Homo Film Frenzy

The tenth annual Portland Gay and Lesbian Film Festival kicks off on Friday, October 6 and runs through Oct. 15. Visit http://plgff.org/ for the screening schedule and other info.
Here are two festival selections that I reviewed:

The Gymnast
Grade: B+

This beautifully photographed lesbian drama by writer and director Ned Farr is the darling of queer film festivals this year. Among other honors, it won Best Feature at the New York Lesbian and Gay Film Festival and the Audience Award at the San Francisco International Lesbian & Gay Film Festival.
The Gymnast is not earth-shattering by any means. Some of the acting is mediocre, but luckily not to a distracting degree. And a handful of hokey domestic drama scenes seem better suited to Lifetime TV than the big screen
Minor complaints aside, this is a solid, provocative effort that deserves the accolades that have been heaped on it. The erotic circus atmosphere of the aerial dance scenes recalls Patricia Rozema’s lesbian carnival drama When Night is Falling, and the portrayal of a blossoming lesbian trapped in a thankless heterosexual marriage is reminiscent of the John Sayles film Lianna.
The protagonist, Jane, is a lesbian waiting to happen. Years ago an injury toppled her dreams of winning an Olympic gold medal in gymnastics. Now she’s 43, working as a masseuse and trying to get pregnant before her biological clock winds down.
Jane joins up with two women to rehearse an aerial dance show that will potentially land them a gig in Las Vegas. Though she identifies as straight, she falls for a closeted Korean woman named Serena and must choose between lesbian love and a blah future with her husband.
Dreya Weber is buff and a bit gruff as Jane. Her acting lacks subtlety, but her performance is so sincere that it’s easy to forgive her shortcomings as a thespian. Addie Youngmee, who plays Serena, won’t be winning an Oscar anytime soon, either. But like Weber, she’s so likable that she ends up seeming more like a friend than a movie character.
In one of the sexiest straight or gay scenes in recent memory, Jane and Serena hang upside down, clutching billowing fabric that hangs from the ceiling. Suffice it to say that their slow, sweet kiss puts Spider-Man and Mary Jane’s famous face sucking shtick to shame.


Amnesia: The James Brighton Enigma
Grade: B+

Queer Canadian cinema is on a roll.
In March the outstanding gay coming-of-age drama C.R.A.Z.Y. swept The Genies, Canada’s equivalent to the Academy Awards. Unfortunately C.R.A.Z.Y. isn’t playing at the Portland Lesbian & Gay Film Festival, but audiences can still get a refreshing dose of northern exposure by watching the deft psychological drama Amnesia: The James Brighton Enigma.
Originally released in Canada in 2005, the film is a fictionalized account of real events concerning a male amnesia patient whose sole memory was that he was gay. Constructed in nonlinear order by writer and director Denis Langlois, the film is a jigsaw puzzle that comes together through flashbacks, dreams, memory flashes and the investigative efforts of a woman writing her PhD thesis on the case.
Amnesia starts off with a chilly, somber tone and becomes more emotionally accessible as the protagonist collaborates with others to try to piece his life together. As the film opens, a young man who has apparently suffered a major trauma wakes up naked in a Montreal parking lot and undergoes extensive medical testing. He’s certain that he’s gay, and he believes that his name is James Brighton.
But when he appears on television several people identify him as a Tennessee resident named Matthew Honeycutt. A trip to Tennessee churns up few memories for him, though the film provides us with a plausible and horrifying account of the homophobic hate crime that stripped him of his memory and his clothes.
Yugoslavian-born actor Dusan Ducik is easy on the eyes in the lead role, but don’t get too excited about the nude scene because he’s shrouded in shadows and there are no full-frontal disclosures. His dark and brooding presence is perfect for the character, though his overboard outburst in one scene is hard to take seriously.
Along with numerous scenes of gay clubs and male intimacy, Amnesia packs a bit of lesbian heat. In the course of her investigation, the PhD candidate has a tender bedroom rendezvous with one of her interview subjects.
Langlois so effectively enters the confused mind of his protagonist that, at times, the film rivals Memento for its capacity to disorient the viewer. But unlike Memento, Amnesia ultimately deposits a satisfying amount of concrete information in our memory banks.