SFIFF 2014: LA DUNE



Hanoch (Lior Ashkenazi) Vardi (Niels Arestrup) in La Dune.



Buried hearts

By Miranda Inganni

Writer-Director Yossi Aviram’s French/Israeli film, La Dune, tells the tale of men lost – and needing to be found.

Middle-aged Hanoch (Lior Ashkenazi) likes cats, kids and chess, but mostly from a distance. When a chance at fatherhood arrives, Hanoch leaves Israel for France.

Meanwhile outside of Paris, soon-to-be-retired Detective Reuven Vardi (Niels Arestrup) locates the missing writer Moreau (a small, but impactful part played by Mathieu Almaric), who does not respond well to being found.

Upon returning home, Reuven begins to pack up his professional life while he and his partner, Paolo (Guy Marchand) pack up their personal lives for a new apartment and a much needed vacation. But one last missing person’s case calls his name.

Local lass Fabienne (Emma de Caunes) has found a man washed ashore in the South of France who either cannot or will not talk. He has no identification on him, so the man found is yet a man unknown. He does, however, have a small clue to his identity on him -- a newspaper clipping about the Moreau case. Seemingly unbeknown to the characters, this silent man is in fact Hanoch.

As Reuven delves more into Hanoch’s case, he is forced to reflect on his own life choices. Hanoch seems to have deep secrets and carries a great burden. Sadness? Shame? Guilt? All of the above and more? But Reuven is weighted by his own past – the buoy of his current love and life cannot forever keep him afloat. As the two men spend more time together, Hanoch seems desperately to want Reuven to uncover his identity, but not by Hanoch revealing it. It is imperative to Hanoch that Reuven figure this out on his own.

Aviram’s feature debut is a touching, understated look at a long-estranged duo. The exceptionally talented cast contributes excellent performances of these characters that quietly exude complex lives. Director of Photography Antoine Héberlé captures a warm, rich softness that effectively enhances the story. Lacking unnecessary dialogue, La Dune speaks to the heart about loves lost and found again.

SFIFF 2014: PELO MALO

Junior (Samuel Lange Zambrano)in Pelo Malo.

Hairs looking at you, kid

By Miranda Inganni

To what lengths will a young boy go to get the attention and love he so desires from his mother? In Mariana Rondón’s film Pelo Malo (Bad Hair) the more appropriate question might be, just how short is he willing to shear?

Nine-year-old Junior (Samuel Lange Zambrano) is fixated on straightening his hair for his school photo. You could say Junior sways to his own music. Sadly, his single mother is more concerned about her son’s perceived sexual orientation, which causes her great consternation.

In desperate need for child care, the mom of two young boys, and a recently unemployed security guard, Marta (Samantha Castillo) turns to her former mother-in-law, Carmen (Nelly Ramos) for help. Carmen allows Junior all the freedom he thinks he wants to straighten his hair and dance around all day. Unfortunately, tough Marta strongly dislikes her son’s pursuits of song, dance and comfort and takes matters into her own rough hands. Junior cannot win -- it is always a battle of wills with his mother. He constantly falls into the traditional binary of being too feminine or too masculine for Marta’s taste, but never just his mother’s loved little boy. Marta fears that her son is gay because she never touches him, and yet she never reaches out to him. Quite to the contrary, Marta pulls away from her son frequently -- at home, on the bus, walking through the neighborhood. She is so removed from him yet is constantly trying to teach him lesson; sadly, usually in the worst kind of way.

Set in the gritty, overcrowded high rise apartment blocks in Caracas, Venezuela, Rondón (Postcards from Leningrad) tells the story without an overbearing sense of judgment. All the actors perform wonderfully, with young Zambrano turning in a heartbreaking performance and Castillo embodying his tough-as-nails mom. Rondón puts a twist on what many perceive as the traditional masculine and feminine rolls in this touching film.

FILM REVIEW: CALL ME KUCHU

A scene from Call Me Kuchu.

The ugly and the undeterred in Uganda

By Don Simpson

Like the Nazi propaganda machine, the Christian fundamentalists of Uganda (and some American Evangelicals) worked hand in hand with the popular Ugandan newspaper (that functions more like a gossip tabloid), Rolling Stone, to effectively communicate to the Ugandan population that the LGBTI community was a bunch of disease-carrying rapists who were actively recruiting others to undermine Christianity and destroy the country's moral fibre.

