Inside Out

Loose Cannons (Mine vaganti)

by Robert Bell on May 24, 2011

in Film Festivals,Inside Out

Loose Cannons (Mine vaganti)

Loose Cannons (Mine vag­anti) (Director: Ferzan Ozpetek): Routinely making ensemble pieces with a homo­sexual com­ponent, Turkish dir­ector Ferzan Ozpetek again reit­er­ates his auteur state­ment – sug­gesting that family is what you make for your­self rather than some­thing dic­tated by blood – with Loose Cannons, a quirky comedy-drama about a young man’s thwarted efforts to come out of the closet to his exceed­ingly con­ser­vative Italian family. And while some­what more access­ible than Saturn in Opposition or Ignorant Fairies, Loose Cannons never really breaks new ground or works as the sum of its parts, having more poten­tial than actual success.

Here, the familial drama starts when Tommaso’s (Riccardo Scarmarcio) plans to come out to his father Vincenzo (Ennio Fantastichini) are ruined when his brother – the co-owner of the family pasta busi­ness – Antonio (Alessandro Preziosi) unex­pec­tedly announces his homo­sexu­ality first. When the news gives Vincenzo a heart attack, Tommaso decides to stay in the closet, leading to inev­it­able comic shenanigans when his flam­boy­antly gay group of friends shows up at the family estate for a weekend of awk­wardly veiled sexual references.

Because Ozpetek’s dir­ec­tion is mostly sta­tionary and func­tional, observing rela­tion­ship dynamics with a com­petent but undis­cerning eye, this story never moves far beyond its sur­face plot mach­in­a­tions, com­menting on the nature of family through the source screen­play without a great deal of sub­tlety. Everyone states their dis­pos­i­tion in point form, occa­sion­ally hiding it from each other, but always having some form of con­fid­ante, be it a grand­parent, a mis­tress or a removed family friend and flirtation.

Also, since everything is framed with a slightly camp, hyper­bolic eye, there’s never much oppor­tunity to identify with any of the char­acter plights, leaving only gauche ste­reo­types, such as a single sex-fueled vampy aunt and a bunch of gay clichés pran­cing around to dance music to fill the peri­pheral, non-expositional runtime.

It’s all assembled pro­fes­sion­ally enough, solid­i­fied by com­mitted per­form­ances and lush cine­ma­to­graphy while repeatedly preaching the import­ance of per­sonal integ­rity, but it offers little beyond its overly colour sat­ur­ated, sun-drenched veneer, acting only as a passing and mildly enter­taining diversion.

Tagged as: #insideout11, homosexuality, italy

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Black Field (Mavro livadi)

by Robert Bell on May 22, 2011 · 1 comment

in Film Festivals,Inside Out

Black Field (Mavro livadi)
Black Field plays as part of Inside Out on Saturday May 28 at 7:15pm at the TIFF Bell Lightbox.

Black Field (Mavro livadi) (Director: Vardis Marinakis): Continuing the recent trend in Greek cinema of presenting iden­tity and sexu­ality as mon­stros­ities res­ulting from a sheltered and abject upbringing, Black Field – sim­ilar to Dogtooth (review) and Attenberg – con­fronts its audi­ence with inac­cess­ible char­ac­ter­iz­a­tions and a stark depic­tion of dis­torted ideals mani­fested in human form upon youthful sexual awakening. The main dis­tinc­tion here is that while the other titles take place in modern times, clearly com­menting on a declining Greek eco­nomy after years of instant grat­i­fic­a­tion without foresight, Black Field jumps back to the 17th cen­tury to isolate its vacuum paradigm, which unfolds in a rural cloister.

The story is simple enough, fol­lowing an injured and unnamed Jannisary (Hristos Passalis) through the coun­tryside to a cloister where he col­lapses under the weight of injuries into the care of a group of nuns, but it plays out in a some­what uncon­ven­tional and unex­pected manner, des­pite a very sombre and delib­erate tone and pace. Anthi (Sofia Georgovassili), a younger, socially isol­ated nun, takes to treating his wounds, retreating to her room to play out dirty sexual fantasies about the virile war­rior in her head.

We learn early on that Anthi has a penis, which we see as he cuts his inner thighs to sate his under­stand­able internal pain. It’s an appro­priate choice that detracts from the pos­sib­ility of a Crying Game shock, which helps fur­ther the didactic inten­tions, asking the audi­ence to assess nature versus nur­ture and the psy­cho­lo­gical nature of repressing and shel­tering someone from a world they’re bound to even­tu­ally confront.

