Alive and kicking

A-

Pioneer stirring of every known feature of the dance and AIDS genres into a very acceptable emotional stew.

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Originally entitled Indian Summer, the 1996 British feature Alive and Kicking was an early tale of gay love and AIDS written by UK-based American playwright Martin Sherman (best known for Bent and Mrs Henderson Presents). Stage director Nancy Meckler directed the dance drama starring Jason Flemyng as an H-positive ballet star who rejects AIDS treatments in order to continue his career, his real life.

Antony Sher is the AIDS psychotherapy specialist who successfully woos the dancer; every other character is in the dancer's world (including Bill Nighy as the sympathetic company manager and Dorothy Tutin as its Alzheimer's-suffering founding choreographer).

Sherman achieves a screenwriting mission impossible, stirring every known feature of the dance and AIDS genres into a very acceptable emotional stew. The dancers are insecure posturing egotists with big hearts, the lead dancer has a black dyke best friend with a working-class accent, handsome young people get lesions and die, cameras pirouette around agonised faces, gay sexual activity is photographed with cunning lighting schemes, and the whole movie feels as clearly marked for emotional moments as a ballet floor is with spots.

The movie overcomes its screenplay's painstaking contrivances largely due to the credible facial reactions and body language from Flemyng and Sher. Their characters bond in an unlikely pairing, and Sherman's dialogue has memorable moments raging about AIDS. More noticeably, there's a tedious over-dependence on ironic American-accented cliches (which were possibly all de rigeur in London dance circles in the 1990s).

At first sighting, this well-acted mainstream treatment of AIDS and homosexuality should have become a global festival favourite and potential award-winner. It wasn't, maybe because it cast its dramatic net too wide to appeal strongly enough to dancers or the gay market.

Undertow

A-

Simple macho maturity from Peru; as gay movies go, it's one of the better on the festival circuit.

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A scenario that's credible, emotional and dramatic is a rarity in the gay genre (in which even Brokeback Mountain somewhat failed the first criterion). Undertow (Contracorriente) may therefore have been over-rated by the critics, who've been very kind to the debut feature by Peruvian writer-director and co-editor Javier Fuentes-Leon. He also earned the Audience Award at the Miami and Sundance film festivals in 2010, and his Colombian and Franco-German producers deserve big kudos for backing his breakthrough movie (12 years after he directed the first of his two short movies).

The storyline, screenplay and directorial style are observant and restrained. A happily married bearded fisherman in a Peruvian coastal village has also been the secret lover of a well-off bearded painter who stays in the village every year. Villagers have suspicions about the painter but not their dutiful Catholic fishing colleague, who's first seen leading the rites for a dead man's burial at sea after listening to the foetus of his pregnant wife's first child.

When the painter drowns at sea after an offshore tryst and tiff, his ghost returns to the village, visible only to the lover who wouldn't/couldn't acknowledge his existence in life. They chat and embrace, and the former non-believer pleads for the ritual burial and consequent eternal peace, not wishing to be an invisible lover with no contact with reality other than the fisherman. To achieve his lover's wish, the fisherman must come out as a bisexual, accepting his wife's desertion, villagers' hostility and the painter's family pressures.

There are just enough artfully composed scenes of water, sand, fishing boats, male posteriors and village panoramas (cinematographer Mauricio Vidal) to give the movie art-house appeal, while the dialogue and ensemble acting are natural enough to avoid the customary Latin American label of "magical realism". Characters and situations are neatly designed to jerk sympathetic tears but manage to avoid eye-rolling cliches. There's no cop-out "happy" ending; the movie has a simple macho maturity. As gay movies go, it's one of the better on the festival circuit.

Christopher and his kind

Are there too many "gay" films being made? Will familiarity breed contempt? Could gaiety become a genre as outmoded as musical operettas, cowboys'n'Indians or the Perils of Pauline? There's probably an ever-lasting market for gay romantic comedies, and definitely one for hard-porn, but I wonder how long normal (ie non-GLBT) TV viewers can be expected to face ever more gay-focused movies made for their living-room screen?

Christopher and His Kind is another BBC TV movie presenting gays as fascinating dramatic characters. On a PC scale, it also ticks a lot of boxes coincidentally, for a dramatisation of Christopher Isherwood's autobiographical memoir of life in 1930s Berlin also documents the rise of the Nazis and increased persecution of Jews.

Not that Isherwood was bothered by politics, and apparently planned to do some writing in Berlin for an Oswald Mosley magazine. He'd been urged to go there ("for the boys") by his public-school friend (and undeclared lover) W.H Auden, to delight in a divine decadence that included many rent boys. Several eccentric people who lived in or visited his boarding house became fictional characters in his fictional tale of Sally Bowles (who became a larger-than-life lead role for Lisa Minelli in Cabaret).

The movie shows us that her real-life inspiration was a socialist Englishwoman, Jean Ross, who survived in Berlin through prostitution and singing in a cheap nightclub. She's a juicy role for Imogen Potts, a young British actress who's already had good supporting parts in Hollywood. She manages the tough task of talking posh while sounding down-to-earth, being sluttish and politically aware.

