drama

Happy Together (1997)

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When I first moved to Austin, there were four different video rental locations that were still open, despite the fact that streaming was already nearly omnipresent at the time. There were two locations for I Luv Video and two for Vulcan Video, with both organizations consolidating into one storefront each by 2020 and both of them ultimately closing during the pandemic. In those days, my devotion was to Vulcan Video, even though the giant outdoor mural of Spock on their campus-adjacent “North Vulcan” location, which I saw when visiting the city before moving, was long gone by the time that they had been pushed out to North Loop Boulevard. Back then, I Luv Video’s website didn’t have a catalog search feature, while Vulcan did, and that won me over. Back when I wrote about every Dario Argento movie, every single one of those DVDs was rented from Vulcan North (except for Le cinque giornate, which was, and to my knowledge remains, only available on VHS). Within the past year, however, both Vulcan and ILV have returned in some form, with the collection of the former being donated to the Alamo Drafthouse and operating as “Vulcan” out of the Village location, while ILV is now known as We Luv Video and has set up shop in the exact location that was once Vulcan North. They recently had their first anniversary and threw a block party to celebrate, with VHS swapping and getting new members to sign up. I was won over by the pitch, and invited my friend to have a nineties movie night this week, wherein we would go to the video store to pick out a movie, order a pizza, and enjoy. One of the great things about having a local rental store again is the “Staff Picks” selection, and my companion was immediately drawn to Happy Together, Wong Kar-wai’s tender but turbulent 1997 drama that’s easily one of the best examples of New Queer Cinema. 

Ho Po-Wing (Leslie Cheung) and Lai Yiu-Fai (Tony Leung) are a gay couple from Hong Kong who, hoping that a visit to Argentina will break the cycle of their constant break-ups and reconciliations. Po-Wing insists that they rent a car instead of taking a bus to visit the Iguaza Falls, which results in them getting lost and never making it to their destination. Their trip is marked by the acquisition of a lamp that creates a simulated image of a waterfall, which Fai keeps when he and Po-Wing break up once more because of the stress of their failed venture and the conflict that ensues. Lacking the funds to fly home, Fai takes up residence in a rundown motel in Buenos Aires, where he has a shoebox of a room and shares cooking facilities with all of the other residents, and he finds work as a doorman at a tango club. Po-Wing takes up a life as a sex worker, and Fai is forced to watch him entertain john after john at the club where he works. After the two of them argue and Fai confronts Po-Wing about spending all of their money and stranding them there, Po-Wing steals an expensive watch from one of his clients so that Fai can pawn it and go home but is badly beaten by the man over it. Po-Wing’s hands are badly injured, and he is forced to wear plaster bandages on them for an extended period, and Fai reluctantly becomes his caretaker. 

Po-Wing makes his interest in resuming their affair clear—Fai notes that Po-Wing’s “Let’s start over” was a constant refrain over their rocky separations and reunions—but while Fai clearly still loves and cares for him, they do not become lovers again. Po-Wing’s attempts to climb into bed with Fai only alienate him, and his constant whining and demanding tell us a great deal about what their relationship was like, even before he became largely incapable of fending for himself. He forces Fai to go jogging with him in terrible weather despite his ex’s reluctance, and when Fai takes ill because of the weather, Po-Wing still demands that he cook for them. Of course, Fai is revealed to be no shrinking violet or victim either, as we see that he becomes intensely jealous; when Po-Wing goes to get cigarettes and isn’t home when Fai returns from work, Fai buys multiple cartons so that Po-Wing has no reason to leave. He even takes Po-Wing’s passport the first night that his former lover stays with him following his release from the hospital and hides it so that Po-Wing can’t leave him. It’s clear that they were always toxic for each other, but that they were also madly, passionately in love in a way that defies all logic and common sense and drives one to extreme highs that make the extreme lows seem worthwhile. And that love is still present, even if it’s so tainted by mutual bitterness at this point that there’s no way for them to walk the same path ever again. 

Fai is fired from the tango bar when he attacks the man who beat Po-Wing and starts working at a Chinese restaurant. There, he befriends a young, handsome Taiwanese man named Chang (Chen Chang). Although Chang never expresses overt attraction to Fai, his affection is clear. Po-Wing becomes jealous after overhearing Chang in the background of one of his constant, demanding phone calls to Fai at work, and this, combined with Fai’s continuous refusal to return his passport, leads Po-Wing to move out when he is recovered from his injuries. Fai opens up to Chang about having left Hong Kong in disgrace due to stealing money from his employer, who was a friend of his father’s, and Chang tells Fai about his family’s food stall in the night market in Taipei. Chang eventually earns enough money to continue his travels and tells Fai he intends to travel to the southernmost tip of South America, where he has heard that one can release all their cares. He offers his tape recorder to Fai so he can carry his worries for him, but Fai can muster no words, only sobs. Fai starts to work nights in an abattoir so that he can get his body back on Hong Kong time and goes home, with Po-Wing breaking down upon realizing that Fai is really gone. 

This is one of the most moving films that I have ever seen. I’ve never been in the kind of relationship that the film depicts, one in which one partner’s jealousy and control issues and the other’s learned helplessness and deliberate provocation of envy put them in constant conflict with one another, but I’ve been a teenager (and a twentysomething, and a thirtysomething) in love, the kind of love that’s so big and so loud that it takes up the whole room. Love immiserates as well as illuminates, love consumes as well as sustains, and love can craze as much as it can ground. Po-Wing and Fai’s relationship is one that can swing back and forth between Po-Wing’s mad desire for the physical intimacy of sharing a bed even if they don’t touch, with complete disregard for Fai’s boundaries or well-being, to Fai berating his former lover for his promiscuous ways (before later cruising in the same ways and in the same places after Chang leaves, noting in his internal monologue that all lonely people are the same, deep down) while making him a virtual prisoner, to the two of them slow dancing in the shared kitchen of Fai’s hostel, sweet and kind and perfect — but only for a moment. 

The copy of this film that I watched was a grey market region-free DVD, and although the transfer was terrible (there are several scenes during the portion of the film where Fai is working in the restaurant wherein the subtitles are completely illegible against his white chef’s wear), it was nonetheless a beautiful movie. It’s a mood piece, wherein there are several long shots of urban decrepity punctuated by neon and headlights as well as very long shots of Iguaza Falls as we take in the majesty of the pouring, pulsing water, countless gallons and tons of the stuff moving at incomprehensible volume, churning with a power that can only be imagined and yet which pales in comparison to the raging waters that push and pull inside of Po–Wing and Fai. It’s powerful stuff, and worth tracking down.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Asphalt (1929)

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I am by no means well studied in the broader history of German Expressionism, but I have seen a horror movie or two.  When I think of the German Expressionist visual style, my mind immediately conjures up the fantastic, transportive images of titles like Nosferatu, M, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, The Man Who Laughs, The Hands of Orlac, Destiny, The Golem and, of course, Metropolis.  Even the cultural impact of those films’ innovative directors & cinematographers emigrating to America has always been most immediately apparent in early Hollywood horrors like The Black Cat & Dracula, given their surrealistic production design and shadowy visual play.  It was surprising, then, to find no supernatural dream logic in the once-lost German Expressionist drama Asphalt, which might account for the film’s relatively low name recognition in that field.  In terms of narrative, Joe May’s tragic story of mismatched lovers feels more familiar to early Hollywood dramas about misbehaved women than it does to the nightmare-realm horrors more typically associated with German Expressionism.  However, all of the ecstatic visual flourish associated with that film movement is in full swing, as the camera sways wildly in an attempt to capture the bustling urban chaos of Berlin, where its doomed love story is set.  Its plot synopsis might sound like the German equivalent of early US films like A Fool There Was, The Red Kimona, Parisian Love, or A Woman of the World, but it’s way less restrained & stage-bound than any of those titles.  It’s pure cinema, made by the people who established the language of that artform in its infancy.

