Wicked Queer’s Adventurous 33rd Year
Our guide to the best of a very diverse fest
From Pakistani Lucha wrestlers to Inuit tribal elders, the diversity and depth of LGBT experiences on display at this year’s Wicked Queer: The Boston LGBT Film Festival was staggering. Now in its thirty-third year (its second under the Wicked Queer moniker), the volunteer-run fest offered a downright overwhelming wealth of adventurous programming: forty-five screenings spread across ten days, at venues all around the city, representing every facet of the rainbow flag. Indeed, we managed to see fourteen films and still came away feeling that we barely scratched the surface.
The coming-of-age-and-coming-out movie is a cottage industry in itself, and based on the breakout success of Moonlight that trend shows no sign of slowing. Three powerful examples of the form showcased at the fest prove that there are still plenty of stories to tell about the experiences of queer young people, and demonstrate why these films resonate with so many audiences.
In Hjartasteinn (Heartstone), the gorgeous, gloomy feature debut of Guðmundur Arnar Guðmundsson, four preteen friends in a remote Icelandic fishing village navigate their changing feelings about themselves and each other. The threat of violence looms from the first scene: a group of young boys laze on a dock and surreptitiously glance at each other’s bodies, then catch fish, stomp them to death, and casually gut them. Guns are brandished; schoolyard bullies and alcoholic fathers threaten to erupt; girls read morbid poetry at the dinner table. While somewhat familiar from a narrative standpoint, the lush, low-to-the-ground cinematography of Sturla Brandth Grøvlen and the remarkable performances of the film’s four young leads make for a transporting experience, and the clammy sense of menace lingers long after the perfectly fitting final image.
The characters of Deb Shoval’s AWOL are older and more sure of their own desires, but no less trapped. Eighteen-year-old Joey (Lola Kirke, in a star turn) desperately wants to escape her life in rural Pennsylvania but can’t afford college. Enlisting in the Army might be her way out — that is, until she meets the brash, impulsive Rayna (Breeda Wool) at a carnival and falls instantly in moony-eyed love. Rayna is herself stuck, in a loveless marriage with a man whose trucking job keeps him away from home most of the time. Kirke and Wool are both captivating throughout, and Shoval vividly captures the claustrophobia and class tensions of life in a dead-end town. Though there is sometimes an unfortunate sense of lunging from one plot point to the next, the film nevertheless conjures an airy poetry during Joey and Rayna’s covert trysts — in a hay loft, a steaming bath, a lonely red tent on a hill overlooking the twinkling factory lights below.
In another universe entirely is Jakob Erwa’s Die Mitte der Welt (Center of My World), a swoony adaptation of Andreas Steinhöfel’s bestselling young adult novel that isn’t believable for a moment and is all the better for it. Phil is a refreshingly self-confident gay teenager who returns home from summer camp to find his tempestuous, cowboy-boot-clad mother Glass (yes, Glass) and sullen sister Dianne have had some sort of falling out. But who cares? There’s a hot new boy in school (played by a very angular 24-year-old, naturally), with whom he is soon having gauzy, soft-focus sex in a billowing white canopy bed. I am admittedly not up on my American YA movies, but I can only assume they don’t feature so many penises. Anyway. Phil’s life is picture perfect, a John Hughes-by-way-of-Xavier Dolan daydream with nary a homophobe nor a pimple in sight. There are flashbacks, pop music montages, winking voiceover asides about the Olsen twins, even an element of magical realism (animals and insects seem to be magnetized to Dianne). By the final act the film has taken a turn toward operatic melodrama, devastating betrayals, and shocking revelations, but that’s part of the fun: queer teens deserve their escapist fantasies, too. I wanted to spend more time with these people, and I wanted to raid all of their wardrobes.
The darker, more grown-up delights of the festival were no less intoxicating. Women Who Kill, the mordantly funny story of two ex-girlfriends who still live and run a popular true crime podcast together, mines self-involvement and commitment-phobia to hilarious ends. When monotone Morgan (writer/director/star Ingrid Jungermann) meets the beguiling Simone (Sheila Vand of A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night) she is instantly smitten, although it isn’t long before she suspects that Simone may in fact be a serial killer. The excellent cast is the film’s key strength: Jungermann and Ann Carr (playing ex-girlfriend Jean) have a believable, easy chemistry — you understand at once why they can’t seem to move on from each other, and also why they drive each other crazy — and the reliably excellent Annette O’Toole and Shannon Patricia O’Neill show up in scene-stealing supporting roles. So, is Simone hiding a sinister secret? A needlessly ambiguous ending may leave some scratching their heads, but it isn’t enough to spoil the prickly fun. “You would rather think that your girlfriend is a murderer than have an actual conversation,” accuses Jean; a pathological need for personal space is frightfully funny stuff, indeed.