That wasn't Isherwood's style, judging by the way he's portrayed by Matt (Dr Who) Smith: he speaks very poshly, almost painfully so, and stares at life with supercilious glances, lecherous twinkles or emotionally dead eyes. It's possible to sense a continuity of character between Smith's egotistic observer and Colin Firth's troubled gay lecturer in Tom Ford's adaptation of Isherwood's A Single Man, but Smith's is a much less likeable character. Isherwood probably was too, as his memoir revealed with an honesty that disgusted his former Berlin lover (as an end caption notes).

The memoir was adapted by Kevin Elyot, a former UK TV actor who switched to writing in the mid-90s, winning the 1995 Olivier award for his stage play, My Night with Reg (about four intimate friends of a man with AIDS). It was filmed by Roger Michell for the BBC. Elyot has also written a quartet of Miss Marple movies and a couple of Poirot screenplays for TV, and another gay drama, Clapham Junction, screened on Channel Four. His Riot at the Rite, also for the BBC, focused on bisexual dancer Nijinsky, and he's cultivated a rewarding patch of gay docudrama.

Director Geoffrey Sax, a TV veteran since 1979, created well-decorated period settings marred only by too many over-composed pretty shots through windows. One extra is given full-frontery (none of the lead actors are), Jean Ross's American boyfriend is shown in full-rear nudity, and there's enough kissing and simulated buggery to delight Gay Libbers.

The excellent supporting cast of characters includes Toby Jones (Capote in Infamous) as an English masochist spied through keyholes, Tony-winning Lindsay Duncan (Rome on TV) as the writer's miserable snobbish mother, and former Burberry model Douglas (Boy George on TV) Booth as Isherwood's young German sweet-sweeper lover. It's easy to see why he won the title role in the current version of Romeo and Juliet.

To give Elyot well-earned credit, although this gay docudrama may appear to excuse, almost promote, male homosexuality, it also depicts its gay protagonist as a mean-spirited, selfish writer who'd joke about Nazis killing yodellers. I'd like to have seen Firth play this role too, if only because Matt Smith's eyes and expression are not attractive, to me.

Masahista

Brillante Mendoza has amassed dozens of awards, including many from festivals outside his native Philippines. An experienced production designer (using the name Dante Mendoza), he worked on ten features in 1985-9, and on three more of his own directions in that function since 2006. His debut as a director came in 2005 at the age of 45, with Masahista (The Masseur), after a long spell working as an art director on TV commercials. Since then he's won Best Director at Cannes for (Kinatay, 2009), which also earned him a second Palme D'Or nomination, following Serbis (Service) the previous year.

Masahista's emotionally powerful story (credited to frequent Mendoza collaborator Ferdinand Lapuz) and naturalistic screenplay (Mendoza and another frequent associate, Boots Agbayani Pastor) have a pronounced gay element. So do several of the Mendoza team's movies, but their homosexual action and characters are a secondary, albeit seemingly integral, aspect of working-class Filipino existence as seen by Mendoza.

Family love and/or duties is his dominant motif. The movie's central character, a young masseur in a seedy back-street Manila house of male prostitution, is summoned back to his reprobate father's death-bed in his scruffy home city (Pampanga). Calming helping an embalmer dress his father in formal clothes for the funeral rites, the masseur's actions are counterpointed with scenes from his previous day's work, undressing and oiling a new customer.

At little more than 70 minutes, the movie is a shocking slice of poor Philippine life. Shocks abound not so much in the full nudity (mostly non-frontal), simulated homosexual intercourse, street language or intimate details of gigolos' techniques and services. What's overwhelmingly shocking is the depiction of desperate poverty in a society where amorality and cheating is masked by facades of politeness and friendliness.

The writing team avoid many of the usual soap-operatics that can blight such docudramas. The masseur's younger brother is not shown following his sibling's lead, his girlfriend is a foul-mouthed sluttish customer, and his mother is as hard to love as his aunts and adulterous drunkard absentee father. The masseur's co-workers are portrayed credibly too, reserving only their oral kisses for their girlfriends, and the screenplay employs telling overhead shots to pan across the row of tiny curtained massage cubicles. If only all such operations in Manila (or the nation's movie versions of them) weren't managed by unctuous queens twittering camp Filipino-English.

Eventually, the masseur breaks down in regretful tears over the loss of his father, but he's not allowed to walk off into any sunrise of hope or happiness, or a loyal woman's arms. A challenging focal figure, a street-wise cherub, Iliac the masseur was the first major role for Coco Martin, who subsequently starred in other Mendoza movies and is now a TV star. He's credibly faux-naif, his emotions little explored, firmly repressed.

Alan Paule is credible too as the kindly massage customer, whose stilted chat-chat conversation and price negotiations with Iliac advance the movie's docudrama, providing details that explain the two men's outside lives and commercial relationship. Paule, also a frequent actor in Mendoza films, made his first movie back in 1988: it was a similar socio-political saga, Macho Dancer, directed by Lino Brocka, one of the country's leading anti-capitalist neo-realists.