Shot with all encom­passing static com­pos­i­tion and long takes of the land­scape in rela­tion to char­acter, this dis­torted coming-of-age also works as an aes­thetic treat, con­vin­cingly depicting the 17th cen­tury with its dampened stone nun­nery and seem­ingly untouched snip­pets of nat­ural envir­on­ment. It heightens that sense of social isol­a­tion neces­sary to detail the spe­cificities of the rela­tion­ship that develops between the Turkish sol­dier and the trans­gendered nun.

Even if delib­er­ately cold, never offering any sort of close-up emo­tional cath­arsis or human­izing reac­tionary per­spect­ives, this Greek import never suf­fers from a lack of pro­voca­tion and intrigue, offering a variety of topics for dis­cus­sion. Plus, Anthi lifts up her habit at one point, flashing the entire nun­nery, which leads to a sui­cide. Even if the aca­demic and dra­matic aspects of the film don’t appeal, this sequence alone can at least inspire a few inap­pro­priate chuckles.

Tagged as: #insideout11, greece, transgender

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Inside Out 2011

by James McNally on May 20, 2011

in Film Festivals,Inside Out

Inside Out 2011

Toronto’s Inside Out returns from May 19-29th, cel­eb­rating LGBT cinema in all its forms. This 21st edi­tion of the fest­ival is bigger and broader in focus than ever before. Some of the fea­tured sec­tions this year include:

  • International Focus on the UK — 9 fea­tures and shorts from the United Kingdom, including Andrew Haigh’s Sundance breakout Weekend
  • 24 Hours in the Middle East — 3 fea­tures, a shorts pro­gram, and a master class with author and aca­demic Samar Habib
  • The Outsiders — Inside Out’s home for exper­i­mental film, including anim­a­tion and short films
  • Icon Documentary Series — a par­tic­u­larly strong selec­tion of docs this year, with 7 fea­tures including por­traits of fig­ures as dis­parate as Yves Saint Laurent, Bruce LaBruce and pion­eering trans­sexual ath­lete Renée Richards

A large number of films in the pro­gram look inter­esting, and I’m happy to report that Robert Bell will be returning to write reviews from the fest­ival. Here are some of his recommendations.

80 Days

80 Days

Two middle-aged women meet while vis­iting comatose rel­at­ives in the hos­pital and dis­cover they were child­hood friends. Not only that, but they once shared a furtive kiss. A second chance at first love?

Black Field

Black Field

In 17th cen­tury Greece, an injured sol­dier is nursed back to health by two nuns. The younger one falls in love with him and they escape the cloister. Only then do we dis­cover that young Anthi is not what she seems.

Four More Years

Four More Years

A polit­ical comedy from Sweden. Married David is the leader of a polit­ical party that has just been thrashed at the polls. Depressed and vul­ner­able, he falls head over heels for the suave Martin, who just hap­pens to be the party sec­retary of the new ruling gov­ern­ment. What’s the bigger shock, his feel­ings for another man or for someone whose politics he detests?

Loose Cannons

Loose Cannons

Tommaso is about to reveal his homo­sexu­ality to his family when his brother Antonio upstages him by revealing his own secret. His father col­lapses, Antonio is dis­owned, and it falls to Tommaso now to run his father’s factory in the coun­tryside. Directed with a comedic touch by Ferzan Ozpetek, this Italian film will charm you as it uncovers family secrets that even Tommaso can’t guess at.

Visit the Inside Out site for details about the entire pro­gram, as well as sched­ules and ticket information.

Tagged as: #insideout11, homosexuality

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The Secret Diaries of Miss Anne Lister

by Robert Bell on May 25, 2010

in Film Festivals,Inside Out

The Secret Diaries of Miss Anne Lister
The Secret Diaries of Miss Anne Lister screens as Inside Out’s Closing Gala on Sunday May 30 at 7:30pm at the Bloor Cinema. Buy tickets here.

The Secret Diaries of Miss Anne Lister (Director: James Kent): I think my favourite part of The Secret Diaries of Miss Anne Lister, the BBC biopic about the tit­ular 19th cen­tury Yorkshire indus­tri­alist, is that during the cli­mactic romantic moment when our heroine wins the affec­tions of a suit­able mate and leans in for the kiss, she quickly fol­lows this up by lifting up her lover’s dress and giving her a quick finger-bang. Now if we could just slip some­thing like that into a Jane Austen adaptation…

It doesn’t come off quite as shock­ingly as it sounds, given that Miss Lister (Maxine Peake) is a bit renegade, unapo­lo­get­ic­ally grasping for all she wants in life, regard­less of social implic­a­tions or pro­priety. It’s respect­able and ardent, but also bor­ders on ego­centric, espe­cially con­sid­ering how ideal­istic and sol­ipsistic she can be when not acting out of ven­geance. As a result, char­acter iden­ti­fic­a­tion is min­imal, which is prob­lem­atic when the ire of the film depends on this almost entirely.

