bisexuality

Entertaining Mr. Sloane (1970)

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Picture it. You’re settling in for Movie Night, and you know exactly what you’re in the mood for: a film about a bisexual demon twink who moves into a family home to seduce & ruin everyone who lives there.  Teorema is sounding a little too challenging that evening, but you’re not quite in the mood for the empty calories of Saltburn either.  What can you do to scratch that specific itch?  Thankfully, there is a perfect middle ground in the 1970 stage-play adaptation Entertaining Mr. Sloane, which is a little more sophisticated than an Emerald Fennell music video but not, like, Pasolini sophisticated.  It’s got all of the bisexual lust & thrust you’re looking for but lightened up with a little vintage Benny Hill-era British humor to keep the mood light.  Everything is falling into place . . . except that Entertaining Mr. Sloane isn’t currently available for home video distribution in America.  All you can access from the couch is the trailer on YouTube (which at least helpfully includes the film’s plot-summarizing theme song so you can imagine the rest).

I was lucky to catch this horny, thorny farce at The Broad earlier this month, when it was presented by filmmaker John Cameron Mitchell for the weekly WW Cinema series, with particular attention paid to the original work’s playwright Joe Orton.  Mitchell specifically recommended the 1987 biopic Prick Up Your Ears as background context for Orton’s queer agitator sensibilities, but none of that place setting is really necessary for being entertained by Mr. Sloane.  The tricky part is just finding a copy.  This is a work of broad humor & caustic camp.  Its stage play origins and its early arrival on the queer-cinema timeline afford it a sophisticated air, but it’s played directly to the cheap seats so that everyone gets a laugh.  A precursor to similar broad-appeal outsider art from the likes of John Waters & Paul Bartel, it played well to a raucous crowd of hipster weirdos, but there’s nothing especially exclusionary or esoteric about it that would turn off a broad audience.  It’s like an old TV sitcom with a premise that’s in such bad taste that the network deliberately lost its archival tapes.

Peter McEnery stars as the murderous demon twink of the title: an unscrupulous drifter who’s invited into a middle-class family home after he’s caught sunbathing in a nearby cemetery.  He’s picked up by a lonely middle-aged biddy (Beryl Reid) as a thinly veiled act of charity that both parties winkingly acknowledge as transactional sex work.  It would be out of the question to offer him room & board in exchange for sexual favors, but while he’s there . . . Also, because she’s an upstanding lady, there’s no proper way to express her desire for the younger, eager man, but if he were so overcome with passion that he sexually ravished her . . . Unsurprisingly, the men around the house (a classist snob played by Harry Andrews and Alan Webb as his ancient, ornery father) are just as repressed in their attraction to the smooth-bodied scamp.  No one can state out loud that they want to sleep with Mr. Sloane, but everyone jealously conspires to keep him away from the young girls around town whom he’s actually attracted to, meanwhile finding excuses to touch his body.  No one can state out loud that he’s a wanted murderer either, but they all know it to be true.

As a cultural relic, this pitch-black comedy feels like a response to the moral rot of the Free Love era.  Mr. Sloane’s selfishness & violence might reflect the amorality of that era’s hedonistic youth culture, but he’s not the main target of the satire.  Really, the bulk of the movie’s satire is rooted in the older generation’s response to the moral looseness he represents.  Beryl Reid’s girlish view of sexuality is absurdly repressed for a woman of her age, which gets increasingly uncomfortable once she starts treating him as a baby she’s coddling mid-coitus, like a child playing Mommy to her dolly.  Her closeted brother is no better, framing all of his lust for the houseguest through the misogynist mindset of boarding school bunkmates playing rough house.  He also treats Mr. Sloane as a kind of doll, dressing him head to toe in a tailored, fetishistic leather get-up under the guise of hiring him as a uniformed chauffer.  No one can express what they want from Mr. Sloane or how they intend to compensate him for it, but there’s a constant power struggle for his physical time & attention between the siblings that makes for a vicious tug of war.  And then the doubly-repressed lust expressed by their father makes things even uglier.