Metropolis star Gustav Fröhlich plays a bumbling, naive cop who’s not quite streetwise enough to handle the streets of Berlin.  Else Heller (doing her best Louise Brooks drag) plays the young man’s downfall: a cunning, compulsive thief he catches robbing a jewelry store when he should be directing traffic his first day on the job.  The poor rube buys her sob story about needing to steal to survive, as she is perilously close to being evicted onto the harsh streets of Berlin.  An unlikely romance blossoms between cop & criminal as his sympathy grows, until she can’t stand his naivety any longer and fully confesses her betrayal of trust.  She does not, in fact, steal for survival.  She steals because it’s thrilling to get away with taking home diamonds & furs.  She steals for the fun of stealing.  What ruins the fun is the way her flirty pickpocket lifestyle gets her new beau into steep trouble, both with the macho brutes of her past and with the strictly law-abiding members of his own family.  The dramatic entertainment value of Asphalt is in watching a young, fashionable woman thieve, lie, and cheat in hedonistic excess, even if the morals of the era require it to eventually condemn her for crimes against morality.  No matter how deplorable the femme fatale’s behavior is in the abstract, the movie takes obvious delight in watching her smoke cigarettes and smolder in a heated bathtub, treating herself to a life of luxury that she would be denied through any legal path.  She might not steal to survive, exactly, but she does steal to make life worth surviving.

Asphalt intuitively takes for granted that crime is sexy & fun, so it gets to spend a lot of its time playing around with new, exciting ways to move the camera instead of complicating its central romantic dynamic.  It opens with kaleidoscopic mirroring of Berlin street traffic and sweeping montages of the rain-slicked asphalt beneath those cars & feet.  The camera is in constant motion, either evoking the mania of navigating a city’s cacophonous busyness in exterior scenes or taking inventory of individual objects & players on interior sets.  It represents an end of an era for ecstatic, inventive German filmmaking, but there’s no solemn, settled maturity to its cinematography.  It’s desperate to impress.  Like Metropolis, a complete print of Asphalt was considered lost media for decades, until it pieced back together through archival discovery & recovery in the 1990s.  Unlike Metropolis, it’s been largely forgotten to time a second time since that restoration.  There just isn’t as much of a completionist streak among romance & crime film enjoyers the same way that horror & sci-fi freaks will seek out anything that falls into their genre of choice.  I’m as guilty of that bias as anyone, having never heard of this film until a used DVD copy fell into my hands at the Minneapolis record store Electric Fetus.  Meanwhile, I’ve actively sought out at least a dozen horror films from the German Expressionist era in my frantic search to guzzle down all things horror.  It turns out they were making romantic dramas in that period too, just like in Hollywood (except way dreamier & prettier).

-Brandon Ledet

Carny (1980)

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One venue in which enthusiastic moviegoing is still alive & well is the Outdoor Movie Night, especially the free, inflatable-screen showings of Family Friendly favorites like Coco or Moana.  Those screenings are more of a community event than your typical, isolating trip to the cinema.  Families spread out on picnic blankets, halfheartedly try to keep their kids in eyesight as they play around with new friends and, whenever bored enough, pay attention to the movie being projected.  It’s cute.  The Broadside offers that same kind of Outdoor Movie Night experience with a little more formal structure & focus, having built a Family Friend compound next to The Broad Theater for regular concerts & laid-back screenings.  The recent Wildwood showing of 1980’s Carny made great use of that communal atmosphere.  To play off the movie’s traveling-carnival setting, they invited face-painters, stilt-walkers, tarot readers, and cotton candy spinners as a pre-show warmup, concluding with local musician Brookiecita (of LSD Clownsystem) introducing the film over a slideshow of her own childhood photographs from growing up on the carnival circuit.  There were indeed kids running around the grounds too, this time eating cotton candy and enjoying the “VIP room” of inflatable pools.

That Outdoor Movie Night atmosphere is worth noting here because Carny is absolutely not a Family Friendly affair.  This is one of those teenage Jodie Foster roles that edge right up to the line of being too slimy to stomach without ever fully crossing it (see also: Taxi Driver, Foxes, The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane).  Foster plays an underage waitress who’s bored with the tedium of small-town living, so she joins a traveling carnival on a whim after lusting after its most boisterous performer (Gary Busey in horrifying clown makeup).  Struggling to establish her place in the carnival beyond her function as The Dunk Tank Clown’s girlfriend, she briefly auditions as one of the striptease dancers in the “hoochie coochie” tent.  This decision lands the teenager in multiple compromising scenarios: modeling lingerie for hooting drunkards, getting body-slammed onto the stage by said drunkards, and eventually getting tied to a bed by a villainous goon who threatens to sexually assault her before her fellow carnies intervene.  The worst part is that her much older boyfriend knows exactly how old she is (while she lies to everyone else about already being 18), and the safer, more appropriate job he eventually finds for her is still as sexual bait in one of the carnival-game booths – this time working marks for pocket change, which we see play out in a lengthy sequence of lesbian cruising.

All of this dangerous flirtation with Jodie Foster’s early cinematic persona as Teenage Jailbait is eased by the film always implying its sex scenes instead of fully illustrating them and by its characterization of her as a consenting participant in her own seduction & indoctrination.  It’s also eased by the fact that Carny isn’t really about her seduction into the carny lifestyle at all.  It’s more of a love story about the two best bros she gets between: Busey as the clown and musician Robbie Robertson as his “midway” hustler trailer-mate.  Busey & Robertson love each other with furious devotion, often expressing their mutual affection in drunken acts of group sex with women they pick up on the road.  It throws off their dynamic when Busey catches real feelings for Foster, then, and that goes double for when Robertson inevitably has sex with her too.  Their seething jealousies & whispered bickering just outside of her earshot end up taking over the foreground of the movie while her own coming of age carny-life story fades into the background, so that it’s less of a love triangle than it is a tortured bromance.  That helps steal some attention away from the situational leering at Foster’s body, but Carny still made for an intensely uncomfortable watch at times, especially in an Outdoor Movie Night setting.

Of course, discomfort was the intent.  The movie opens with Busey smearing on his greasy clown paint before hopping into the dunk-tank cage, antagonizing every mark who strolls by like a screeching gorilla.  It concludes with a classic hall-of-mirrors horror sequence in which the carnies plot to scare off local thugs who are shaking them down for obscene payouts, essentially borrowing its climax from Tod Browning’s 1930s cult classic Freaks.  Despite those intentionally scary images and the amoral sexual politics of Foster’s seduction into the carny lifestyle, Brookiecita introduced the movie as a humanizing, empathetic portrayal of traveling carnival folk as a type of found family.  Likewise, Robertson co-wrote, produced, and partially scored the picture based on his own experiences as a teenage carnival worker, fondly remembering his time in the business.  Personally, I got my own “seedy underbelly of the carnival” crash course from Bikini Kill’s “Carnival,” not The Band’s “Life is a Carnival,” but I like to think I still got the message.  In Carny, Robertson seemed to be acknowledging both the warmth of the carnival community when dealing with their own and the grimy, violent hucksterism they could stoop to when dealing with outsiders.  In a way, that clash of familial warmth and carnival grime actually made it a perfect Outdoor Movie Night selection, the best one I’ve seen since The Broadside screened Demons with live prog-rock accompaniment.

-Brandon Ledet

Bubble (2005)

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Even more so than your Slow Cinema auteur of choice, Steven Soderbergh is the master of the mundane. He consistently makes tight, thrilling, wryly funny dispatches from the florescent-lit hell pits of American tedium.  A 70min experiment in early-2000s digi cinematography and purposefully deflated genre payoffs, Bubble is a perfect illustration of that skill.  Its vision of America is a complex labyrinth of small-town diners, factory breakrooms, and low-ceiling apartments.  The doomed souls who navigate those mundane spaces all work multiple jobs for the privilege of getting paid minimum wage, wondering in their spare time what it might have been like if they had stuck it out for a full high school diploma.  When jailed for a violent crime, they complain “It’s horrible in here,” but it’s so oppressively bland everywhere else that it’s questionable whether rotting in a concrete cell is any worse than being free to work their next shift.  Even the murder that lands them there is bleakly, purposefully uninteresting. 

