Frameline 35: 'Absent'

This unusual thriller from Argentinian director Marco Berger is a complete departure from his debut Plan B.  Both films are psychologically astute, intelligent and erotic, but Absent swerves into much darker territory with its study of youthful obsession, sexual taboo, and paranoia.  In a clever twist on the seduction-of-a-minor theme, so prevalent in anti-gay rhetoric, 30-something swim-coach Sebastiano (played by Carlos Echevarria) is tricked early on into first driving his 16 year-old student Martin (Javier de Pietro) to a doctor's office one evening and then extending his hospitality to a couch for the night when Martin's supposed arrangements go awry.  The relentless way this innocent-looking boy draws the well-intentioned but increasingly nervous older man into his web of attempted seduction is developed in tense, spiralling detail, with claustrophobic sound design and camerawork, but at some point the discomfort it generates splits into divergent streams in the viewer's mind; one stays with the action, while the other begins to question the film's intentions - its bowing to genre conventions and persistent invocation of Hitchcock become a shade too heavy-handed, perhaps ironic (?), close to parody without ever exactly crossing the line, and for some time we are unsure just where Berger is going with it all.  

Given the revelations in the second half of the film these self-conscious effects make wondrous sense, and I marveled all over again at the intellectual facility of this young director for whom elements of film grammar/history double as psychological clues and even plot devices.  The slightly ramped-up genre tropes refer not to the action after all, but to the windmills in its unfortunate protaganist's unconscious mind, and when events swerve into more dreamlike territory the sense that we are witnessing the exteriorization of a sealed, completely occult experience intensifies, with layered cuts, sequencing distortions, and obscure visual keys (darkness, shots through water, through glass, broken windows, eye movements, eyes ... ) which extend the ominous effects of Carolina Canevaro's weird soundscape and Pedro Irusta's incredible, spooky, thrilling score.
 
Berger has commented somewhere that he makes 'gay films for straight people', and it's true that straight audiences will identify completely with the characters in both Plan B and Absent.  They hover on the cusp, they are straight people who find they are gay, or gay people who think they are straight; they are embroiled in scenarios as complex, challenging, or ambiguous as any we have seen or can imagine - and when sexual orientation comes in as somehow integral to all that, we respond to their situation as if it were our own.  It's an oblique approach to the theme which works well, completely sidestepping the 'otherness' that usually inflects gay films and situating characters inside our shared predicament.  I hope he finds the crossover audience he deserves, for his sake, but mostly, for ours.  We all need films as good as this.  Berger is a master already and he's barely out of film school - its phenomenal.

Frameline 35: Three reviews

Four More Years:  This film is a class act from beginning to end, hilarious, delightful, and very clever.  Its script alone should win every award going.  It is sharp, fast-moving, on-target, and very, very funny.  Why can't we have more of this kind of screenwriting over here?  We used to have Woody Allen, but he is churning out the same tired old stuff these days and this film from Swedish director Tova Magnusson-Norling is completely fresh.  The acting is great as well, the characters intensely lovable, and the concept - the leader of the centre-right party in Sweden falls for the second-in-command of the victorious socialists - is superb.  I can't even begin to imagine how funny it must be for Swedish speakers familiar with the scene.  But we get the gist of the tax-cut/tax-hike rhetoric, even if it is laced with references to things like the North Bothnia Rail Link.  Actually the North Bothnia Rail Link part is important.  I should like somebody to text me about the North Bothnia Rail Link in that way.  And have I mentioned the Serbo-Croatian, Social-Liberal aspects of bisexuality yet?  See this film. 


Wish Me Away:  I wasn't ready for how complex and passionate this documentary about country music phenomenon Chely Wright's coming-out was going to be.  If you like soul-searching stuff, and I do, this film is one of the stand-out events of the festival.  Quite apart from the in-depth revelation of how intelligent, thoughtful, courageous, divided, and conscious one human being can be, it really opens up the issue of just what it means to be gay in homophobic country with a crowbar.  It is hell.  People have to subvert and destroy themselves - especially people who dream big, apparently.  Chely Wright is a kind of superstar, and was an icon in the country music scene, a virtual archetype of beauty and goodness to a community saturated in hate for gays and other differently-oriented types.  Her journey as documented here is intensely moving; I cried my eyes out.  Her on-camera deliberations are a complicated, eloquent testament to just how thorny and profound a human predicament like this can be.  Coupled with fascinating footage of meetings with her spiritual advisor and publicity agents, editors, tour-managers, make-up artists, friends and family, it is a rich and beautifully-crafted film that will make you realize, if you don't already, what is at stake emotionally and spiritually for LGBT people everywhere.


Last, Fast Ride - The Life, Love and Death of a Punk Goddess:  This is one of those films that sometimes crop up at Frameline, where the subject is only incidentally gay or lesbian, but the issue at stake is something else.  I like that about this festival.  It illustrates how GBLT issues bleed into other issues, like feminism, or 'values'-politics, or media representation, or any area where the political and personal collide.  In this case the late, great, and beautiful punk-rock star Marian Anderson's sexual orientation is not exactly the point; nor are her sexual antics on stage, or even her outrageous acts of provocation generally, though these get closer.  It is that she was a victim of childhood sexual abuse by her father, an alcoholic, violent cop.  Everything that comes after, and there is a lot, can be seen in the light of this traumatic original sin.  Her life becomes an object lesson in how profoundly destructive such early trauma can be.  No doubt she means many things besides to many people, and I don't mean to deny any of that.  On the contrary, her achievements, her fearlessness, her energy, and raw talent (her voice alone is incredible), not to mention her sweetness and intelligence, as illustrated here in several interviews, contribute to what is at least my understanding of the magnitude of this crime against her, because it becomes abundantly clear as the film goes on that the effects of her sexual abuse were so far-reaching that no amount of personal talent, courage or virtue could save her from its destructive legacy.  It is a tragic film, a study in identity and struggle and loss, but I was filled with admiration for how fiercely this woman fought to define herself against unbeatable odds, and filled also with a renewed sense of disgust and hate for the men who perpetrate such crimes against children.  Fans of local punk scene will love it as well.  There are tons of stunning performance clips, and interviews with Tim Armstrong of Rancid, Dexter Holland of The Offspring, Becky Wreck of Lunachicks, Texas Terri, Daniel deLeon, Greg Langston, Fate Fatal, Ginger Coyote, and more.