There are a few production design and shot composition choices that elevate Entertaining Mr. Sloane above its TV sitcom trappings.  Reid’s frilly lingerie and stuffed-animal-decorated teen girl bedroom are especially gorgeous, along with the continually hilarious prop of Andrews’s gigantic pink Cadillac, which appears to be undulating without shocks to match his clownish persona.  Occasionally, director Douglas Hickox & cinematographer Wolfgang Suschitzky will also frame out an absurdly over-curated tableau, like disembodied lips wrapping around a phallic popsicle against the grey backdrop of gravestones, or like a makeshift wedding ceremony staged at the altar of a fresh corpse.  Mostly, though, it’s the comedic voice of Orton’s source material that shines through, just as John Cameron Mitchell’s introduction to the film suggested.  Orton’s version of “The Straights Are Not Okay” social commentary manages to feel ahead of its time but also ingratiating enough to not entirely lose his contemporary audience.  Instead, he lost the future audience that’s more accustomed to that line of combative queer humor simply through scarcity in distribution, thanks to the current, dire state of home distro for any film made before 1990.  Catch it when it inevitably hits one of the only two streaming services that matter: Criterion or Tubi, whoever gets there first.

-Brandon Ledet

Challengers (2024)

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I don’t really understand sports. I’m not talking about the rules of various games or what have you, but the appeal—Wait! Don’t go! I promise this isn’t just another one of those “guy who tries to be funny on the internet does a tired ‘I think I’m better than people who like sports’ thing to be relatable to other disaffected millennials” thing. This has nothing to do with in/out-group mentality or sport/anti-sport tribalism. I’m confessing something here. See, I understand competitiveness, as anyone who has ever had the misfortune of seeing me at trivia can attest. I personally hate sweating, and I don’t understand the appeal of feats of athleticism that are specific to “sport” as an inscribing factor; I’m never interested enough to watch some kind of strong man competition where an overrepresented number of kilt-wearers (for some reason) chop down trees and haul them up an incline, but I do understand that as a thing that would be of interest, as a viewer or a participant. People who find meaning in devoting their life to the pursuit of athletic achievement are so different in the way that their minds work that they are as inscrutable to me as an alien would be. 

Obsession, on the other hand, is something that I do understand, and that, more than tennis, is what’s at the heart of Challengers. The film opens and closes in 2019, during a “challenger” match between Patrick Zweig (Josh O’Connor) and Art Donaldson (Mike Faist) in New Rochelle, observed by Art’s wife, Tashi Duncan (Zendaya). It’s clear that there’s more than just this win on the line, and we learn about the complicated relationships between these three through a series of flashbacks. Thirteen years earlier, Tashi Duncan was the hottest thing in tennis – Adidas sponsorships, scholarship to Stanford, nothing on the horizon but bigger and better things. After successfully trouncing her sore-loser opponent at the Junior U.S. Open, she meets Patrick and Art, “Fire and Ice,” who had their own big win playing doubles that same day, at a party in her honor. They both come from some amount of wealth while she does not; we don’t know the extent of the Donaldson family’s finances other than that both boys have attended a tennis-focused boarding school together since age twelve, while the Zweig’s money is implied when the shoreside mansion at which the party is held is noted to be smaller than Patrick’s family home. Later, back at the hotel, the trio drink and things get steamy, with Tashi making out with both boys at once and then pulling back to watch them make out with each other. She agrees to give her number to whichever boy wins against the other the following day. 

In the intervening time between 2006 and 2019, the three of them grow closer and then further apart at different intervals. Patrick and Tashi date long distance while she’s at Stanford, as is Art, while Patrick attempts to go straight into the pros. When he comes to visit and see one of Tashi’s matches, she gives him unsolicited advice about his tennis playing beforehand, and he storms off on her and doesn’t come to see her play; Tashi ends up with a career-ending injury, possibly because Patrick’s absence got in her head. This drives a wedge between Patrick and not only Tashi, but Art, too. In 2019, Tashi and Art are a coach-and-player power couple, but the line between their time together at Stanford and the reunion with Patrick at the challenger match in New Rochelle isn’t a straight one. The frenetic energy of tennis is deliberately evoked in the way that the narrative frenziedly moves around in the timeline and pings back and forth between different characters’ perspectives, showing us secrets being created, kept, and discovered, all while the soundtrack jumps from utter silence to pulsing house music and back again. 