Neo-realism is a small world in a small film industry: Mendoza's main female character this time (the masseur's matriarchal aunt) is played, sharply, by Jaclyn Jose; she also starred in Macho Dancer and several other Mendoza movies.

Pornography: a thriller

The gay genre is such a feverishly exploited sector of the indie film market that it's impossible to see all those that might be worth seeing, even if anyone would want to. Many of the genre's current rash of first-time writer-directors presumably gained production funding and/or distribution on account of the novelty value of their concept. Philadelphian David Kittredge probably did. With two short gay films to his credit (Fairy Tale in 1998, Target Audience in 2002), he made his debut feature in 2009, with Pornography: A Thriller.

Its starting point is the disappearance of a gay porn star. Fourteen years later, two separate investigations are being conducted coincidentally, by a curious non-fiction writer and a gay porn actor planning to direct his debut film based on the actor's life and supposed death.

The "real" story takes half-an-hour and ends mysteriously, with the apparent snuff-film killing of the retired porn star. He may have killed his agent, who'd introduced him to big money and an unseen menacing client. Another half-hour tells the tale of the gay porn researcher and his lover, who've rented a flat at a price that's too good to be true. It seems to be the setting for a snuff film, whose existence is suggested by evidence enigmatically revealed and B&W photos mailed anonymously to the writer. This time, an unexplained death possibly arrives for the writer's video-storekeeping friend.

In the last segment of the 110-minute movie, the wannabe gay porn actor director's script for the lost actor's final days seems to write itself. It also transforms the lives of the director and his actors and crew.

The potentially intriguing but non-dramatically convoluted storyboard is made even messier by self-conscious attempts at indie-style experimentalism, with non-linear progression, single-colour lighting effects and fleeting cuts to mock clues, all probably reflecting the director's wish to emulate the alienating artistry of David Lynch. Further confusion results from the employment of some actors in two roles in different segments.

Most irritating are red herrings such as a signet ring always obtained from nowhere explained and worn meaningfully by each segment's lead actor, its design matching that of a gay porn club and film production company whose ownership is unknown, like that of the writer's apartment.

The movie's conclusion, echoing earlier dialogue, has the modern-day porn actor stripping in front of a camera, telling his supposed unseen controller (probably symbolising the movie's audience) that's what it really wanted to see. Some audience members may have applauded that non-revelatory final scene: after almost two hours of non-total exposure, they get to see a bit of soft-core full-frontal male nudity.

The lead actors and some supporting cast members sport major credits in gay TV series and the hard-porn adult film industry, as the US porn industry likes to call itself. All of them are more than competent in dead-pan roles that don't provide characterisations or dialogue requiring acting stretches. The director shows promise, and can be faintly praised too for boldly going where no gay genre writer-director has been before.

Unfaithful

In 2009, writer-director Claude Peres pushed the envelope of gay movies beyond most movie-goers' tolerance level. The Frenchman's first feature, Unfaithful (Infideles), showed his night of sex with Marcel Schlutt, a German model, escort and professional gay porn actor.

Peres had a storyboard on the wall of the apartment in which they met, but there was no film crew. Peres was his own cameraman, editing the footage caught by fixed cameras (in positions fixed between scenes) and mobile cameras (hand-held by him and Schlutt). He recording what they said to each other (in English) and the ambient sounds of the apartment building.

Peres's first film, a short made in 2006, showed a man viewing photos of a kiss and recalling homosexual love (La memoire vive). His feature's in-your-face directness was not a complete novelty in France, as lesbian director Emilie Jouvet had already filmed live action with a similar intellectual g-string of sexual discussions added to the hard core. Most of that is hidden from view, though, in darkness, inadequate lighting of out of the fixed camera's position.

The concept had value, and it would have been interesting to experience an honest exchange of views and sexual activities by a pair of strangers. It need not have been at the self-consciously and overly intellectual level of My Dinner with Andre, but it did need two people with an ability to communicate in words and body languages. However, a coy Frenchman and blase German cannot be expected to spark verbal wonders in the English language when neither of them are fluent in it. Peres adds voice-over comments without adding to the overall impact or meaning. This film is "so not about sex", he comments, but fails to prove it.

As the DVD extras show, neither of the men is bursting with extrovert intelligence. They are nice young Europeans with good bodies, and their movie merely proves a basic fact of sexual life: that horny men are faithful to nothing but their penile urges. They are polite, considerate, use condoms, smoke joints and have breakfast; they don't teach their audience enough about male sex and bonding, or the relationship between a director and an actor, in terms of reality or symbolism.

Twisted romance

The first feature movie from Jose Campusano, an Argentine writer-director, was Twisted Romance in 2008. Rotten Tomatoes indices suggest that in some markets it was re-named Vile Romance in 2011. Either way, it is another indication that Buenos Aires is not a city of loving normality.

Joe Orton would have appreciated the storyboard, and been tempted to exploit its comedy noir potential. The central character is an acned teenager, a non-mercenary practising homosexual. His wrinkled cackling mother and wild-eyed manic sister earn their living as a duo providing therapeutic sexual services for needy middle-aged men. Presumably eager to find a father-figure, the lad picks up a long-haired weed-smoking be-ringed ultra-macho gay divorced man who's a gun merchant and bitterly separated from his young daughter.