While comings-out and comedies are festival mainstays, many of the fest’s most exciting movies were its most unclassifiable. In Travis Mathews’ paranoid Discreet, an enigmatic drifter travels Texas backroads in a beat-up van, listening to right-wing talk radio, occasionally stopping to film static images of highways. A victim of a sketchy past trauma, he finds solace in an ASMR performer he watches on his laptop. (ASMR, or autonomous sensory meridian response, is a YouTube phenomenon in which whispering and tiny sounds are meant to produce calming, tingling sensations in the listener-viewer.) Soon, he is taking up with an imposing but catatonic old man, stealing from blindfolded Craigslist hookups, and, disturbingly, spying on a very young skater boy at a local diner. What are his intentions? What is in the padlocked shed out back? And whose body is floating in garbage bags in the river? Stitched together as more of a jagged collage than a straightforward narrative, and held together by Scott Steiner’s unsettling sound design, Discreet is alluring and maddening in equal measure. Audiences seeking thrills will find their patience tested: the film doesn’t generate suspense so much as it drifts inexorably downstream; ambiguities abound; threads and themes are picked up and discarded. Still, it builds a queasy power as it progresses, hypnotic and insinuating as an ASMR video.
The Ornithologist, auteur João Pedro Rodrigues’ finest work yet, is a fable so serene you almost don’t notice how bonkers it is. A hunky birdwatcher’s canoe capsizes; upon waking he finds himself on an increasingly bizarre, possibly delusional, journey through an enchanted forest. (A lover back home frequently texts him reminders to take his medication.) The delicate surrealism and verdant imagery recall the work of Thai visionary Apichatpong Weerasethakul, and Rodrigues has a similarly disarming sense of humor. A deaf-mute shepherd named Jesus is introduced drinking milk from a goat’s teat and minutes later is engaged in rollicking gay sex on a beach, for Christ’s sake. Still, the film casts a quiet spell that is hard to shake. Take note: The Ornithologist will screen again at the Harvard Film Archive on Sunday, May 7th, with Rodrigues in attendance. Rui Poças’ stunning cinematography deserves to be seen on the biggest screen possible.
There is a maxim about horror movies that what you don’t see is often the scariest. With Taekwondo, Marco Berger and Martín Farina apply this principle to the softcore film and posit that the sex you don’t see is the most erotic. Languorously paced, the film follows a group of nine male friends vacationing together at a summer house. Nothing happens. In this woozy hothouse atmosphere, the men — often mostly or entirely naked — drink, swim, play sports, fight, and talk endlessly: about partying, about comic books, but mostly about women. Indeed, most of the group is straight. (It is not lost on Berger and Farina how gay a group of dudes hanging out can be; this movie is truly what the word ‘homosocial’ was invented for.) Early on, however, we learn that newcomer Germán is gay, though he doesn’t disclose this to the others, and he suspects that Fernando may be harboring a crush on him. So begins a will-they-or-won’t-they exercise which is drawn out until the final frame. “We don’t fight, we only train,” says one of the men about taekwondo class, neatly summing up the film’s mission statement. Whether you find it a warmhearted hangout or a trollish tease may depend entirely upon your imagination.
What if Jodorowsky did a queer retelling of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and filmed it on his iPhone? What if John Ashbery was born in 1995 and worked in video installations instead of poetry? What if Grindr was an 8-bit arcade game that spoke in the voice of God? What if I invoked the dreaded phrase “student film,” and meant it as a compliment? Disco Limbo, directed by first-timers Fredo Landaveri and Mariano Toledo, is a fever dream of questions and contradictions, a torrent of gorgeously composed images captured in hideously washed-out digital video. The story, inasmuch as there is a story, concerns a young man named David reliving a one-night encounter with the handsome Lucio, whom he met at a club. Memories are rewound and rerun and reconstructed. Lucio is played by different actors from scene to scene (“Wasn’t his hair darker before?”). David’s best friend María offers advice, sometimes via postcards from Italy, sometimes while ice skating in a kind of liminal state, most often through telepathy. Events collapse into a fog of reveries, nightmares, underground lairs, mountaintops, karaoke rooms, dance parties, family vacation VHS tapes, constellations on the ceiling, Britney lyrics, Whitney lyrics, and refrigerators full of strange liquids. It’s exhausting and hilarious and utterly unique and way too much — in short, the queerest of the queer. Four audience members walked out before the 30-minute mark from my row alone; I wanted it to go on another hour.
The documentary selections on offer this year were equally bold. Best of the bunch was Dana Flor and Toby Oppenheimer’s uncompromising Check It!, a vivid look at the country’s only documented LGBT gang. Made up of over 200 black teenagers in Washington, D.C., The Check It have grown tired of being bullied and decided to fight back, by any means necessary. The film focuses on three vibrant, outsized personalities — Tray, Day Day, and Skittles — and wisely doesn’t portray them as downtrodden victims or righteous avengers, but as complicated figures who nonetheless love and support one another. The camera doesn’t flinch from showing violent street brawls, confrontations with police, and underage prostitution on K Street, only two miles from the White House. It makes for uncomfortable viewing, but ultimately these are kids you root for, and theirs is a story that urgently needs to be told.