The Ugandan LGBTI community -- otherwise known as kuchus -- was left three options: go back into the closet, emigrate to a more queer-friendly environment, or stand up for their personal freedoms.

Like good documentarians, directors Katherine Fairfax Wright and Malika Zouhali-Worrall had the premonition to document a group of Ugandan LGBTI activists who took a stand against their government. Wright and Zouhali-Worrall conducted a series of interviews with both sides of the issue; without injecting their own opinions and judgments, they admirably allowed everyone to freely speak her or his mind.

Outed by Rolling Stone and under constant threat of being turned in by their own family or neighbors, these activists had to walk the fine line of staying safe while inciting change. In most cases, it is the influx of vigilant human rights activists from around the world and the presence of video cameras that serves as the most effective protections for the LGBTI community. Call Me Kuchuserves one of the rare examples of cameras having a (mostly) positive influence on the subjects they seek to capture.

The documentary also captures the loss of one of its primary subjects.

An emotional tsunami, Call Me Kuchu is about sticking together and not conforming to popular opinion despite the ever-present dangers of not abiding by the government's tyrannical rules, looking forward into the future and making sacrifices for the greater good. While it is impressive to see so most of the Western world stand up to Uganda on this issue, sometimes it can be easier to criticize the follies of others than to point out one's own faults.

It is not that I am complaining that the United States took such a firm stand against Uganda's gay death penalty bill, but it does seem a bit hypocritical, since in most U.S. states the LGBTI community is still not permitted the same rights as everyone else; and, in many areas of the U.S., the LGBTI community is still the recipient of hatred and violence.

So, while watching a documentary about the hardships of the kuchus may seem a bit foreign, it is actually a very relatable topic for Americans to contemplate.

THEATER REVIEW: ALBERT HERRING

A scene from Albert Herring.

Sex sings

By Ed Rampell

Benjamin Britten’s comedy of manners, Albert Herring, premiered in 1947 at Glyndebourne, a grand country manor in the veddy British countryside near East Sussex. But this good fun opera about sexual repression unfortunately remains all-too-contemporary, what with Republican presidential candidates debating contraception and Rick Satan-orum running for witch-burner-in-chief and all.

When the prim and not so proper village of Loxford runs out of vestal virgins for its annual, traditional May Day Festival (no red flags, please -- this is Edwardian England, after all), they turn to the virginal and eponymous Albert Herring (tenor Alek Shrader). Like his nation’s future prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, Albert is the child of a green grocer (mezzo-soprano Jane Bunnell). Much as with today’s GOP buffoons, Loxford’s power players place a premium on chastity, as well as on greed.

The resident one percenter, Lady Billows (Scottish singer Janis Kelly alternates in the role with soprano Christine Brewer), is tended to by Florence Pike (mezzo-soprano Ronnita Nicole Miller), a domestic servant with airs, at her ladyship’s posh estate, beautifully evoked by scenic designer Kevin Knight. Lady Billows offers a handsome sum as reward for Albert’s virtue, while she presides over a retinue of comical sycophants. The festival committee includes those not so stellar pillars of the community: The Vicar Mr. Gedge (baritone Jonathan Michie); the Mayor Mr. Upfold (tenor Robert McPherson); the Superintendent of Police Budd (bass Richard Bernstein); and the teacher Miss Wordsworth, a sort of old maid, well-played by soprano Stacey Tappan.

Not all of the Loxforders pretend to be such goody two shoes. A trio of undomesticated youngsters add to levity. The drolly named Sid and Nancy may not be punk rockers like the Sex Pistols’ Sid Vicious and his girlfriend, Nancy Spungen, but as the youthful lovers baritone Liam Bonner and mezzo-soprano Daniela Mack add a devil-may-care ingredient to the simmering stew of social propriety. Ultimately, boys will be boys, and predictably, as Albert is quite publicly lauded for his moral uprightness, with a little help from the mischievous Sid and Lady Billows’ bounty, all hell breaks loose. Much to the constable’s consternation amidst several, uh, red herrings, he is no longer a Prince Albert in a can. Although Albert’s coming of age is couched in hetero camouflage, Britten was reportedly gay, and his lampooning of sexual repression may have been his encoded ripostes to homophobia.