The older man is a violent love-maker, and averse to the sensitive and dim-witted lad's wish to take his turn as the active partner. Inexplicably, unless it's an Argentine politeness thing, the women in his family are eager to host the lad's older friend for dinner, an offer which the older man accepts. This leads to the daughter deciding to get the same action her brother is getting.

Picking up a young Spanish visitor (symbolically, perhaps, the film's only good-looking and likable character), the lad gets his sexual need satisfied, but the Spaniard has probably been affected by the Argentine sun or psyche, falls in love with the lad, follows him home, and ends up, the audience must assume, gorily slaughtered by the older man.

The lad pretends to ignore that happening but is still upset about his treatment in bed. So he invites the older man home for dinner again, possibly knowing that the wacky sister will make good use of the big kitchen knife and he can take the old man's jewellery and home for himself.

Within a year of this film's release, Campusano had created Vikingo, and it is awaited with a masochistic level of interest: the tale of a "rude motorcyclist whose rigid principles are honor and respect" could be another character in search of an Orton.

Art of being straight

The Art of Being Straight won the Audience award at a Dublin G&L film festival. Maybe the city's movie-goers loved the 2008 US movie's shortness. It's a 70-minute vanity project by producer-writer-director and lead actor Jesse Rosen.

He presents himself from flattering angles as Paul, a half-self-delusional womanising photographer who leaves the East Coast for L.A., where he gets a couch in a college mate's apartment and beddings in the home of his advertising agency's gay boss. An ex-girlfriend from the East has turned lesbian, his male friend's mates are boorish young men, and he's confused about his identity. He parties and simpers amid well-lit technically-competent settings.

It's probably meant to be a dramedy. If it were worse, it might be amusing. It's just a yawn.

Plan B

Argentine writer-director Marco Berger's second feature, Ausente, won the Teddy award for LGBT movies at the 2011 Berlin festival. It'll be worth looking out for, as his first movie, Plan B [2009] was an engaging romantic comedy.

Bruno (Manuel Vignau), an amiable bearded layabout, is firmly rejected as a life partner by his girlfriend, Laura (Mercedes Quinteros, in her first role). She still has sex with him occasionally even though she's got a new college boyfriend, Pablo (Lucas Ferraro). Bruno schemes to get her back by befriending her new love and trying to lead him astray. The plan backfires when their male bonding unhinges Bruno's own emotions, then those of his girlfriend and rival.

The cute concept succeeds: Berger presents a slow-paced, wry character study of modern-minded young men facing up to sexual self-awareness. The slow, episodic pace reflects the naturalistic dialogue and gradual development of the men's friendship.

At 100 minutes, it's a slightly over-long novella given unexpected depth by the lead actors' close-ups: Vignau's eyes twinkle and dare (imagine a Bloom-Beckham hybrid) while Ferraro's glare anxiously (in stereotypical Latin style a la Bernal or Bardem). Their mutual attraction is comprehensible, unlike the woman's role in their lives; their happy ending is too pat to be true to life.

Out in the silence

The Sundance Institute helped fund Out In The Silence, a 2009 one-hour documentary report of a gay man's return to his small-town home-town of Oil City, Pennsylvania. Provocatively, Washington-resident Joe Wilson had announced his homosexual marriage in the local paper, triggering angry letters and an appeal for help from the mother of a bullied gay student.

Back "home" 25 years after fleeing the town, with his partner (Dean Hamer) holding the camera, he meets with townsfolk and homophobic bigots, wondering whether life is any easier for minorities in the US hinterland.

Hamer is credited with a couple of other gay short films and it can be assumed he encouraged his partner's documentary project. Three years earlier, Hamer had made We Belong, focusing on the efforts of a young schoolboy, Charles Bills playing himself, to come out. The same student in 2009 is called CJ Bills, who's also credited with additional camerawork.

It's suspiciously convenient for the movie-makers' narrative that Wills's mother "wrote", presumably unsolicited, to Wilson: it's clear that the teenager is a tough kid who can fight for himself. He needed help in the school board meetings, though, where school discrimination and abuse were being wilfully ignored in a community nourished on Christian and family "values".

Another dramatically convenient local connection is the lesbian whose house lies two doors away from Wilson's old Catholic family home. She and her new girlfriend had bought and renovated a long-closed downtown Art Deco theatre with a stupendous period chandelier. The building's revival is a convenient symbol of a backwoods Rust Belt town's struggle to find a new role and personality for itself. One of the DVD extras notes the toughness of the struggle: the state is 50th in rankings for mobility, 48th for economic growth.

By covering a variety of local angles, the documentary lacks a focal point and a clear storyboard. Its producer-directors stirred up a hornet's nest, upset the local American Family Values flag-wavers, exposed small-town prejudices and pettiness, and went back to Washington without indicating whether Oil City deserved to learn and grow or fester and die.

*****

Hamer subsequently made two documentary shorts about twins described as "developmentally disabled" (in the 2010 short) and "differently abled" (in the 2011 follow-up report).