I’m not quite sure what to make of this one. Before going to the theater, some of the critique I read was about the film’s length, which is a complaint that I, eternal champion of The Tree of Wooden Clogs, practically never agree with. I did feel the length of this one (I feel the need to say “no pun intended” here given the homoerotic nature of the text) though, and when I walked out, I wasn’t sure if I had seen a good movie or a very stylishly crafted but shallow erotic sports fantasy. In the intervening time, I think my ruminations on it led me to give it more credit than I initially did. For one thing, and not to knock any of these performers, but this is a movie where the characterization comes through more in the editing than in the performance. O’Connor’s character is one that lets him emote more, his devil-may-care attitude letting him get away with smirking and scheming, while Tashi (and Art as he spends more time with her) spending her whole life stoically, as serious as a heart attack. As a result, Zendaya is called upon to be stone-faced for a lot of this, especially in the framing narrative. We get more about her character in the opening when she is watching the match, her head following the ball in tandem with everyone else in the stands, until she stops watching the game and starts watching the men, and then focuses in on one of them, than we do in many of her more dialogue-heavy scenes later in the film. Tashi is driven throughout, but there’s a stark contrast between her playfulness prior to her injury and the way that she’s eternally guarded for the rest of her story. She’s effective at compartmentalizing and disguising her bitterness, and while the narrative affords her few opportunities to drop that wall, Zendaya is able to do it with a subtlety that seems effortless. 

I’m a big fan of both Call Me By Your Name and director Luca Guadagnino’s Suspiria remake, despite my extensive reservations about the latter. I don’t know that this one is really in the same league as those two films, both of which could arguably be named one of the greatest pictures in their respective genres. It does feel of a piece with them, though, even if I can’t say that this one has the same immediately apparent artistic merit that they do. It’s not bad; not at all. That the non-linear narrative is so clear and easy to follow is praiseworthy, and it cleverly mimics the spontaneity of moving between memories that, for whatever reason, are linked in our personal histories. It’s fun, but the things that make it interesting and exciting are the same things that capture my attention in music videos or this video edit. On the night that I saw it, I texted Brandon to say it felt like an elevated David DeCoteau movie in large swathes, but I’ve come around on it a little and can see that an artistic decision was made here: to make a sexy drama about hot people, and use that basis to play around with some cool drone footage and go into the tennis ball’s POV and make people feel like they’re at the club. It’s not a bad impulse.

I’m reminded of something that Brandon wrote about last year, when we were talking about how directors who have had the mixed fortunes to start their directing careers with what would be the magnum opus of any of their peers: Jordan Peele, Ari Aster, Robert Eggers, and I would add Guadagnino to this list and stand ready to nominate Julia Ducornau the next time she puts something out. I’m probably the biggest proponent of his work around these parts, but I’m not ashamed to fly this flag. In the link above, Brandon talks about how far into his career Hitchcock was able to get before he started making what we think of as the biggest hits of his canon, but I’m reminded of a bit of trivia about Alfred Hitchcock Presents. Psycho, perhaps the most enduring of the auteur’s work in the public consciousness, was a project that he actually made on the cheap and with a large portion of the crew carried over from the weekly series. There are several episodes in the seasons leading up to the filming of Psycho where you can see a few trial runs for things that Hitch would do in later films. The episode “One More Mile to Go” is the most obvious as it gave the old man, who directed the entry, the opportunity to try out some of the camera tricks that he would use to build tension when Marion Crane is pulled over in Psycho’s first reel. Challengers feels like an episode (or several) of a theoretical Luca Guadagnino Presents, where he’s given a couple of new techniques a shot so that he can use that skill to make the best possible version of a story that, unlike this one, is thick enough to coat the back of a spoon (sorry, I’ve been making a lot of ice cream lately). Challengers may be one of the things that helps him crack the code of how to make the filmmaking equivalent of overlaying audio onto satisfying kinetic sand or Subway Surfers footage, while making it cinematic art. That’s something to see, even if it wasn’t really for me. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Both Ways (1975)

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Long before New Queer Cinema directors like Derek Jarman, Todd Haynes, and Gregg Araki were praised for their confrontational depiction of queer sexuality onscreen in the 1990s, there was already a strong, decades-long independent filmmaking tradition of doing just that in hardcore gay pornography.  At least, that was the central thesis of Liz Purchell’s archival work in the Ask Any Buddy project, which is where I first heard of Jerry Douglas’s 1975 bisexual romance thriller Both Ways.  Although the review of Both Ways on the Ask Any Buddy podcast was less than glowing, it still felt like a necessary purchase when I ran across a used DVD copy of the film in a Minneapolis record store, since its X-rated onscreen sex meant I’d unlikely be able to access it on any mainstream streaming service in the near future (which is the exact kind of false scarcity logic that’s led me to collect a modest stack of vintage porno titles like Pink Narcissus, SexWorld, Bijou, and Fleshpot on 42nd Street).  On its surface, Both Ways is a fairly straightforward—pun unintended—porno drama about a closeted bisexual man living a double life, but between the director’s commentary track on the Vinegar Syndrome disc, the supplementary insight from the Ask Any Buddy pod, and the plot’s last-minute swerve into Hickcockian violence—okay, pun obviously intended that time—it ends up feeling like a surprisingly substantial work of outsider art.