Mr. Knight’ sets, with rather large models of various homes in the background, aesthetically evoke the English countryside, while his period costumes conjure up a highly class stratified and rarefied era. Whereas Lady Billows’ home is suggestive of manorial splendor (not unlike, one suspects, Glyndebourne), the Herrings’ claustrophobic grocery shop is realistically rendered. The scenic transitions, enhanced by Rick Fisher’s lights, are gems as the Shanghaied cast, apparently impressed into service as stagehands, seamlessly, fluidly move from one time and place to another. But the fact that part of the background is simply bare and black -- at least viewed from my angle -- distracted me from Samuel Coleridge’s willing suspension of disbelief.

James Conlon’s baton reigns over a 13-piece orchestra with a sprightly score and much recitative singing, although there is no breakout aria or solo number per se that shakes the rafters. Paul Curran adeptly directs his ensemble cast with a flair for the bawdy and vaudevillean. Herring’s libretto, by Eric Crozier, is based on the French writer Guy de Maupassant’s short story Le Rosier de Madame Husson. Although sung in English supertitles are projected in English throughout the performance. Rule Britannia!

Innocence -- or rather innocence lost -- is a recurring theme in Britten’s work; his operatic take on Herman Melville’s angelic but doomed sailor Billy Budd (the mariner has the same last name as Herring’s policeman) premiered in 1951. Undercurrents of angsty sexuality roiled Britten’s version of Henry James’ symbolically titled The Turn of the Screw, which debuted in 1954 and was staged by L.A. Opera last season. (The centennial of Britten’s birth is next year.) While Britten put the sex into East Sussex, the hanky-panky in Albert Herring is largely played for laughs, although beneath the surface Britten’s opera jabs the tyrannical puritanical busybody brigades of then and now. One wonders what opéras bouffes the current Republican presidential race will someday inspire?  


Albert Herring runs through 17  at L.A. Opera at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, 135 N. Grand Ave. For more info: 213/972-8001; www.laopera.com.

  

AGLIFF 2011: FIT

A scene from Fit.

To be tied and tried

By Don Simpson

Fit takes place in a fictional world where people judge, belittle and abuse other people merely because their presumed sexual preference is not “normal.” These bullies accuse their prey of being “gay” just because of how they act and dress, knowing nothing of whether or not their prey would prefer to snog a boy or a girl. In other words, just because someone does not conform to the restrictive social constructs of what defines masculinity and femininity, they are teased, ridiculed and beaten. Oh and for some, their interpretation of The Bible says that gays are evil. Sounds pretty crazy, huh?

Cleverly flipping queer stereotypes onto their heads, Fit lays out several red herrings in order to prompt the audience to make early judgments about the characters. Lee (Lydia Toumazou) appears to be a stereotypical tomboy “dyke” while her best friend Karmel (Sasha Frost) is girly, pretty and obviously straight. Tegs (Duncan MacInnes) is the school geek and is labelled as “gay” because of his gentle personality while his best mate, Jordan (Ludvig Bonin), is a talented footballer (read: soccer player) who protects Tegs from bullies such as the hyper-homophobic Isaac (Jay Brown) and Ryan (Stephen Hoo). All on the verge of expulsion from school, they have been sentenced to dance class with a flamboyantly gay teacher, Loris (writer-director Rikki Beadle Blair), as their final warning. We see these six teenagers, in turn, via their own and others’ perspectives.

Unfortunately for all of us, the cinematic world Blair creates for us is significantly more real than it should be. Our society needs Fit just as much now as it did back when I was a teenager in the 1980s. Heck, any world in which people cannot be legally married to someone of the same sex or where someone as hateful and judgmental as Michele Bachmann could even be considered to be a Presidential hopeful in the United States needs a lot of help.

Though it plays a lot like a 100+ minute episode of Degrassi: The Next Generation or Skins — comparisons that some may find more favorable than others — Fit is the most complex and thorough exploration of teenage queerness that I have ever seen. Most of all, it is quite encouraging: people can change, acceptance (and happiness) is possible. Fit should be required viewing for all teenagers. Let us just hope that it is not “too gay” for the haters in the audience.