Eyes wide open

Would a devout Orthodox Jewish butcher, happily married with four young children, suddenly sense an uncontrollable desire to wet-kiss a homeless gay Torah student who's provided no clear seductive moves or signs of his homosexuality? Just after his butcher-father's death? In Jerusalem, in the old, traditionalist Hasidic quarter? Very soon after letting the younger man borrow his cellphone and giving him a job and a storeroom to sleep in? Would the younger man make passionate love while still pining for his previous Orthodox lover?

Audiences are expected to accept such far-fetched fairy-tale ideas by Eyes Wide Open. In parts, it's an interesting Israeli docudrama too, enabling outsiders to view and vaguely understand aspects of Jewish Orthodoxy: kissing entry doors, wearing two hats and vests, being bearded and conformist, the importance of cleansing rituals, ways to cut kosher meat, love of debate and questioning, belonging to an ultra-self-defensive minority. All that, and more insights, adds special value to an otherwise standard man-meets-man storyboard.

There have already been Mormon, cowboy, neo-Nazi and Muslim gay dramas, and there may well be Sikh, Amish, Tibetan Buddhist and Voodoo versions yet to be seen. There's even been a documentary feature about Hasidic gays (Trembling Before G-d, 2001). This 2009 dramatic contribution to the genre is good of its kind due to above-average pacing, lighting, editing and acting. It's a debut feature for both the writer (Merav Doster) and director (Haim Tabakman). Zohar Strauss (playing the tempted father) was previously seen in a supporting part in Lebanon and his co-lead, America-born Ran Danker, had one previous starring role in an Israeli movie (Restless). Their facial acting during silent scenes adds much to the stilted euphemistic dialogue, contradictory mood changes and fundamental incredibilities.

There's an eastern European air to the movie, a Chekhovian reticence, and a miserable final scene signalling self-repression and providing adding a touch of reality to this offbeat tale of doomed love.

Choses secretes

Choses secretes (Secret Things) was a 2002 "New French Extremity" movie, another example of French auteurs' self-conscious effort to push their envelopes without crossing the line into inanity. That's difficult creative juggling, which was beyond the skills of writer-director Jean-Claude Brisseau (then almost 60).

A bisexual nightclub nude dancer opens the movie with a ponderously-staged full-frontal display that captivates a new bartendress. Cue a very long teasing tete-a-tete (one full of giggles, the other of frowns) before they get round to mutual passion. Entering a state of happy flatmatedness, they get extra kicks from wandering through Paris with nothing under their raincoats.

They organise their lives and future by both working for the same corporation. Its middle-aged human relations chief is ripe for seduction, its young maliciously rakish heir-apparent is their prime but dangerous target for marriage and wealth. In the end, they get what they want, after some semi-comic orgiastics, lovers' deceptions, sibling incest and a murder.

In non-French eyes, such soft-porn noir can either be camp or horrifying, but should be fun cinema either way. This effort isn't, and its consolatory award at Cannes 2003 is yet another condemnation of that festival's past directorate.

Dear Mr Gacy

Writer-director Svetozar Ristovski won two awards for his first movie, Joy of Life, a 2001 documentary made in his native Macedonia. His debut drama, Mirage (2004), also set in war-ravaged Macedonia, was another festival winner. In 2010, his third feature was a Canadian made-for-TV movie, Dear Mr Gacy. Based on a novelised memoir, The Last Victim, by lawyer Jason Moss, the screenplay portrays the evolving relationship between John Wayne Gacy, a convicted American serial killer and Moss, then a criminology student.

Twice married and the father of two, Gacy drugged, raped and killed (many by asphyxiation) 33 young men and teenagers between 1972 and 1978, burying many of them in lye in his Chicago house's crawl-space. Dubbed "The Killer Clown" by the media, Gacy created a clown character for charity appearances. He was one of five mass killers Moss corresponded with for his thesis, employing the be-friending subterfuge of adopting a personality based on those of the killers' victims.

In 1994, in a real-life drama akin to that of Hannibal Lecter, Gacy agreed to meet Moss and provoked the student into attacking him, stressing the similarity of their personalities. A few days later, after 14 years on Death Row, he was executed by lethal injection. Moss, who spitefully revealed his duplicity to Gacy, obtained his degree, got married and, according to end credits, committed suicide for unstated reasons in 2006.

William Forsythe, a busy American actor (123 credits) often cast in villainous roles, portrays Gacy's menacing nature convincingly, but lacks the clownish avuncular charm the real Gacy demonstrates in a photograph shown with the end credits. His prey must have felt safe with him, but no one would with this actor's representation. His Gacy is a self-assertive gay-hating alpha male, not a manipulative self-disguised paedophile.

Similarly, the teenage naivety of Moss is not captured by his namesake Canadian actor Jesse Moss, another busy actor (mostly in TV). The student's psychotic character and egomania are signposted but his troubled relationships with family and girlfriend are unclear, and his willingness to follow Gacy's guidance in his city's sensationalised homosexual underworld is inexplicable.