The first sounds you hear in this Golden Age porno is a child giggling as his father tickles him on a carnival Ferris wheel.  Gerald Grant stars as a straight-laced family man: a Harvard graduate (which he’ll remind you of frequently) who’s built a tidy suburban life for himself as a high-powered lawyer and a loving father of a young son.  All is not well in the bedroom, though, as his sexually neglected wife, played by Andrea True (likely the most famous member of the cast, due to her disco hit “More More More”), confronts him for being distracted by a secret affair outside the house that she can’t quite figure out.  She’s correct, of course, as her husband has been sneaking around with—shocker of all shockers—a Yale student played by Dean Tait.  Now, you might expect that vintage pornography about a closeted bi man’s infidelity would mean double the variety of onscreen sex, but it really just doubles the amount of couples bickering.  This is the kind of porno-chic relic that speeds through rapid edits of sex scenes so it can really dig into its domestic melodrama, making for a shockingly sincere representation of male bisexuality for its era … until it takes a wild swerve into psychological thriller territory.  After all of its cheeky humor about collegiate rivalry between Harvard & Yale and all of its sentimental homelife drama in which the father figure constantly buys his cavity-sweet son handfuls of balloons, Both Ways gets really dark in its final twenty minutes, making for a chilling ending to something that’s ostensibly supposed to heat couples up on a naughty date night.

In filmmaking terms, Both Ways is surprisingly playful for a hardcore porno.  Douglas does a lot to mirror the domestic scenes in both of our antihero’s competing relationships, even going as far as to symmetrically pose his actors in front of wall-hung mirrors to drive the point home.  During early domestic squabbles where both couples recount how they first met and during a later pornographic montage of the cheating husband alternating between his two partners in two separate beds, the threesome’s body language is exactly copied in direct contrast to underline how little meaningful, physical difference there is between the two relationships.  Douglas also plays around with insert shots of artificial exteriors to simulate intimate dialogue when characters are navigating the world outside their bedrooms, shooting his actors against a surreal blue-void “sky”.  He also tries his best to ground this tale of extramarital romance within the context of Free Love looseness, setting a major couple’s spat at a swingers’ wife-swap orgy and meticulously framing a lit joint at the center of a male performer’s buttcheeks.  Other visual details & directorial choices are more inscrutable, such as the frequent cutaways to a frumpy housekeeper during the aforementioned wife-swap, the repetitive focus on yellowed copies of New York Times headlines to mark the timeline of the couples’ pasts, and the Ivy Leaguers’ obsession with ceramic beer steins – which only become more noticeably bizarre the more they become directly involved in the scene-to-scene plot.  It’s all baffling in its distraction from the presupposed purpose of hardcore pornography, but it also all adds to the feeling that this is a personal, thoughtful, creative project for Douglas instead of a quick cash grab between writing his off-Broadway stage plays.

I’m fond of Both Ways despite all of its lopsided plotting and its confused representation of Normal male bisexuality.  Even after the domestic melodrama gives way to crime-thriller psychology, the movie still has an oddly light tone to it, present both in the generic funk-guitar background music and in the nosy investigations of a local antiques dealer who mistakes the husband’s sneaking around for living a double life as an undercover Commie spy.  It may not be the artistic pinnacle of Golden Age pornography, but it does function as a clear, standalone example of how porn from that era has unique cultural value as independent filmmaking.  If nothing else, it’s difficult to imagine any mainstream Hollywood studio dramas of that time depicting male bisexuality with so much candor (even if it is easy to imagine a Hollywood version of this film choosing to conclude with the exact same act of domestic violence).  I got the sense that the reason the Ask Any Buddy crew were less enthused about Both Ways in their much better-informed review is that Jerry Douglas had previously contributed to a much more accomplished bisexual porno as the writer of Radley Metzger’s Score, which makes this one suffer by comparison.  I cannot personally speak to that comparison, as I have not yet scored a copy of Score while killing time in second-hand media stores on vacation, but I also never expected to find Both Ways through that method either, so never say never.