This expect­a­tion is apparent from the opening act, when Lister is unce­re­mo­ni­ously dumped by her secret gal pal Mariana (Anne Madeley), whose mar­riage to the much older Charles Lawton (Michael Culkin) is announced unex­pec­tedly at a social gath­ering. She pleads, she cries, she locks her­self in her room—really everything that a dev­ast­ated lover might do in a bodice-drama. The thing is that we have no idea who these char­ac­ters are, how they met, or what their his­tory is, or how they see the world, and so on, so it’s dif­fi­cult to care about whatever it is they’re going on about.

Thankfully, things pick up later in the film while Anne con­tinues to pursue the mar­ried Mariana, as her loyal and likable friend Tib (Susan Lynch) makes her own romantic interests known. This love tri­angle gives the drama some much-needed heft, and offers a diver­sion from Lister’s frus­trating per­son­ality. Mariana is a bit of a twit, to be sure, but her dis­pos­i­tion is under­stand­able, given her grounding in reality. Similarly, Tib’s tend­ency to say the inap­pro­priate, and wear her feel­ings on her sleeve, makes her far more access­ible than the tit­ular heroine.

But aside from a frus­trating prot­ag­onist and a minor plot, this is a pro­fes­sion­ally assembled piece with solid acting all around, decent art design and com­petent, if slightly flat, dir­ec­tion. It’s just some­thing more akin to a Sunday after­noon diver­sion than a full-blown the­at­rical experience.

Tagged as: #insideout10, homosexuality

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Family Tree (L’arbre et la forêt)

by Robert Bell on May 25, 2010

in Film Festivals,Inside Out

Family Tree (L'arbre et la forêt)
Family Tree (L’arbre et la forêt) screens on Friday May 28 at 7:15pm at the ROM Theatre. Buy tickets here.

Family Tree (L’arbre et la forêt) (Directors: Olivier Ducastel and Jacques Martineau): Tackling issues of gen­er­a­tional mani­fest­a­tions of repressed iden­tity and their reper­cus­sions, along with notions of the self as a con­struct of per­sonal his­tor­ical sig­ni­fiers, Family Tree gives a layered, subtle and thoughtful look at three gen­er­a­tions of a family built on deceitful, but sin­cere, inten­tions. While decidedly dif­ferent in its alleg­or­ical implic­a­tions, defying the notion of estate as dying legacy and ignoring glob­al­iz­a­tion out­right, under­stand­ably, it shares styl­istic and them­atic sim­il­ar­ities to Olivier Assayas’s recent mas­ter­piece, Summer Hours (review).

Likewise, this tale of unspoken angst takes place almost entirely at a lush and capa­cious estate, here sur­rounded by a family tree plant­a­tion. Aging grand­par­ents Frederick (Guy Marchand) and Marianne (Francoise Fabian) Muller plan the divi­sion of wealth between their sur­viving son Guillaume (Francois Negret) and grand­daughter Delphine (Sabrina Seyvecou), selling off a por­tion of their forest to take a trip to the South Pole while they still have time.

Things open with the funeral of Charles, Delphine’s father, which Frederick skips much to the dis­ap­point­ment and rage of other family mem­bers. What they don’t know, and soon learn, is that this father and son pairing hated each other, mainly due to a secret that Frederick has long hidden from his family.

In sheer virtue of this film playing at a gay and les­bian film fest­ival, we can guess what that secret might be, but this is less a film about homo­sexu­ality than it is about not let­ting your past, or labels, over­take who you are, or the legacy you’ve built. It shows a dys­func­tional but caring family trying to under­stand each other without having the lan­guage, or shared under­standing, to do so. And in this, the appeal is uni­versal, whether it is pri­or­it­izing inan­imate accu­mu­lated objects, or eso­teric notions of hap­pi­ness, dif­fering and shared per­spect­ives unite and dis­tance these people with equal gravity.

Some family exchanges can feel a little too on-the-nose and expos­i­tional, with Marianne pointing out to her ex-daughter-in-law that she wasn’t entirely a passive victim without a great deal of sub­tlety, and the par­allel of self-hatred in Frederick and Guillaume being all but shown in point form. But this doesn’t hurt the overall effect of a quiet, gorgeously-filmed and well-acted story of finding one’s place in a world con­stantly cat­egor­izing and imposing morality.

If the meta­phor of a family tree looming over the family house with slight instability seems trite, this exer­cise in reclam­a­tion and let­ting go is nothing of the sort, offering a com­pas­sionate glimpse at flawed people doing their best to work with what life has offered.

Tagged as: #insideout10, family, france, homosexuality

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