Much of the screenplay dramatises the correspondence between the two, during the last months of Gacy's life. It's hard to believe that they trusted each other's words, and even harder to accept that two warders left them alone in an interview room and countenanced Gacy "getting his rocks off" for the last time. Moss's widow reportedly approved the screenplay, and it may therefore have avoided some truths that better explain Moss's character. Gacy remains an inexplicably amoral caricature of evil.

Crush

In 2004, writer-director Michael Saul produced seven gay video shorts and called the collection True Love. Five years later, he packaged four less short films about gay couples as Crush.

A gentle black soldier has a non-camp white lover and conflicting loyalties (Don't Ask), a camp white student designer is besotted by an Asian vampire boyfriend (Bloodline), a wannabee painter pairs up with an older artist (Strokes), and a painfully shy Asian with a Caucasian voice emotes the poeticised tale of his schoolboy crush for a chirpy Caucasian kid (Breathe).

All four had interesting ideas, competent acting and technical qualities, off-beat inter-racial couplings, and one with a generation gap. The non-porn gay movie genre needs more variety; Saul produced a likely and likable choice for most gay film festivals.

Le fil

The technically competent 2009 gay love story Le Fil (The String) stars one of the grandest dames of European cinema, Claudia Cardinale, emoting majestically in the land of her 1938 birth, Tunisia. Writer-director Mehdi Ben Attia's debut feature wraps her in a rich, sheltered environment, neither French nor Tunisian, neither European/modern nor Arabic/traditional, as a mother of an only son whose homosexuality she appears to despise, especially when it crosses class and racial lines. Then she accepts it, inexplicably, and everybody lives happily ever after: the movie serves only to illustrate that movie-making is a universal toy for any country's rich and elite.

Malik is the central anti-heroic figure, returned from France to his European mother's fairly grand estate. His Arabic father's death has died, and the young man's best friends are a boldly out fashionable couple of Arab lesbian lovers for whom he agrees to be a husband and semen donor. The director reveals his hero's preferences early on, when the man asks to be raped by a hunk of rough trade in an unnamed city (Tunis).

As a boy, he'd needed a long string (of the title) tied to his waist to guide him out of involuntary pacing in circles, and it makes occasional real or imaginary appearances - without helping the storyline, other than to suggest that he'd long needed a human link to reality. This he finds in a manly houseboy working for free board and lodging at his mother's. His homosexuality appears to be unexpressed, unrealised, and then, suddenly, it isn't, and he's in bed with the supposed fiance. This transition was so sudden I feared I'd jumped a chapter or the movie lost one.

Lead actor Antonin Stahly-Vishawanadan (as handsome, pensive, sulky Malik) does not have an extensive record in movies. He's first noted in IMDb as "The Boy" in the 1989 French TV mini-series presentation of Peter Brook's Mahabharata. In 2002, he worked for Brook again, as Osric in the TV movie, The Tragedy of Hamlet. His lover, Blilal, is played confidently by French-born TV actor Salim Kechiouche, but his role is difficult to comprehend, as a working-class artist accepted by a society of rich snobs.

Maybe the director imagined a small world where gays and fag hags could find sunlit happiness, oblivious to the barbaric realities at the gates of Tunisia. Many gay movie-goers would be happy to escape into such a dream world; many gay movies are far from real worlds.

Kaboom

Indie-gay Japanese-American Gregg Araki loves to make controversial movies featuring sexy teenage bodies. Luckily, he also knows how to choose a cast of competent as well as attractive actors. Their efforts for his eleventh and latest (2010) romp, a comic fantasy entitled Kaboom, helped to earn him the Cannes film festival's first-ever Queer Palm.

"The Queer Palm will recognize one film for its contribution to lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender issues.

Cannes, whose 63^rd edition runs for 10 days in a town along the French Riviera starting May 12, was the largest European film festival to lack a gay prize. The Berlin Film Festival's annual Teddy Award first debuted in 1987, while the Queer Lion has been recognizing gay-themed films screened at the Venice Film Festival since 2007."

To keep such awards in perspective, it should also be noted that Cannes has presented a Palme D'Or counterpart, the Palm Dog (for the best canine performance) since 2001, with Boss from Tamara Drewe winning in 2010.

Araki wrote all but one of his movie's screenplays, and has not yet replicated the critical success of his ninth feature, Mysterious Skin. That 2004 film won awards galore, in large part due to Joseph Gordon-Levitt's co-starring performance. The child actor and former TV sitcom star (3rd Rock from the Sun) played a sexually and psychologically confused character well.

Araki may have hoped that Kaboom's male lead would provide similar magic and luck, casting another experienced child actor and TV regular (Honey I Shrunk the Kids, Heroes, Terminator), Thomas Dekker, as sexually malleable "Smith". With his trimmed stubble, glittering blue eyes and schoolboyish carnal charm, he could be viewed physically and figuratively as a young (18-year-old) messiah in a tale of college youth discovering each other's sexual organs.