-Brandon Ledet

The Doom Generation (1995)

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If you follow enough fired-up cynics on Twitter, you’d think that queer youth culture is suddenly going soft after decades of consistent, unified radical politics.  There are surely some fruitful debates to be had about the ways corporate & police presence have been welcomed into Pride celebrations recently, especially when it comes at the expense of freer, kinkier expressions of queer sexuality.  However, I’m a little more skeptical about the recent in-house dogpiling on “tenderqueer” Zoomers for their generational desire to see wholesome, conflict-free Gay Representation onscreen, as if that impulse is anything new.  Politically edgier queer audiences have been debating Gay Assimilationists about the value of presenting “the right kind of representation” to the public at large since at least as far back as Stonewall, which has led to much controversy over “the wrong kind of representation” in movies like Basic Instinct, Cruising, and The Boys in the Band for presenting their queer characters as flawed & villainous when they had no wholesome mainstream counterbalance.  I have to wonder how much that eternal controversy has dulled the career & reputation of queer provocateur Gregg Araki, whose signature works have been left to rot in censored, out-of-print obscurity since he first made a splash in the New Queer Cinema era of the 1990s.  All those decades ago, Araki got enough pushback for making hyperviolent, oversexed queer art he describes as “too punk rock for gay people” that he thought it’d be easier to sneak his edgier, more outrageous ideas into his version of a straight film. Araki’s breakout 1995 road trip flick The Doom Generation is even subtitled “A heterosexual movie by Gregg Araki,” a cheeky in-joke about how it’s easier to get away with making his provocative, overtly queer outsider art within a heterosexual dynamic, since there’s much less pressure to deliver “the right kind of representation” in that context.  Or, as Araki put it in a recent interview, “I made this heterosexual movie, but in a very punk rock bratty way, made it so gay.”

That hetero cosplay may have landed Araki easier production funding, but the prudish straights in charge of mainstream movie distribution were not fooled.  The Doom Generation has been heavily, viciously censored since it first premiered at Sundance, with its various R-rated home video cuts removing up to 20 minutes of footage so that what’s left onscreen is borderline incoherent.  Although some of those Blockbuster Video-friendly edits removed scenes of cartoonish ultraviolence, you will not be surprised to learn that a majority of what has been removed is its queer sexual content, which drives most of the relationship dynamics between its trio of disaffected Gen-X leads.  So, it’s a huge deal that The Doom Generation has been recently restored to fit Araki’s original vision nearly three decades after its film festival premiere, re-released into a post-She-Ra, post-Steven Universe tenderqueer world that’s just as squeamish about the wrong kinds of representation as it’s always been.  Its theatrical victory lap is a bittersweet blessing for me personally, in that I wish it was around in my life when I was a John Waters-obsessed edgelord teen, but I also cherished getting to see it for the first time with a rowdy crowd of queer weirdos who hooted & hollered the entire screening.  Laughing along with like-minded genre freaks made every horned-up, airheaded line reading hit way harder than it would have if I watched it alone on VHS in the 90s, with or without the prudish MPAA censorship.  There was something heartwarming about sharing that experience with multiple generations of in-the-flesh human weirdos who might be inclined to snipe at each other for minor political differences online but can’t help but cackle & gasp in unison at campy, radical queer art when it’s presented IRL.  It’s just not that often that boundary-pushing queer art survives the controversy cycle to reach queer audiences in the first place, and it turns out that costuming itself as “heterosexual” can only help it get so far.