I suppose there’s some novelty in what type of Midwest factory employs these small-town workers.  Bubble was shot in a real, operational doll parts factory in Ohio, which makes for some horrific digital-video footage in early scenes.  The mundanity of the world outside the assembly line quickly closes in, though.  Loneliness & petty jealousies shared among three of the factory workers leads to one of their murders, with only one clear suspect and no real need to investigate.  A deleted scene explains the psychology behind that act of violence like the Freudian denouement of Hitchcock’s Psycho, but Soderbergh removes even that morsel of narrative satisfaction from the final cut.  He also undercuts the potential for dramatic excitement or emotion by casting non-actor locals to play the central parts, mumbling their semi-improvised lines through obvious shyness.  Even the camera’s movements are pedestrian, often just swiveling on a stationary tri-pod like an oscillating security cam.  It’s all very matter of fact, and the facts of the matter are all grim, grey gruel.

Handling the editing & cinematography himself under pseudonyms, Soderbergh seemed to be having fun playing around with the unpretentious tools of the new digital filmmaking era.  He even got hands-on in Bubble‘s distribution strategy, striking a deal with the Mark Cuban-owned cable company HDNet to release the film simultaneously in theaters, on-demand, and on physical disc.  His pitch was that hopefully audiences would be drawn to see the movie in theaters and, if they liked it, would pick up a physical copy for repeat viewings on the way home.  Corporate theater chains were outraged at this disruption to the traditional theatrical window, but that day-and-date release strategy has obviously become more of a standard practice in recent years.  Bubble was supposed to be the first of six HDNet releases with the same improvised-drama filming methods and unconventional home distribution schedules, but instead it flopped and mostly fell out of circulation.  I had to find my DVD copy second-hand, and it only includes a Spanish-language subtitles track, so it likely traveled far to reach me.

Forever adaptable, Soderbergh has been doing just fine in the two decades since the Bubble debacle.  If anything, he’s since moved on to making straight-to-HBO cheapies instead of straight-to-HDNet cheapies, which feels like a minor step up in prestige.  He’s also had a few theatrical hits since then and has flirted with the idea of early retirement, only to discover that he’d rather be making movies no matter the scale in production or distribution.  Bubble is not his most exciting, imaginative dispatch from the great mediocre American void (that would be Schizopolis), but it might be the most indicative example of his stripped-down, unfussy style.  In most other cases where a career-shifting work from a major filmmaker had fallen out of distribution, it would be tempting to petition for a spiffy new digital restoration from a boutique Blu-ray label.  In Bubble‘s case, it feels totally appropriate for it to be stuck in time on thrift-store DVDs.  The only reason to reissue it, really, would be for a new director’s commentary track looking back on how the industry has changed in the past couple decades, since Soderbergh happens to be the master of those too.

-Brandon Ledet

The Bikeriders (2024)

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The thing about shamelessly borrowing from Scorsese’s Goodfellas is that it works.  It worked for Paul Thomas Anderson when he applied the Goodfellas template to the Golden Age of porno in Boogie Nights.  It worked for Todd Haynes when he applied it to the classic glam rock scene in Velvet Goldmine (even if he had to mix in a healthy dose of Citizen Kane to throw critics off the scent).  And now it has worked just as well for Jeff Nichols in his new film The Bikeriders, which is essentially just Goodfellas on motorbikes.  All three of these Goodfellas derivatives follow a distinct pattern that starts in a Fuck Around era (in which they introduce the audience to the power outsiders feel when they find community in seemingly dangerous subcultures), followed by the requisite Find Out Era (in which those subcultures are unraveled by drugs & violence), distinctly marked by the turning of a decade.  They all heavily rely on vintage pop-music montage and period-specific costume design to evoke the cool-factor appeal of their subcultural settings, often underlined in wry voiceover.  I’m also of the lowbrow opinion that all three are the career-best feature films of their respective directors to date. It’s an overly familiar genre template, but that’s because it’s a consistently effective one.

If Nichols narrows in on any particular element of the Goodfellas formula that other imitators miss, it’s in the second-act narrator switch in which the protagonist-gangster’s wife, Karen (Lorraine Bracco), highjacks the story’s POV for a short stretch.  We get a great taste of how overwhelming it is to be plunged into the deep end of a foreign subculture during Karen’s wedding-sequence narration in particular, but more importantly we get a woman’s perspective on what makes that particular subculture sexy.  One of the most important line-readings of Scorsese’s script is Karen describing the first time she directly witnessed mobster violence first-hand, confessing “I know there are women, like my best friends, who would have gotten out of there the minute their boyfriend gave them a gun to hide. But I didn’t. I got to admit the truth. It turned me on.”  Jodie Comer’s wife-of-a-motorcycle rebel narrator Kathy keeps that horny engine running throughout the entire runtime of The Bikeriders, whereas Goodfellas only takes Karen’s POV for a few minutes.  It’s not enough that Jeff Nichols dresses up every young character-actor hunk of today in the fetishistic biker gear of yesteryear, mounted on the backs of roaring sex machines.  He also frames them from the perspective of a woman panting like a cartoon hound in disbelief of how ridiculous and how ridiculously sexy they are.  Comer gives the best lead performance of the year as a result, even if she is just a regional accent in high-waist jeans.

Otherwise, the movie rides within the painted lines of the road that Goodfellas paved.  The Shangri-Las check off the 60s-Girl-Group-Soundtrack requirement of the template, with “Out in the Streets” deployed as an overture that explains Comer’s lustful fascination with Austin Butler’s bad-boy rebel.  She has to compete for his attention with Tom Hardy’s gang leader, who is living out a fantasy in his head in which he is the Wild One Brando to Butler’s Causeless Rebel Dean.  Nichols positions Hardy as a weekend-warrior poser and Butler as the real-deal biker rebel that all of his fellow riders strive to emulate.  They form a motorcycle riding club in the Fuck Around 1960s, then cower in disgust as it spirals out of control in the Find Out 1970s, mostly due to Vietnam War PTSD from their younger recruits.  Comer maintains a “Can you believe these guys?” incredulity throughout that helps keep the mood light, recounting tales from the road to a photojournalist played by Mike Faist, who in real life published the anthropological portraits that Nichols adapted to the screen.  From there, the cast is rounded out by young That Guy character actors playing eccentric bikers with ludicrous nicknames: Norman Reedus as Funny Sonny, Karl Glusman as Corky, Michael Shannon as Zipco, Toby Wallace as The Kid, etc.  They all look just as great in their grimy leather jackets as the cast of Goodfellas looked in their shiny silk suits.

All of this posing & posturing in vintage biker gear makes total sense for a movie adapted from a series of portraits where motorcycle nerds & freaks posed for still images.  It’s also appropriate for a subculture that was so intrinsically image-obsessed, wherein men with regular jobs & families would play dress-up with their buddies to live out the rebel-biker fantasies they would otherwise only see at The Movies.  The Bikeriders is not a pure, prurient portrait of handsome men in leather & denim, though.  It’s much less of a capital-A Art Film than Katherine Bigelow’s The Loveless in that way, even though it shares its themes & interests.  The Goodfellas template allows it to indulge in as much sexy rebel-biker fantasy and subcultural anthropology as it wants without leaving a mainstream audience behind in its dust.  It might be an unimaginative way to hold a movie together, but dammit it works every time.