Dekker re-hired his favourite actor, very-mixed-blood James Duval, to play a spaced-out character actually called Messiah, and imported Roxane Mesquida (Catherine Breillat's favourite actress) to emote as Lorelei, a witch and lustful temptress for Smith's fag-haggy lesbian best friend, mean-eyed sarcastic Stella (Haley Bennett). An English actress, Juno Temple (daughter of director Julien), is "London", a laid-back British student prepared to lay out on Smith and straighten him up.

But Smith still has eager eyes for his dumb jock of a room-mate, Thor (TV actor Chris Zylka, obliged to display all his big muscles and meaty buns), and is net-chatting a real gay character (Brennan Mejia), despite being side-tricked by London into sharing a birthday fuck with Thor's hunky buddy (muscular TV bit-parter Andy Fisher-Price).

All of the actors are visibly over their supposed college age, suggesting that it was tricky to get, or obtain approval to employ, teenage actors for full-dorsal (male) and full-breasted (female) fake orgasms, of which there are various full-face examples for audiences to emulate. There are also some well-photographed older adult bodies in bright-coloured side-plotlets.

The occasionally hilarious (and sometimes intentionally so) screenplay cries out to be treated as a freaky frolic dreamed up between puffs, snorts and sucks. Its ending is beyond a joke though, ensuring that the film achieves the juvenile self-set task of being the first movie to blend soft-porn, horror, scifi, lesbian, gay, youth, Christian and Oedipal themes. The young actors' names will be worth following, but Araki has become an old-fashioned agent provocateur of his so-called New Queer cinema.

Newcastle Australia

It's summer in 2008 in the city of Newcastle, Australia, the world's largest coal port, and the surf's up on fine sand beaches flanked by massive coal ships and floating dockyards. Luckily, neither shades nor songs of Frankie Avalon or Cliff Richard mar the scene.

Writer-director Dan Castle revisited a genre with major appeal in Australia (and Japan, from which some production funds were obtained): surfing. His major variation on the usual scenario is the inclusion of a happily out gay teenager with purple hair streaks and fingernails, an amused mum and a not-so-accepting step-father.

The boy supplies side-plots through his hots for a tolerant surfing buddy, and his efforts to play the sport that obsesses his two straight older brothers. The oldest is a washed-out past champion, a boozer separated from a wife and kid, now an anti-social port labourer. The middle brother is 17, golden-curled, eager to be a touring pro surfie and subject to moody fits.

Add a trio of close buddies (one rich, one cheekily comic), and two sexy girls who join them all for a weekend beach party, and you've got the expected: a pair of hetero couplings in a tent, an uneventful chat about gay things like star formations, a death at sea, and success for the wannabee surfie. Just so the movie could offer an outing for the whole family, there's also a young-at-heart grandfather-figure (veteran Barry Otto, trying to smile painlessly).

Castle then went overboard with hand-held cinematography in the waves, rollers and murky depths, lingering shoreline shots capturing brilliant blue skyscapes and shimmering dunes, and a soundtrack that adds melodramatic ham to a bland salad of sun-toasted teens obliged by the Aussie-coded screenplay to frolic (only full-dorsally) on the beach cupping their genitalia.

As with any modern Australian movie, audiences will look for a new generation of budding Crowes, Ledgers or Pearces on the screen. The country has produced many excellent directors too, but Castle needs to prove his talent on different material. His previous work comprised The Visitor, a 30-minute 2002 surfing tale with a fully homosexual theme (and Barry Otto's name on the poster), Zona Rosa, a 2005 documentary ogling male strippers in Mexico City's gay nightclub district, and other gay short films.

Casting decisions inevitably hinged on actors' surfing abilities, and 18-year-old Lachlan Buchanan (younger brother of a busy Aussie TV actor) had them as well as good looks and physique (and is now chasing the dream in Los Angeles). The choice of the actor to play his supposedly younger brother was less effective: Xavier Samuel presents the character's gaiety credibly, but close-ups reveal his 24-year-oldness.

The film was the first for Ben Milliken, who's since done work in the US and on other surfie features (including the Blue Crush sequel). The one actor with a more interesting role (the non-surfing gawky group jester) and stronger, offbeat screen presence, Israel Cannan, hasn't had another film credit since this. The bad guy (the older surfie brother) was well played by Bosnian-Australian Reshad Strik, and he may be the best name for Crowe-hunters to watch.

8: the Mormon proposition

Reed Cowan, like many Mormons, had been a missionary. His documentary 8: The Mormon Proposition shows a similar zeal in its effort to charge the Mormon church with providing funds and organisation for a California state initiative to ban gay marriage. Disappointingly, Cowan's propaganda contains counter-productive bias, sentiment and self-defeating lack of perspective.

The writer-director's attack on the tax-exempt Utah-based church's US$22 million involvement in politics depends largely on one set of leaked Mormon documents obtained by a researcher, to prove that the church deliberately camouflaged its key role in the anti-gay campaign. The human repercussions of the fight to de-legitimise the California court's acceptance of same-sex marriage are largely illustrated through the words and actions of a photogenic, tearful couple of outcast gay Mormons.

One of them has a family tree sown by a Mormon pioneer, and his parents, very unusually, also abandoned the church in order to support their son (and gay daughter, whose story isn't included). The mother is a delightful real-life spitten image of the features and forthright goodness of the fictional Queer as Folk U.S. mum played so sympathetically by Sharon Gless.