Internal gay debates about positive representation in American media may have not changed much in the past few decades, but to be fair neither has America at large.  If The Doom Generation lives up to its “heterosexual” subtitle in any authentic way, it’s in its depiction of an apocalyptic USA in cultural decline.  It’s one the best movies out there about how boring, rotten, and beautifully cheap life in America can be, defining US culture as a putrid pile of junk food, junk television, fundamentalist Christians, and Nazi right-wingers.  Set in an America where everything costs $6.66 and is protected by loaded gun, the film responds to the nation’s final moments before Rapture with pure Gen-X apathy, shrugging off every grotesque fascist afront with a Valley Girl “Whatever!” worthy of Cher Horowitz herself.  Rose McGowan & James Duvall star as a pair of aimless, politically numb punks whose teenage puppylove is disrupted by the intrusion of Johnathon Schaech, a leather-clad agent of chaos.  After the third-wheel interloper makes them accomplices in the brutal (and somewhat accidental) murder of a gas station clerk, the trio go on a cross-country, Natural Born Killers crime spree touring the nation’s cheapest fast-food joints & honeymoon motels.  The reluctant throuple’s initial sexual dynamic starts as adulterous betrayal, but quickly devolves into a bisexual free-for-all that edges the audience to desperately want to see the two male leads kiss (and more).  Only, Araki interrupts the gay male tension in that central threesome with a violent reminder of just how broken & violent life in America can be, concluding their road trip with a shock of strobelit Nazi brutality that fucks everything up just when it things are starting to get properly heated.  The Doom Generation might feature characters exploring the boundaries of their emerging queer sexual identities, but it’s also honest about how horrific it can feel to do so among the straight Christian psychopaths who run the USA – something all generations of queer audiences can relate to, no matter how sensitive they are to onscreen sex & violence.

I could go on all day about how sexually, politically transgressive The Doom Generation is in both its modern & retro American contexts, but really its greatest strength is that it’s extremely cool.  McGowan’s Gen-X punk uniform of plastic gas station sunglasses, see-through plastic raincoat, and blunt, dyed goth bob looks just as hip now as it ever did.  Every motel room & dive bar interior is a gorgeously cheap fantasy realm of D.I.Y. decor & artifice, so much so that I mistook the out-of-context screengrabs I’ve seen over the years for a momentary dream sequence instead of the overall art design.  Decades before anyone would think to tweet “Give Parker Posey a sword,” Gregg Araki gave Parker Posey a sword, casting her as a crazed lesbian stalker in a cheap drag queen wig.  And yet Duvall’s performance stands out as the coolest detail of all, nailing the kind of puppydog himbo humor that would have made him a beloved Keanu Reeves-level cult figure if this film were given the proper, uncensored distribution it deserved.  It’s not often you see a movie combine the finer points of Heathers, Freeway, Blood Diner, and Terminal U.S.A. into one toxic Gen-X gumbo, even if it’s one that crassly force-feeds the concoction to its audience through an unwashed beer funnel.  I was overjoyed to gulp down The Doom Generation unfiltered with a full crowd of fellow filth-hungry weirdos, if not only for the reminder that radical queer art has always been controversial by nature, and America has always been an apocalyptic cesspool.  At the same time, I also left the theater angry that the film hadn’t been funneled into my brain sooner, and that so much of Araki’s back catalog of bad-representation punk provocations are still not readily accessible to the modern public.  Here’s to hoping that titles like Nowhere, Splendor, and Totally Fucked Up get this same digital-restoration victory lap soon—theatrical re-release and all—before Christian America gets the Rapture it so desperately wants.

-Brandon Ledet

Cabaret (1972)

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It’s incredible how effective Bob Fosse’s 1972 adaptation of the Broadway stage musical Cabaret still felt to me on a delayed introductory viewing after years of feeling over-exposed to its basic elements. The lush sets & performative androgyny of its stage performances are a tamer, Hollywood-flavored version of the same acts I’ve seen play out at New Orleans cabarets like One Eyed Jacks & The AllWays Lounge for years. Liza Minnelli’s central performance as the lovable Manic Pixie Dream Bawd extraordinaire Sally Bowles might, unfathomably, be the first time I’ve ever seen her in a proper film, but I’ve already spent plenty of time with her persona in television clips, audio recordings, and local drag impersonations. Most notably, I had seen the 1993 filmed-for-television, Sam Mendes-directed adaptation of the same stage play several times before, as it had been singled out to me as the ultimate version of the source material available (mostly thanks to Alan Cumming’s definitive performance as the menacingly horny emcee). All this pre-exposure to Cabaret’s general milieu had prepared me to feel jaded & underwhelmed by Fosse’s Oscars-sweeping, Hollywoodized take on the material, but that wasn’t my experience at all. In the earliest sequences of the picture I was totally drunk on the pansexual bacchanal on display, and by the end I genuinely felt sick to my stomach, which I mean as a huge compliment. Fosse did not clean this property up for mass appeal. If anything, he found a way to make an already powerful substance even more dangerously potent by emphasizing the tools & tones of cinema to justify the act of adapting it in the first place. This is a great film in its own right, regardless of the virtues of any other form its story has taken since it was first published in the 1939 novel Goodbye to Berlin, the Broadway play included.