-Brandon Ledet

Quick Takes: Summertime Drama

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It’s been a strangely quiet summer for theatrical moviegoing so far, thanks largely to last year’s Hollywood labor strikes.  All of the usual corporate slop that clogs up American movie marquees has been arriving in a slow trickle instead of a constant flood, which has many box office pundits panicking about the collapse of theatrical exhibition as a viable industry.  I understand that theaters need weekly hits to sell enough popcorn to keep the projectors running, but I have to admit I’ve mostly been enjoying the lull.  This year’s short supply of substantial superhero sequels & IP extenders has left a lot of room for smaller, gentler films to breathe in local cinemas – from digital restorations of already venerated classics like Le Samouraï  & It’s Such a Beautiful Day to future classics in D.I.Y. outsider art like Hundreds of Beavers & The People’s Joker.  It’s actually been a great summer for movies so far if all you care about is easy access to high-quality cinema, which pretty much fully accounts for my selfish POV.

Last year, when I wrote about the state of summertime moviegoing in early June, I reported that I had retreated from theaters to watch smaller, quieter movies than what they were offering at home instead.  This year, I don’t have to stream those quiet dramas from my couch; they’re actually playing in New Orleans cinemas right now.  Theaters may be struggling, but attentive cinephiles are thriving.  So, here are a few short-form reviews of the smaller-scale, smaller-budget dramas currently playing across the city (among other titles I haven’t had time to catch up with yet, like The Bikeriders, Tuesday, and I Used to Be Funny).

Ghostlight

The most consistent, predictable supplier of the small-scale indie drama is, of course, The Sundance Film Festival, which typically opens the year with a handful of buzzy, awardsy titles that inevitably get drowned out by louder, flashier titles from later festivals like Cannes.  Somehow, Ghostlight plays directly into the tropes & expectations of a typical Sundance selection but earns sharp laughs and emotional pangs though that familiar template.  A family drama about a macho, emotionally closed-off construction worker who gets in touch with his feelings by signing up to play Romeo Montague in a community-theatre Shakespeare production, it’s got the general shape of a standard post-Little Miss Sunshine festival breakout.  However, it ends up being an inversion of hokey indie drama tropes instead of playing them straight.  There are plenty dramas that are shot like documentaries, and there are plenty documentaries that are shot like dramas; Ghostlight is a drama shot like a documentary that’s shot like a drama (a turdocen, if you will).  There are also plenty dramas wherein an actor’s real life starts to mirror a role they’re playing in their art, but Ghostlight is about an already famous play that starts to mirror the actor’s life instead, taking the teen-suicide themes of Romeo & Juliet more seriously than most modern adaptations and interpretations. It’s shockingly successful in that inversion too. If nothing else, it made me cry earlier & more often than any other new release I’ve seen so far this year.

I don’t often cry when something sad happens in a movie, like when the farm burns down in Minari.  I tend to cry at mawkish acts of kindness, like when Mrs. Harris is gifted the dress she desperately wanted after her trip to Paris.  In Ghostlight, all of the saddest events in our tough-exterior construction worker’s life happen before the audience meets the big softie.  All we really know about him at first is that he’s explosively angry when pressed to talk about his feelings, and that he’s currently rehearsing for two auditions: one for a legal deposition in a civil lawsuit and one for his first theatrical role as Romeo.  The audience is able to deduce the details of the lawsuit long before our grieving hero has the strength to voice them, based on his discomfort with the plot of the Shakespearean tragedy he was roped into performing.  The biggest tearjerking moments are all in the way his small social circle gently pushes him to heal without scaring him off: Dolly de Leon as a failed pro actor who takes him in like a wounded puppy, Katherine Mallen Kupferer as his theatre-nerd daughter who finally has a mechanism for bonding with her walled-off father, Tara Mallen as his put-upon wife who supports his surprising new hobby even though it threatens the couple’s domestic intimacy.  It’s a lovely, loving communal dynamic that only gets more emotionally effective once you learn that the central family unit is played by a real-life family of Chicago-area actors, led by Keith Kupferer as the hard-hatted thespian.  So much of Ghostlight‘s premise and presentation sounds phony in the abstract, but in practice there’s a raw, healing truth to it that’s cathartic to anyone willing to be vulnerable.

Janet Planet

Not everyone wants to spend the hot summer months having a public ugly-cry about small acts of kindness.  Maybe you just want to space out in your neighborhood theater’s AC and observe small acts of being.  The 1990s period piece Janet Planet is a warmly familiar coming-of-age story slowwwed down to the tempo of summer bugs ambiently chirping in the woods.  It’s like a less traumatic Aftersun, chronicling the summer months spent by a young girl named Lacy (Zoe Ziegler) quietly observing her mother, Janet (Julianne Nicholson).  The film’s chapter breaks are named after various temporary boarders & lovers who drift through the small family’s home, mostly without incident.  Lacy is a bookworm introvert who observes the adult behavior around her with searing intensity, which redirects the dramatic scrutiny of the movie towards Janet’s relationships.  Occasionally, she’ll match her mother’s impulsive, depressed disposition with unprompted one-liners like “Do you know what’s funny? Every moment of my life is hell.”  Mostly, though, this is a drama of recognition, dragging the audience back to childhood experiences of being lonely, bored, and disregarded – filling your empty schedule with personal rituals, like compulsively plastering your loose hairs on the shower wall.  Lacy is realistically awkward, selfish, and nosy for a child her age.  We’ve all been there, but not all of us were so still and so quiet about it.

I would have never guessed that Janet Planet is the debut film of a well-known playwright (Annie Baker), given the general sparseness of its spoken dialogue.  There’s a detailed specificity to Lacy’s environment at the edge of 1990s Massachusetts hippie communes that feels like the work of a novelist, especially by the time she’s attending midsummer puppet festivals and watching her mother run an at-home acupuncture clinic (the titular Janet Planet).  At the same time, it belongs to a broad lineage of observational coming-of-age stories broadcasting the inner lives of young girls: Are You There God? It’s Me Margaret, My Girl, Mermaids, Now & Then, Eighth Grade, Peppermint Soda, the aforementioned Aftersun, etc.  Its major distinction within that canon is in its slow-cinema distancing, in which a fixed camera silently observes the figures shrinking in its frame as they wander at the edges of American wilderness, their thoughts drowned out by the roaring static of birds & bugs.  I suppose it’s also distinct in that it’s the only film in this canon with a Laurie Anderson needle drop, which alone says a lot about the idiosyncrasies of Lacy & Janet’s particular, peculiar home environment.

Evil Does Not Exist

Falling further down the slow-cinema rabbit hole, Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s latest drama Evil Does Not Exist is even more quietly observant of its characters’ bodies shrinking against the enormity of nature, often staring into a fixed place in the wooded distance for minutes on end.  Unlike Janet Planet, though, it’s set in the snowy mountains of a small village outside Tokyo, which is a visually appealing reprieve from the Climate Change heat waves outside the cinema walls.  That village will not be small for long.  After distantly observing the daily lives & labor of the rural locals, we’re led to a fluorescent-lit townhall meeting wherein greedy real estate developers announce a plan to establish a large-scale “glamping” site for tourists that will transform the village forever, despite protests.  The rest of the film is a tense battle of wills between skeptical locals who want to maintain an authentic relationship with their environment (represented by Hitoshi Okima) and big-city phonies who want to commodify that authenticity as an amusement-park experience (represented by Tyuji Kosaka).  This philosophical clash inevitably culminates in a shocking act of violence in the final seconds, but most of the “evil” depicted in the film is quietly bureaucratic and told through the grimaces of the locals being steamrolled for short-term profits.

I had an unexpectedly conflicted reaction to Evil Does Not Exist, especially to its cheap digi-video image quality.  Its amateur-grade digital video felt appropriately soulless when mocking the sinister mundanity of City Brain but felt flat & ugly when gazing at the idyllic mundanity of Country Life.  Dramatically, it packs neither the emotional wallop of Ghostlight nor the melancholic beauty of Janet Planet, even if its political & philosophical themes are more sharply defined.  It ended up being a mixed bag for me, which was a surprise after being enthusiastic about the other Hamaguchis I’ve seen (Drive My Car and Asako I & II).  Still, its quiet mood and overly patient pacing make for excellent summertime counterprogramming just as much as Ghostlight or Janet Planet.  These are the kinds of movies that theaters usually only have space for in the last-minute awards campaigns of winter, so excuse me if I’m a little perversely grateful for mainstream Hollywood’s current supply-chain struggles.