LAFF 2011: AN ORDINARY FAMILY

A scene from An Ordinary Family.

Out to dinner

By Don Simpson

Seth (Greg Wise) and his boyfriend, William (Chad Anthony Miller), show up at the lake house while Seth's unsuspecting family members are enjoying their annual week-long vacation. Before they announce their arrival, Seth confesses to William that his family does not know they are coming. As it turns out, Seth has been estranged from his family ever since he abandoned working beside his older Christian minister brother, Thomas (Troy Schremmer), and ran away to live with William, whom he met on Chatroulette. The Biederman family presumably does not know that Seth is gay and they certainly do not know that he has been sharing a bedroom (wink, wink, nudge, nudge) with William.

Seth’s arrival with William in tow catches the Biederman clan off guard. The tension -- stemming from the most socially conservative member of the family, Thomas -- reaches its boiling point during dinner. Presumably, Thomas, a straight-laced minister and family man, does not like Seth and William discussing how they met in front of his young and impressionable children, but we know there is more to this story that is fueling his outrage.

The Biederman family comes around to accepting Seth and William fairly quickly, and Thomas remains the only holdout. (Admittedly, I am a little surprised by how quickly their mother, played by Laurie Coker, comes around to accepting Seth.) Mattie (Janelle Schremmer) -- Thomas’ significantly more open-minded better half -- tries to convince him to open his heart to Seth, but it seems that Thomas will never get beyond his homophobic Christian biases.

Seth and Thomas’ sister (Megan Minto) is married to a rotund husband, Chris (Steven Schaefer) and it seems Chris’ primary purpose is to provide some much needed comic relief-- especially when paired with William -- to the otherwise serious family drama.

The chemistry between the real-life married couple Troy and Janelle Schremmer is undeniable, thus contributing to Akel’s obvious desire to achieve cinematic realism. That said -- Akel and Patterson’s script is so well-written that it sometimes plays in detriment to the film’s sense of realism.

Writer-director Mike Akel’s (Chalk) An Ordinary Family conveys the age-old conflict between religion and homosexuality from a relatively unbiased perspective. Akel -- who co-wrote the script with Matt Patterson -- never gets too preachy, though it is quite obvious that Akel is of the opinion that Christians should be more accepting of gays; otherwise the portrayal of the Christian minister is just as favorable as that of the gay characters. Accordingly, An Ordinary Family will be enjoyable for Christians and gays alike -- though there is no denying that its target audience is gay Christians, a niche crowd if ever there was one. I fit into none of these categories yet applaud An Ordinary Family for its open-mindedness and its ability to intelligently discuss (without ever becoming argumentative) the acceptance of gays by Christians without offending either side of the equation. Also, An Ordinary Family is one of the few films that prominently features gay characters in leading roles that I would not consider a gay film, which is something I wish there will be more of in the future.

LAFF 2011: WISH ME AWAY

Chely Wright in Wish Me Away.

Wrightright

By Miranda Inganni

When singer-songwriter Chely Wright decided to come out as the first openly gay country music star, she did so in a big way -- by making the announcement on Oprah. Not only did her fans not know about this aspect of her life, but neither did some family members, most notably her mother.

Making its world premiere tonight at the Los Angeles Film Festival 2011 (although there was a "sneak peak" at the Nashville Film Festival in April),  Bobbie Birleffi and Beverly Kopf's documentary, Wish Me Away, chronicles Wright's rise to fame and her coming to grips with those predictable reactions of what many in her country community considered shamefully behavioral choices.

With one-on-one interviews, archival footage and lots of confessional camera time, the film has an intimate home video feel. Wright's tribulations are heartfelt and raw, and full of tears. Make no mistake about it, this is a woman whose strength is obvious, despite her doubts. 

In addition to the film, Wright has her latest book, Like Me, and most recent album, Lifted Off the Ground to further her message of hope and understanding, especially for the LGBT youth she hopes to inspire and comfort. With the help of her sister, father and her spiritual guide, Wright and the film prove that no amount of wishing something away will make it so. And thank goodness for that.