Fosse’s fame as a dancer & a stage choreographer had me expecting a version of Cabaret somewhat close to the Mendes broadcast. Wide, static shots that value choreographed dance over camera movement & editing trickery are the norm for this kind of adaptation; at least, they were in an earlier era when Old Hollywood would regularly churn out big-budget crowd-pleasing musicals in an almost vaudevillian tradition. The 1972 Cabaret is much more aggressively cinematic than what that tradition prepares you for. Quick cuts of intricately arranged bodies captured in sweaty, leering closeups immediately excite the audience in the film’s earliest stage performances, completely blowing open the possibilities of what a stage musical can look like with the camera roaming around, under, and behind the dancers who’d normally only be viewed from a safe, fixed distance. Fosse directs the hell out of these performances, using harsh backlighting & grotesque closeups of audience reactions to completely disorient the audience into a shared drunkenness with the Berliners frequenting its central club. Gradually, though, the party sours and the cabaret performances become less energetic & less frequent as the lives of the performers and the politics of the world outside the club sink into fascism & despair. As much as this is the personal story of Sally Bowles and her latest drama-filled love affair, it’s in a larger sense the story of a sexually, morally liberal Berlin that’s lost over the course of the movie. It isn’t until we fully return to the immersive, camera-on-the-stage performances of the Kit Kat Klub in the film’s final moments that we realize just how much has changed over the course of the film and just how devastating that loss is. It’s a harsh blow to the gut, especially in how reminiscent that quiet decline into fascism is to the world outside our own pleasure-dome bubbles in the 2010s.

Cabaret builds much of its in-the-moment drama around two central romantic affairs – one in which Sally Bowles finds herself navigating a bisexual love triangle with her roommate & a financial benefactor who’s quietly bedding them both, and one in which a young Jewish couple perilously navigate the heavily policed class lines that divide them. There is some genuinely upsetting, heartfelt melodrama shared between these four friends, particularly in Bowles’s existential crisis as a freewheeling cabaret artist whose career is going nowhere. If nothing else, her self-lacerating breakdown in the line, “Maybe I’m not worth caring about, maybe I’m nothing,” is pure heartbreak. Still, the real substance of the movie is in how a larger, political drama plays out in the background, largely unnoticed by these self-absorbed libertine artists & intellectuals. Set in a 1930s Berlin, the film quietly tracks the rise of the Nazi Party in Germany. At first, its members are treated as fringe lunatic bullies who aren’t welcome in the Kit Kat or any other club around Berlin, ostracized for their hateful hooliganism. By the end, the lewd, amoral performers of the Kit Kat are performing for an audience comprised entirely of Nazi scum. The war for who defines the spirit of Berlin was lost just under their noses as they minimized the Nazi threat as an ugly fad and continued about their personal dramas, unaware of the seriousness of the party’s rise to power. There’s a quiet menace to the way Swastikas become incrementally more ubiquitous as the film goes on, a gradual temperature change that Fosse expertly handles to the point where it doesn’t really hit you until you’re already boiling alive. Even being familiar with Mendes’s version of the play and knowing exactly where the movie was going, I still felt physically ill by the film’s final scenes. It’s effectively handled on a technical level but also just feels true to how Nazi ideology is currently on the rise in American politics as well. We may already be past the point where they’re just fringe hooligans who can be ignored as we go about our daily business, deliberately unaware.

This direct correlation with current events is not some unintended happenstance either. As much as the film carries a spiritual reverence for the sexual hedonism & defiant artistry of pre-War Berlin, it’s also very much a product of its own time. A few 70s-specific blouses & mirrored “disco” balls (which, admittedly, had been nightclub fixtures for decades) loudly barge their way into the production design, drawing attention to the way hippie counterculture had already been pulling aesthetic influence from the pre-War era. If the Kit Kat Klub performances were just a tad grimier (and far less artfully documented) you could almost pass them off as footage of San Francisco bohemian weirdos like The Cockettes or contemporary proto-punk glam acts like The New York Dolls or The Rocky Horror Picture Show. The sickening feeling I caught from Cabaret was likely just as potent in the early 70s, which had its own gradual rise in Conservative fascism to combat in the era’s anti-War, Free Love protests. In a best-case-scenario where our current bout with Nazi ideology is stomped out before it gains any more momentum, there will still likely be a quiet fascist contingent to keep at bay as the most vulnerable among us simply try to live fulfilling lives without having to constantly fight off oppressive bullies. In that way, the themes of this film are just as evergreen as the excitement of its stage musical cinematography, the drunkenness of its rapid-fire editing, and the sartorial pleasures of its sparkle-crotch tap costumes. That might not be good news for the world at large, but it speaks well to Cabaret’s value as a feature film adaptation, a work that’s apparently remarkably effective no matter how familiar you are with its source material or its real-world thematic substance.