-Brandon Ledet

Days of Heaven (1978)

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One of the most beloved jokes among film people is the one about how everyone wishes that they could be like Terence Malick and take a twenty year vacation. This is a reference to the fact that Malick was so exhausted by the making of 1978’s Days of Heaven that he didn’t attempt to mount another film production until The Thin Red Line, which was released in 1998. The fact of the matter is that if this had been the last thing that Malick ever made, it would still be a masterpiece. With almost all of the film being shot during dawn and dusk, this is without a doubt one of the most beautiful movies of all time, an almost impossibly staggering work of art. 

Bill (Richard Gere) is a manual laborer in a steel mill in Chicago in the mid 1910s. He has a temper, and when he knocks over a foreman during an argument and accidentally kills the man, he flees the city with his younger sister Linda (Linda Manz) and his lover, Abby (Brooke Adams). In order to avoid judgment and gossip for being an unwed couple, they pretend to all be siblings. They find themselves in the Texas panhandle, not far from Amarillo, and take on work as seasonal laborers at the farm of a wealthy but reclusive farmer (Sam Shepard). When Bill overhears that the farmer has been given a prognosis of only a few months, he convinces Abby to marry the man so that she can inherit his wealth when he dies and they can be set for life. Abby does so, reluctantly, but then finds herself actually falling for the farmer, while he in turn seems revitalized. Only the farmer’s trusted foreman (Robert Wilke) seems to think that anything’s amiss, but the farmer sends him off to another part of the huge ranch in a fit of pique. After a period of easy living, Abby and Bill get a little careless, and her husband starts to sense what’s happening. Before anything can really be done about it, Bill leaves the farm for a time, citing “business” elsewhere; he returns the following harvest at the same time as a new group of seasonal laborers, but a swarm of locusts isn’t far behind, and the attempts to burn them out only create more tribulation, with tragedy soon to follow. 

Narratively, Days of Heaven is a little thin. Famously, Malick decided late in the process to cut a great deal of the dialogue and instead let a voiceover from young Linda carry most of the exposition, along with her insights. In turn, the voiceover was largely ad-libbed, which lends the whole thing an unfinished, extemporaneous quality. It’s the thing that I like least in this film, even though it was, legendarily, the only way that he could think of to make the film work, so who am I to judge? Further, I would say that there are parts of the film in which the narration is to the film’s benefit; this is most obvious in the early scenes, as it establishes the characters and their relationships to one another. There’s also a good bit of foreshadowing built in when she talks about her encounter with a traveling hellfire-and-brimstone minister, which neatly sets up the fire at the farm at the end in particular but also the general biblical influences that are found throughout, fitting for a film with “heaven” in the title. Like Abraham and Sarai/Sarah, a couple has to go into hiding and pretend to be siblings; like Jacob, Bill is kept from being with his beloved and forced to labor instead; like Moses, Bill survives a plague of locusts but never gets to enter the promised land because of the consequences of his temper. It’s relying on those associations to make the plot work, but that’s really not what’s important here. 

What matters are the feelings of longing, and the way that the photography captures that transitional space between day and night (and vice versa). Everybody here is in a constant state of utter yearning, and the way that this is caught on film is lightning in a bottle. I also can understand why that made this one a nightmare to create, with less than an hour a day of the perfect light. That craftsmanship is apparent in every frame, however, and it’s definitely worth seeing if you have the chance. I was fortunate enough to catch this one at my local arthouse cinema, and I would say it’s the best way to go about it. If that’s not an option for you, then you’re in luck; although the original 2007 Criterion release has been out of print for a long time, there’s a Blu-Ray pressing that’s currently available. 

I also don’t want to end this review without calling out Brooke Adams’s performance. I adore her as the mother to Ione Skye and Fairuza Balk in 1992’s Gas, Food, Lodging, and she’s also amazing as Sarah in Cronenberg’s Dead Zone adaptation. And who could forget her performance in the 1978 remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers? In spite of all of those triumphs, this might be a career best performance for her, as she’s torn between the two men in her life. There’s a way that her face just breaks when she realizes that her world was never as solid as she thought it was when Bill’s temper gets the best of him for the last time, and it’s so subtle and so lovely. This is a slow one, but its reputation is as well-earned as Malick’s rest was.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Bonus Features: Torch Song Trilogy (1988)

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Our current Movie of the Month, 1988’s Torch Song Trilogy, is Harvey Fierstein’s big-screen adaptation of his own stage play about a drag queen’s life, loves, and heartbreaks in 1970s New York.  The film’s greatest accomplishments lie less in its queer political advocacy than they lie in its dramatic approximation of a full, authentic life for Fierstein’s protagonist – something gay men were rarely afforded onscreen at the time, even the cis white ones.  By all accounts, the original stage play version of Torch Song Trilogy approximated an even fuller, more authentic record of gay life in 1970s NYC, since it was twice as long as its movie adaptation.  One of the producers’ only contractual obligations for Fierstein’s screenplay was that the movie could be no longer than two hours, which meant a lot of tough-choice editing of a play that ran for four.  Instead of narrowing in on a few key moments in his life (through the fictional avatar of Arnold Beckoff), Fierstein decided to maintain the full breadth of the play’s story for most of the runtime, so that an inopportune bathroom break means that you could miss a half-decade of love & loss.

Torch Song Trilogy was unique but not alone in its no-big-deal dramatization of everyday gay life for a 1980s audience.  In general, independent filmmaking was a relatively robust industry in that era, which means there were plenty of gay filmmakers in that era who were eager to flesh out representation for their own demographic on the big screen.  If you’re curious to see other 1980s dramas about gay life in the big city, here are a few more titles to check out in addition to our Movie of the Month.

Buddies (1985)

Torch Song Trilogy is notably one of the few gay 80s classics that doesn’t touch the communal devastation of AIDS, since it’s set before the darkest days of the epidemic.  It opens with a shot of a graveyard at the outskirts of New York City that visually acknowledges how cultural circumstances had changed between the film’s 1970s setting & 1980s production, but the mission of the story that follows is mostly to show an adult gay man living a full, healthy, normal life . . . filtered through the wry humor of Fierstein’s hyper-specific personality.  Arthur J. Bressan’s 1985 landmark Buddies does not sidestep the horrors of its time in the same way, but it does take similar interest in fleshing out its central characters’ lives & personalities, so they don’t register only as statistics.  The opening credits of Buddies scroll over a computer printout of deceased AIDS patients’ names to establish the scope of the illness’s death toll, but it then focuses on just two onscreen characters to humanize those names as full, real people.  Everyone else with a speaking role is a disembodied voice, heard from just off-screen.  The only people who matter are a man dying of AIDS-related health complications and a volunteer “Buddy” who’s been assigned to keep him company after he’s been left to die alone by family & friends.

Self-billed as “the first dramatic feature about the AIDS crisis”, Buddies has all of the furious politics of a Tongues Untied presented with the endearing tenderness of a Torch Song Trilogy, almost cleanly split between its only two onscreen characters.  Geoff Edholm stars as the dying man: a gay-rights activist whose commitment to communal advocacy proved to be no match to his community’s fear of transmission in the early, hazy days of AIDS research.  David Schachter is his assigned, volunteer buddy: a shy assimilationist who’s content to live a quiet domestic life with his boyfriend without any public acknowledgement of his sexuality.  Through lengthy stage-play conversations voicing their opposing views, they reluctantly learn from each other and become vulnerably intimate despite their opposing politics and lifespan expectancy.  It’s a painfully emotional watch, of course, especially after you learn that the actors’ real lives almost exactly mirrored the respective arcs of their characters.  Bressan’s own personality as an auteur is also just as clearly visible in the picture as Fierstein’s in Torch Song Trilogy, given that his two central characters bond by watching his earlier films together in a hospital room (from the political activism documentary Gay U.S.A. to the age-gap porno Forbidden Letters) and that Bressan himself soon lost his life to the AIDS epidemic as well as Edholm.

