his viewers and himself, further layering the implications of this scary horror-melodrama about fundamentalism, superstition, jealousy, and prurience.
After the international PR disaster of The Baby of Mâcon, Greenaway's next film was the luxuriously synesthaesiac The Pillow Book, an absolute corker of a 90-minute movie that unfortunately continues for 45 more minutes, working hard in the process to numb and obliterate everything that is almost impossibly gorgeous in the preceding material. Vivian Wu plays Nagiko, a haughty Japanese model with an insatiable yearning for having calligraphy painted on her skin. Wu is a shrilly maladroit presence, and the premise wouldn't work at all if it weren't realized in such sinuous detail, but so it is. The Pillow Book lists two directors of photography, three production designers, four costume designers, and two calligraphers in the opening credits, and indeed, the movie comes closer than any other to constituting its own elaborate, absorbing museum—one where you're encouraged to sniff and caress the artwork, to strip the clothes off the models, to run the paint along your tongue like it's a spice. This unparalleled mise-en-scène, the creatively embedded frames, and the arresting sonic mix of Japanese pop, monastic chants, and avant-garde rock together yield a new kind of movie, a three- and almost four-dimensional environment. Customary film grammar hardly accounts for how the movie works, either when it's scoring or when it's flailing, and if its structural repetitions ultimately grow a bit tedious, its fearless peculiarity and almost aphrodisiac blend of skin, music, and curvaceous lettering make it worth digesting in multiple doses, even if they're small ones. (Click 
Tilda Swinton stars as a hotshot lawyer named Eve. Right off the bat, you can tell that subtlety isn't the movie's elected forte, and yet, why and how Swinton's character is an "Eve" is hard to pin down. A rising star on the legal circuit with a prestigious judgeship all but guaranteed to come her way, she embodies a mix of professional competence and self-alienation that isn't exactly unfamiliar—don't all professional women in American movies eventually realize that they don't know who they are?—and yet, because she's played by Swinton, Eve's unraveling doesn't feel conventional. Instead, it's a strangely out-of-body experience, navigated by the only Brechtian actress working in modern film, whose masklike and yet disarmingly lucid face always works in ironic tandem with her stiffly elegant body. Surrounding Swinton are a clutch of other women who were case studies and paragons in Dr. Louise J. Kaplan's original book (full title: Female Perversions: The Temptations of Emma Bovary), and whom the screenplay by director Streitfeld and co-writer Julie Hébert determinedly maroon somewhere between being characters and ciphers. Amy Madigan, a coiled and arrestingly spiteful actress, has her finest hour here as Madeleine, the black-sheep sister of Swinton's powerful up-and-comer. Madigan shoplifts a silk scarf with a memorable glower, she all but deliberately sabotages her sister's professional coronation, and she manages the neat trick of constantly messing everything up for everyone in the movie (including for herself) without sacrificing the audience's interest. Frances Fisher blowzes around as a good-time girl, Laila Robins is tearful as a dressmaker in a trailer, Paulina Porizkova strides through her scenes as an immaculately tailored rival of Swinton's, and Karen Sillas—an underrated and little-remembered presence from Tom Noonan's What Happened Was... and some Hal Hartley films—stands toe-to-toe with Swinton as one of two lovers whom the bisexual Eve keeps stringing along. Marcia Cross puts in a mysterious cameo, basically the same shot repeated several times, as Swinton and Madigan's abused mother, and an unknown, almost androgynous waif named Dale Shuger slides even more slivers of unease beneath your skin as Edwina, a teenaged girl who flees from all the parodic female visions around her, retreating into an intensely private life of scarring her flesh and burying the pads and tissues stained with her ovulated blood.