-Brandon Ledet

Appropriate Behavior (2015)

/ swampflix / 13 Comments

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fourhalfstar

It’s difficult to describe Appropriate Behavior without using titles like Broad City & Obvious Child as reference points, but those comparisons truly do the film a disservice, as it’s much more emotionally satisfying than either of those titles (both of which I like very much). True, Appropriate Behavior is yet another raunchy, sex-obsessed comedy-drama centered on a New York City woman-child struggling to figure her shit out, but there’s something uniquely direct & honest about its approach to this aesthetic that distinguishes it from its peers. Its authenticity might have a lot to do with the overall strength of the writer/director/actress Desiree Akhavan, who delivers the material as if she’s lived it before, but what’s really arresting is the crippling, all-too-common sadness that anchors the story. The details of the protagonist’s Shirin’s lifestyle & personality may be specific, but her heartache is universal & familiar.

Shirin is a young, bisexual Brooklynite party girl with a journalism degree & Persian heritage. Not everyone is going to relate to certain aspects of her sex life, such as safe-words, strap-ons, group play and hiding her sexuality from her Iranian-born parents.  However, the film’s central romantic conflict is an about as universal as they come. Appropriate Behavior details the depressing, gradual detangling of two people exiting a long term relationship. The film thankfully doesn’t dwell solely on the couple’s post break-up gloom, but instead adopts a flashback structure that allows it to show the former couple in better times, like in a flirtatious exchange when the first meet where Shirin says, “I find your anger incredibly sexy. I hate so many things too.” When the broken relationship Shirin’s mourning is first detailed it looks too toxic to be worth the heartache. The flashbacks reveal that it was at one time something playful, something worth saving. It allows the film to run through the entire cycle of a romantic tryst from first meeting to fucking to fighting to eventual dissolution.

Although the universal relatability of this cycle is what makes the film affecting, it’s the specificity of Shirin’s world that makes it special. The film’s Brooklyn setting provides a lot of room for lampooning of ludicrous personalities like social justice comedians, Kickstarter gurus, pothead businessmen, and absurdly pretentious performance artists. Shirin’s open, playful sexuality is an invitation into a world of group sex, kink play, and drag queens. Her Persian heritage is a window into both the culture’s familial intimacy & rituals as well as its malignant homophobia. At the center of this Venn diagram is a very relatable Shirin. She calls Brooklyn hipsters out on their nonsense, asking  “What is up with your placid disinterest in everything?” She laughs in the faces of people who take their kink play seriously and finds a way to reconcile her sexuality with her family in a somewhat disheartening “don’t ask, don’t tell” type of equilibrium.  A lot of Shirin’s life goals amount to “a good time”, which is more than understandable for a woman in her twenties.

It’s incredible how much Shirin’s zest for fun shines through when Appropriate Behavior finds her in such a dark time. It’s a familiar balance to anyone who’s experienced true heartbreak: trying to party away the pain like it doesn’t matter, but the superficial hedonism always feeling empty. She pretends like she doesn’t care, but she continuously ends up alone & hurt after the high. No matter your relation to the specifics of Shirin’s background & lifestyle, it’s easy to see yourself in her sadness when she curls up in a ball and says, “I’m going to lie here and forget what it feels like to be loved. Could you please turn off the light?” It’s a sadness that feels like it’s never going to fade, but it always does . . . eventually. Shirin can’t move past it until she gets wrapped up in her own project, a distraction that finally allows her to let go of the past. The thing that saves her? An elaborate fart joke. That’s the exact kind of clash between emotional devastation & goofball irreverence that makes Desiree Akhavan’s debut such a strong, relatable film, even for those worlds apart from her protagonist’s exact circumstances.

-Brandon Ledet