Parting Glances (1986)

Released just one year after Buddies, 1986’s Parting Glances offers a tempered middle ground between Bressan’s confrontational politics and Fierstein’s heart-on-sleeve melodrama. Unlike Torch Song Trilogy, it does contend with the unignorable presence of AIDS in contemporary urban gay life, but unlike Buddies it relegates AIDS to being just one aspect of modern gay life, not the totality of it.  Steve Buscemi plays the HIV+ character who bears the burden of that vital representation: a new wave musician with a once bustling social life who’s been shunned by his own community out of knee-jerk fear & stigma.  He remains defiantly playful & energetic despite being treated as if he were already dead by his chosen family, quipping his way through cramped-apartment cocktail parties and video-art recordings of his will.  Curiously, though, he is not the main character of the film; that designation belongs to his happily-coupled bestie who lives the quiet, assimilated domestic life that Fierstein craves in Torch Song Trilogy and Schacter starts to question in Buddies.  Both characters bounce their understandably jaded world views off friends, neighbors, and potential sexual partners while hopping around NYC social spaces, living a full life.  The contrast in the way they’re received by that community is drastically different, though, depending on their disclosed HIV status.

I may not have spent decades living in the big city like Harvey Fierstein, but I can name at least two things that were beautiful in 1980s NYC: the independent filmmaking scene and Steve Buscemi.  Parting Glances can’t help but feel a little restrained watching it so soon after its more confrontational precedent in Buddies, but every scene featuring Buscemi as a defiantly sardonic man with AIDS is electric. It says a lot that he’s not the main character but he’s the only face on the poster, affording the film the kind of strong, singular personality Fierstein impressed on Torch Song Trilogy and Bressan impressed on Buddies.  Like with Buddies, its open, honest discussion of AIDS during the violent silence of the Reagan regime only gets heavier knowing the history of the artists involved who also died of AIDS-related illnesses, including promising young director & playwright Bill Sherwood in this case, who did not live to make another film.

My Beautiful Laundrette (1985)

Believe it or not, not all urban gay life in the 1980s was confined to New York City.  They even had gay men across the pond back then, as dramatized in 1985’s My Beautiful Laundrette.  While gay men in America were fighting to survive Reagan, gay men in England were fighting to survive Thatcher, and the cultural circumstances on either side of that divide were remarkably similar.  So, My Beautiful Laundrette has to dig a little deeper into cultural specifics in order to stand out among gay independent cinema of its era, notably doing so here as the only film on this list with a non-white lead (albeit a closeted one).  Gordon Warnecke stars as a young Pakistani man who works his way up his uncle’s small-scale crime network until he can carve out a money-maker of his own by running one of the mobsters’ few legitimate businesses: a kitschy, old-school laundromat.  In order to help with the day-to-day operations (and to manufacture opportunities to have sex in the back office), he employs a childhood friend & potential future lover played by Daniel Day Lewis, who has betrayed their intimate bond by joining the ranks of some racist, fascist street punks. 

My Beautiful Laundrette takes so long to establish its premise that you forget you’re watching a Gay Movie until the leads start making out.  Decades later, it still feels remarkable to see a drama that treats that identity marker as background texture instead of it informing every single character decision & line of dialogue. There were infinite hurdles to surviving Thatcher; being a gay man was just one of them.  In that way, this is the film that best lives up to Torch Song Trilogy‘s presumed mission to depict a gay character with a full, fulfilling life.  It’s not exactly a healthy life, though, given that he has to navigate the racism of his community, the homophobic violence of the crime world, and his own internal questions of identity as a second-generation immigrant whose family hates the “little island” where they’ve raised him.  That doesn’t mean the movie is shy about his sexuality though.  If anything, it has the hottest sexual dynamics of any film listed here, with Daniel Day Lewis’s punk reprobate licking his employer’s neck, spitting champagne into his mouth, and playing into a class-divide role play dynamic that touches on all of the film’s hot-wire political issues at once. 

-Brandon Ledet

Ace in the Hole (1951)

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Within the first five minutes of Ace in the Hole, Kirk Douglas does one of the coolest things I’ve ever seen: hitting the carriage return button on a typewriter and while holding a match to the machine, igniting it so that he can light his cigarette. It’s also the last thing he does before we find out what kind of man he really is, and our respect for him is going to vary a lot over the next hour and a half. Douglas is Charles Tatum, a newspaperman extraordinaire, who’s worked in New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, and every other major news center in the U.S., and he’s lost his job in every one because he brings about libel suits, gets involved with the publisher’s wife, or gets caught drinking “out of season.” He tells all this to Jacob Q. Boot (Porter Hall), the editor, publisher, and owner of the Albuquerque Sun-Bulletin, when he finds himself stranded in New Mexico. Boot, a man who is notably wearing both belt and suspenders, tells him that he’s also the town lawyer and edits every word before printing, that Mrs. Boot is a grandmother thrice over who would be flattered to be on the receiving end of Tatum’s attention, but that he won’t tolerate any liquor on the premises. Tatum sees this as an opportunity to start small and transition back to the big leagues, but after a year of dull news and a lack of anything exciting, he’s grown restless. 

He and the paper’s young photographer Herbie Cook (Robert Arthur) are sent on a trip to cover a rattlesnake hunt, but when they stop for gas in a place called Escudero, they find the station and its attached diner empty, save for a grieving older woman who does not greet or notice them. Realizing that there’s some ruckus going on behind the place at some nearby caverns, they start to drive up and come upon Lorraine Minosa (Jan Sterling), who tells them that her husband has been caught in a cave-in while exploring some “Indian” caves (the film never identifies the tribe other than a reference to the Minosa’s cafe selling Navajo blankets, and since Escudero doesn’t seem to be a real place, we don’t even have a region that would allow us to determine the tribe from a territory map). They drive up to the mouth of the cave and Tatum talks his way past the deputy and, given blankets and coffee by the buried man’s father, enters the cave, where he meets Leo Minosa (Richard Benedict) and, turning on the charm, convinces the man to trust him. 

Intending to capitalize on the potential human-interest story, Tatum sets up shop in the Minosa’s motel/gas station/cafe and gets to work, taking the story of a veteran trapped in a cave-in and pairing that with the sensationalist story that he may have been the victim of vengeance from “Indian spirits” due to his treasure hunting in the appropriately ominously named “Mountain of the Seven Vultures.” When he discovers Lorraine preparing to leave the next morning with the eleven dollars she takes from the till and convinces her to stay, at first attempting to appeal to her wifely love for her husband and, when this tack doesn’t work, promises that she’ll find herself rich enough to take off with a lot more than eleven dollars if she sticks around and plays along. Tatum manipulates all involved, as he charms the sheriff (Ray Teal) as well, promising him re-election as he will play the part of the local hero coordinating activities; the sheriff, in turn, manipulates the engineer in charge of getting the man out to switch from his initial plan of putting in supporting struts to secure the passageway and getting Leo out in about a day to a more involved, visually striking plan to drill down through the mountain to get him out, which will stretch the operations out to five to seven days. The whole thing turns into a media circus — literally at one point, as the number of people drawn in by the spectacle starts to enter quadruple digits and the carnival is brought in. As Tatum becomes more energized and starts getting calls from the big city papers again, he continues to gamble with Leo’s life (hence the title) as he tries to get back on top. 