The young couple are followed throughout the story, from their wedding day (on the first day of new and short-lived legality) and through the campaign. Their desire for exactly the same legal and civil rights as a heterosexual couple is expressed but not adequately justified.

Neither does Cowan give enough discredit to other churches and campaign backers: his whole beef is with the Mormon's underhanded spitefulness. That may be true, but doubters will not be convinced by a story that gives no details about the pro-gay organisations and individuals backing the counter campaign. What were they doing to beat the Mormon assault?

Where were the liberal voices in California? Why hadn't they realised that the Mormons' earlier successful anti-gay-marriage fight in Hawaii could be replicated? Where were all the gay community's supposed allies in Hollywood? If there wasn't an organised response, a why-not documentary is also worth making?

Too many questions aren't asked. Where did Romney, Huntsman and other mainstream Mormon politicians stand on the issue? What role did California's non-Mormon politicians and religious leaders play? Was the Catholic church knowingly duped by the Mormons? Why did San Francisco allow itself to be dominated by Utah?

There's even a positive angle that Cowan ignores. After all that multi-million-dollar TV advertising, misinformation and emotional blackmail, why did Prop 8 only gain 52% of the vote? Which constituencies do gay-marriage advocates have to woo better next time? Because a base of 48% is a very strong starting point for a counter-proposition. I hope Cowan's working on the topic, and paying less attention to his former religion.

Patrik, age 1.5

The simplest concepts are often the best, even for gay-film-makers. What happens if a male gay married couple in Sweden get permission to adopt a 1.5-year-old boy, but a clerical error delivers a homophobic 15-year-old to them? That was the hard-to-believe idea in Michael Druker's 2008 play, Patrik, Age 1.5, quickly adapted for the screen by director Ella Lemhagen.

She's specialised in movies about children, and she cast the movie very well. Tom Ljungman, a TV actor from his early teens, is charmingly obnoxious orphan Patrik for a few scenes, then becomes a charmingly lovable involuntary house guest with green fingers in the garden and good technique on a skateboard.

His new two fathers are a charmingly typical couple welcomed into their new suburban home by charming neighbours. One wink-winks approval for the active spouse (the one with a beard and an amiable ex-wife, of course) to have fun with his houseboy like he does with his Polish maid, which upsets the divorced father. His Gothic daughter is still resentful of her daddy, a state of angst sure to vanish by the movie's end.

Meanwhile, the passive spouse (the one who decorated the baby's room and fusses over bric-a-brac, in case an audience may not be sure) starts his first job as a local doctor, supported by a cheery, motherly and tolerant middle-aged receptionist and a fierce-faced female colleague who will surely blossom into an understanding friend warmed by the doctor's charming smiles and manners.

Even the local police and social workers are charming characters, so how could Patrik do anything else but reject their well-meaning efforts to find him new heterosexual adopters? How could he not become a charming, trustful young boy helping his fathers get together again, keep him, and promise him a pet dog?

The pun is unavoidable: how could anything go wrong in a fairy story? The conclusion is inevitable: this was a play and film designed to humour the suburban gay market. It's as charming as an overdose of white sugar.

Men for sale

Hommes a louer, a 2009 French-Canadian documentary movie, comprises over two hours of edited interviews with 11 male prostitutes in Montreal. Its English translation of Men For Sale is doubly erroneous; better, both linguistically and conceptually, is Men For Rent: the interviews clearly indicate that none of the sex workers have sold themselves to sugar daddies. Instead, they rent out their bodies to satisfy their primary love: drug addiction, usually crack.

That depiction is inevitable: the documentary-maker, Rodrigue Jean, found his subjects at an addiction treatment and HIV awareness centre. They are hustlers on the homosexual sidewalk because that's the easiest place to earn the bucks needed to buy drugs. None of them need gay love or sexual release, some have girlfriends (some also on the game); all of them have troubled family backgrounds.

At the end of the movie, when Jean revisits some of the interviewees "few months later", one of them has found love and given up drugs, and it would have been a more positive footnote if his escape path had been described. The other subjects seemed to have wasted away even further, getting uglier and spottier, more addicted, less mentally balanced, doomed, providing a depressing conclusion to a disturbing report.

Technically, it's a competent set of head-shots, mostly filmed in the one of the clinic's sparse rooms. Maybe intending to demonstrate that all the subjects were voluntary and not actors, each was shown getting microphones (or medical gauges?) fixed to their chests. That used up screen time unnecessarily, as did night-time film of wintry Montreal streetscapes.

Sociologists and social workers may find interesting research data regarding the mores, incentives and tariffs for male prostitution. Few other people would see or hear anything worth remembering, and would be better recommended to re-watch Gus van Sant's My Own Private Idaho.

Jean had previously written and directed a pair of French-Canadian feature films, and a documentary about his native Acadia. This documentary (conducted in monthly interview sessions during almost a year) feels as if it was a personal investigation, and it may not be a coincidence that one of the interviewees proudly declares himself an easygoing Acadian.