This is a whip smart movie with fast, witty dialogue, so sharp that it could shave your chin. Douglas is phenomenal, bigger than life, so much louder and more boisterous than everyone around him that you can see clearly that it’s not just his ability to read people and offer them exactly what they want; it’s his pure charisma and the way that he takes up all the air in the room. Sterling’s performance, however, is the standout to me. You’d think it would be impossible to make us like a woman who’s willing to use her husband’s physical entrapment as an excuse to escape, but she so effectively captures the boredom and tiredness of being trapped in a desert nowhere. When Tatum invokes her need to repay her husband for marrying her and giving her a life, she tells that him that she was fooled by his promise that he owned sixty acres and “a big business,” with the acres amounting to useless sand and the business being a place where she “sell[s] eight hamburgers a week and a case of soda pop” while Leo continues to treasure hunt in a clearly unsafe cave. She’s been repaying him for five years, she says, and she’s ready to get out; she’s vain and apathetic about her husband’s situation, but she’s also got a point. 

She’s among the few people who can give Tatum a run for his money in the sass department, including an early defining character moment when he asks if they can put him up for the night and she responds with “Sixty beautiful rooms at the Escudero Ritz. Which will it be, ocean view or mountain view?” Tatum’s editor Boot can also go toe-to-toe with him on occasion, as evidenced by him pulling a nickel out of his pocket and handing it over to Tatum when they first meet and Tatum negs the Sun-Bulletin by way of leading up to the offering of his services. Perhaps most fun, however, is the one-scene appearance of Richard Gaines as Nagel, a fiery, tempestuous New York editor who makes J.K. Simmons’s J. Jonah Jameson look like a bored Brian Williams. The people who can’t compete with him generally fall under his spell. The sheriff, for his part, is utterly guileless in his corruption and ability to be manipulated and goes so far as to have “Re-Elect Gus Krentz for Sheriff” painted on the side of the mountain one night, which is so comically odious that you almost have to respect him. He’s not as smooth or as clever as Lorraine, but he is devious, and willing to twist any arm that he can get his hands on, if it puts a penny in his pocket. 

The thing about gambling is that you can only ride a lucky deal for so long, and if you keep on going and keep on pushing, your luck will eventually run out. Tatum’s right about the cynical nature of the public—eighty-four people trapped in a mine is not as newsworthy as one man—but he’s also haunted by the same flaws that cast him out of the metropoles and into the desert in the first place, including his insistence that he doesn’t “make things happen, [he only] write[s] about them.” By the time he starts drinking again, he’s already lost his way completely, not that he was ever the most respectable member of the fourth estate. It’s not merely enough that he’s coercing reality into a narrative that he can sell, it’s that he’s also pushing the limit of Leo’s endurance, as he starts to develop pneumonia due to being unable to move for days, and he’s corrupting sweet Herbie all the while. 

There’s really only one way this could all end, but I won’t give it away, as this is one that should be experienced in its entirety. And if you know the Hays Code, you know that everyone here has to be punished for their sins, although how that plays out is still a fantastic watch, and this has become my new favorite Douglas performance. The film is marred by some casual racism; the widespread use of the blanket term “Indian” is definitely a product of a different time, and it’s worsened by Tatum’s treatment of a Native American employee of the Sun-Bulletin, whom he first greets with “How” and later calls “Geronimo.” Still, there’s a reason that this one was rediscovered after many years being treated as a failure. Openly critical of both the police and media, it was an embarrassment to the studio, only becoming more widely known since its 2007 Criterion release. It’s not perfect, but it is great. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Movie of the Month: Torch Song Trilogy (1988)

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Every month one of us makes the rest of the crew watch a movie they’ve never seen before, and we discuss it afterwards. This month Brandon made Boomer and Britnee watch Torch Song Trilogy (1988).

Brandon: On a recent vacation to San Francisco, I found myself in the Haight-Ashbury location of Amoeba Music, digging through the LGBTQ section of the record store’s used Blu-rays & DVDs.  There were plenty of obscure gems in there, as you might expect, and I took home copies of the surrealistic drag-queen freak show Luminous Procuress as well as the punk-and-junk porno chic documentary Kamikaze Hearts.  However, my biggest score that day was a used copy of a film distributed by Warner Bros subsidiary New Line Cinema, something much more mainstream than the other standout titles in the bin.  1988’s Torch Song Trilogy has been commercially unavailable since I first watched it on the HBO Max streaming service back in 2021, when it caught my eye in the platform’s “Leaving Soon” section.  Since then, it has only been legally accessible through used physical media, as it is currently unavailable to rent or stream through any online platform.  The Streaming Era illusion that everything is available all of the time is always frustrating when trying to access most movies made before 1990 (an illusion only made bearable by the continued existence of a public library system), but it’s especially frustrating when it comes to mainstream crowd-pleaser fare like Torch Song Trilogy.  This is not the audience-alienating arthouse abstraction of a Luminous Procuress or a Kamikaze Hearts; it shouldn’t feel like some major score to find a copy in the wild. It’s more the Jewish New Yorker equivalent of a Steel Magnolias or a Fried Green Tomatoes than it is some niche-interest obscurity.  I have to suspect it’s only being treated as such because it’s been ghettoized as A Gay Movie instead of simply A Good Movie, which is a shameful indication of how much progress is left to be made.

Torch Song Trilogy is Harvey Fierstein’s big-screen adaptation of his own stage play about a drag queen’s life, loves, and heartbreaks in 1970s New York.  It might be one of the few 80s & 90s gay classics that doesn’t have to touch the communal devastation of HIV/AIDS, since it’s set before the darkest days of the epidemic.  The opening shot of a graveyard at the outskirts of New York City feels like visual acknowledgement of how cultural circumstances had changed between the film’s setting & production, but the mission of the story that follows is mostly to show an adult gay man living a full, healthy, normal life . . . filtered through the wry humor of Fierstein’s hyper-specific personality.  There’s a little hangover Boys in the Band-style, woe-is-me self-pitying in Fierstein’s semi-biographical retelling of his own love life, but he remains delightfully charming throughout as he recalls his two great loves: one with a strait-laced, self-conflicted bisexual (Ed, Brian Kerwin) that was doomed to fail and one with a perfectly angelic partner (Alan, Matthew Broderick) that only failed because of violent societal bigotry.  The major benefit of the film’s strange distribution deficiencies is that owning it on DVD means you can also access Fierstein’s lovely commentary track and double the time you get to spend with his unmistakable voice & persona; it’s like becoming good friends with a garbage disposal made entirely of fine silks.  Loving the movie means loving his specific personality, from his adorable failures to flirt graciously to his fierce defenses of drag queen respectability and the validity of monogamous homosexual partnership.  His stage performances as Virginia Hamm are classic barroom drag that feel like broadcasts from a bygone world (one I last experienced first-hand at Aunt Charlie’s Lounge in San Francisco), but a lot of his observations about seeking traditional love among strangers who are just cruising for sex still ring true, especially as modern dating rituals have been re-warped around the de-personalized window shopping of hookup apps.

There’s something about how complicated, interwoven, and passionate every relationship feels here that reminded me of Yentl of all things, except transported to a modern urban setting I’m more personally connected to.  Structurally, there are some drawbacks to Fierstein’s insistence on covering decades of personal turmoil & interpersonal drama in a single picture, but the movie’s greatest accomplishment is ultimately its approximation of a full, authentic life – something gay men were rarely afforded onscreen at the time, even the cis white ones.  By all accounts, the original stage-play version of Torch Song Trilogy approximated an even fuller, more authentic record of gay life in 1970s NYC, since it was twice as long as its movie adaptation.  One of the producers’ only contractual obligations was that the movie could be no longer than 2 hours, which meant a lot of tough-choice editing of a play that ran for 4.  Instead of narrowing in on a few key moments in his life (through the fictional avatar of Arnold Beckoff), Fierstein decided to maintain the full breadth of the play’s story for most of the runtime, so that an inopportune bathroom break means that you could miss a half-decade of love & loss.  It isn’t until the final sequence that he really slows the story down to stew in the drama of one key event: a home visit from his loving, homophobic mother (Anne Bancroft).  After so many sweeping gestures covering long stretches in Arnold’s life, there’s initially something jarring about stopping the momentum cold to depict a heated bicker-battle between mother & son, but that’s also where a lot of the strongest, most coherent political arguments about the validity of gay life & gay romance are voiced in clear terms.  Boomer, what did you think about the lopsided emphasis on the drama of the final act and how it relates to the broader storytelling style of earlier segments?  Was it a meaningful dramatic shift or just an awkward one?

Boomer: There’s something important to note here about the original staging that contributes to this: each of the three segments were meant to be done in different styles, so much so that it’s almost a miracle that they work when smashed together into the veritas of the screen. In the first segment, International Stud, the story is told in fragments between Arnold and Ed, with the two actors kept apart on stage and the narrative being relayed through a series of phone calls (staged like this), while Fugue in a Nursery, which is the play in which Alan and Arnold visit Mr. and Mrs. Ed, is staged with all four actors in one giant bed (see this image from the 2018 revival). It’s only the final segment, about Arnold and his mother, that the style is more naturalistic and less surreal, in an effort to make the pain of those moments all the more visceral and meaningful. That carries over into the film, and in all honesty, it ought to. Joy can be fleeting, especially for those in the queer community (as we see all too gruesomely with Alan’s death at the hands of a band of bigots, who are seen standing around at the scene even after the ambulances arrive, watching with impunity as their victims are carted away while they remain free men). When you’re happy and in love, it really can feel like three years pass in the blink of an eye, while pain, especially that which comes from intolerance, ends up taking up much more room in our memories than our happiness. 

There’s verisimilitude in that, but that doesn’t mean that we don’t get to spend a long time in sympathetic happiness with Arnold and his loves during the good times, too, and the dilation of unhappy times isn’t merely realism for its own sake, it gives us time to really ground ourselves. This is a piece of fiction that’s about gay people but was breaking out of the mold at the time by not being simply for gay people as well. We see this in the difference between Arnold and his brother Phil, who understands his brother better than their parents do but whose life is clearly one with very few stumbling blocks and in which he can simply saunter without much trouble. The straights in the audience are presumed to be of the same cloth and thus need to have the portrait of what it’s like to have to deal with one’s (loving and beloved) mother also behave in a manner that’s dismissive, cruel, mean-spirited, and bigoted toward her own son, and they need to look into that portrait long enough to get it. Even if the need to provide some socially conscious “messaging” has dimmed in the intervening decades, this scene is also still the tour-de-force segment that makes auditioning for the role of “Ma” worthwhile, enough to attract an actress of the caliber of Estelle Getty (as in the original staging) or Anne Bancroft (as in the film). While I agree that it changes the timbre, I’m not sure I’m fully in agreement that it changes the momentum, as it still feels like it’s barreling through, helped along by the frenetic energy that the desperate-to-please soon-to-be-adopted David brings to the proceedings; he and Ed never seem to really sit still, so it creates the illusion of motion even if the subject matter at hand is heavy and slow. 

One of the things that I really loved about this one was that it wasn’t (and felt no need to be) a “message” picture. With the first cases of HIV being diagnosed in the summer of 1981, the triptych of plays first opened less than two weeks after the January 4th establishment of GMHC (Gay Men’s Health Crisis), the first U.S. community-based AIDS service provider, on the fifteenth of that month. As such, there’s really no room in the narrative for the specter of HIV/AIDS to loom large, and although the intervening years between the play’s premiere and the release of the film were haunted by that epidemic, it’s still banished from the narrative. That’s because this is a story about queer . . . well, not queer “joy” exactly, but one in which the omnipresent shadow of social inequality, potential violence, and familial rejection is outshone by the light of authentic living, easy intimacy, and finding the humor in things. As such, although it may be telling the audience something they might not know or understand about the way that gay people are treated by their families, it doesn’t feel the need to educate them about those broader social issues, the way a lot of other queer films of the time did. 

Britnee, given that this was originally a (series of) stage production(s), there’s a lot of room for more sumptuous, lived-in set design in a film adaptation, as well as the opportunity to do a little more visual storytelling. One of favorite bits of this is how Arnold shows us that the ASL sign for “fucking” is to make two rabbits with your hands and bang them together, and then we see that Arnold’s decor is more rabbit centric than your local grocery store in the lead up to Easter. Another is the change that we see in Ed’s farmhouse between Arnold’s first and (possibly) last visits there, that tell us how much time has passed as Ed has had the time to repair the steps and put up proper supports on the porch. This, more than the change in tempo, is what stands out to me about the final scenes with Mrs. Beckoff, as they are heavier on dialogue (read: argument) for exposition and character work, as those last few scenes of the two of them feel more like a stage play than any other part. Are there any visual flourishes or touches of visual storytelling in particular that stood out to you? 

Britnee: Torch Song Trilogy has been on my watchlist for years. I didn’t have much knowledge of what the film was actually about or based on, but I knew that Harvey Fierstein starred in it. That’s more than enough to pique my interest because he is such a gem. I had no idea that it was based on a play that Fierstein wrote himself! Like Brandon, it reminded me so much of Steel Magnolias, which was also a film adapted from a play with a personal, auto-biographical touch. Both films have loveable characters, witty dialogue, and create a feeling of intimacy between the audience and characters. I felt like I was Arnold’s confidant, following him throughout his journey. Of course, that intimacy with the audience is very typical of a stage play, but it doesn’t always translate to film as successfully as it does in this one.

Until you mentioned it, Boomer, I didn’t notice the rabbit connection! I was admiring the rabbit tea kettle among all of the other rabbit trinkets of Arnold’s, but I had no idea that it was in reference to the ASL bit. There are just so many layers to discover! If I had to highlight any other the visual storytelling touches, there is only one that really stuck with me. I adored the opening sequence of a young Arnold playing dress-up in his mother’s closet, which then transitions to adult Arnold in his dressing room before the first drag performance. There were so many important moments that occur in his dressing room, and to remember one of his earliest crucial moments occurred in his first makeshift dressing room (his mother’s closet) really touched my heart. The ultimate sacred space. 

Lagniappe

Brandon: I’m glad to hear y’all were also delighted by the overbearing rabbit theme of Arnold’s home decor.  I’ve obviously only seen this movie a few times so far, but with every watch my eyes are drawn to more rabbit decorations that I didn’t catch previously.  They’re hopping all over the frame, and yet the only acknowledgement of them (besides the ASL connection) is a brief moment when a hungover Alan quizzically examines a rabbit-themed mug Howard hands him with breakfast before noticing he’s surrounded by them.  Otherwise, it’s just one of many small touches that makes Arnold feel like a full, real person instead of a scripted character and a political mouthpiece.  

Britnee: The dramatic relationship between Arnold and his mother gave us some powerful moments, but I kept wondering about the relationships Arnold had with his brother and father. We do see these characters interact with each other and there’s some dialogue referring to each in various conversations, but I would have loved to see their relationships explored more. Since the play is twice as long as the movie, I’m curious to see if they’re more explored there and were cut for time.

Boomer: Because I always want to recommend it to everyone, especially because it’s one of the few musical theater adjacent texts that I, a musical agnostic, enjoy, I want to call attention to the fact that Tovah Felspuh is totally channeling Anne Bancroft’s Mrs. Beckoff in her introductory scene in Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, beyond just cashing in on some of the same character tropes. Secondly, as a film that is filled with countless quotable lines, the one that has resounded around in my skull the most since the screening is “He used to be a euphemism, now he’s just a friend.” And finally, I find it funny that Brandon should mention the apps in his intro, since I watched this film in a way that I hope Fierstein would appreciate: lying on a bed in a Denver hostel, swiping away app notifications as they attempted to grab my attention and cover the top half of my screen. 

Next month: Boomer presents Notorious (1946)

-The Swampflix Crew