Masculine mystique?

The Women's Film Fest checks out the guise

by Peter Keough

The Rest of the Fest The movies, of course, are the main reason to attend the Boston International Festival of Women's Cinema, but the other amenities aren't bad either, like the opening-night party at 9:30 p.m. next Thursday, April 13, at Upstairs at the Pudding (10 Holyoke Street in Harvard Square). Traditionally one of the best shindigs of the year, it's a chance to shmooze with some of the festival's celebrity guests. You can also meet them in more formal settings. Guinevere Turner, co-writer and star of the lesbian classic comedy Go Fish, will host a panel discussion entitled "Lesbian Filmmaking & Beyond" on April 16 at 11 a.m. Among those participating will be two festival participants, Nisha Ganatra, director of Go Fish, and Yvonne Welborn, director of Living with Pride: Ruth Ellis at 100. Later on Sunday, at 5:30 p.m., Kimberly Peirce, director of Boys Don't Cry (for which Hilary Swank just nabbed a Best Actress Oscar), will preside over "An Evening with Kimberly Peirce." Co-sponsored by Women in Film & Video New England, it's a great opportunity to talk about Boys Don't Cry and women's filmmaking in general. For more information, call 876-6837.

To judge from this year's Academy Award winners, Hollywood has begun to recognize that women can be more than just mothers, whores, housewives, bimbos, and victims. Best Actress Hilary Swank's gender-defying performance as the doomed Brandon Teena in Boys Don't Cry and Best Supporting Actress Angelina Jolie's taboo-flaunting (though nothing compared to her shenanigans with her brother during the actual Oscar broadcast) turn as a sociopath in Girl, Interrupted demonstrated a tolerance for extremes well beyond the comfort zone of Annette Bening or Meryl Streep.

Given such bold choices by the mainstream Academy, shouldn't the selections at this year's Boston International Festival of Women's Cinema be more subversive than usual? Well, yes and no. My first impression of the program was, where are all the women? Most of the high-profile features focus on male protagonists or male points of view. On second thought, though, how subversive can you get? It's radical enough to push women's stories and a feminist agenda; it's downright revolutionary to get into the head of the oppressor, comprehend him, and embrace him as a fellow sufferer.

That is, if you can pull it off. The results range from the strained to the brilliant, often within the same movie. Two of the festival's most ambitious efforts are adaptations of difficult works of fiction by men (a third, Mary Harron's sardonic and sly adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho, was unfortunately passed over, apparently because of the controversy it's generated). In these the problem the filmmakers grapple with isn't so much understanding the opposite sex as translating the literary to the screen.

Based on the novel by Jeffrey Eugenides, Sofia Coppola's debut feature, The Virgin Suicides (1999; April 13 at 7:30 p.m., with director/screenwriter Coppola present), resolves both problems by remaining faithful to the text. Maybe that's its biggest mistake. A first-person-plural narrator is hard enough to manage in prose (Eugenides's pompous "we" voice is precious, offputting, and occasionally poetic); in a movie, it's simply weird. Nonetheless, Coppola uses the engaging off-screen voice of Giovanni Ribisi to intone the Greek chorus of boys who are beguiled and bewildered by the five Lisbon sisters, tow-headed teenagers growing up in a Michigan suburb in the '70s who decide, for some reason or other, to end it all.

Maybe it's the drab and tacky decor and costumes -- that was one ugly decade, and this film's cinematography does it justice. Whatever, both novel and film are often fumbling attempts by a pluralized male adolescent point of view to come to grips with the female mystery, and they neither fully succeed nor shed much light on the psyche doing the probing. Multiplying the number of elusive girls (Kirsten Dunst is the most memorable, as the slut) and voyeuristic boys dissipates rather than deepens the effect. Kathleen Turner brings some feeling to the girls' mother, a Bible-thumping, repressive stereotype, but it's James Woods who steals the show as the befuddled and increasingly balmy dad.

The female object of desire in Alison Maclean's adaptation of Denis Johnson's spare, spooky short-story collection Jesus' Son (1999; April 14 at 7 p.m., with director Maclean present) isn't multiplied but is no less vague. Also set in the '70s Midwest, but in the down-and-out backwaters of anomie, bad drugs, and petty crime, Son relates elliptical events in the life of the narrator known only as "Fuckhead" (Billy Crudup), a drug-addled drifter drawn to Michelle (Samantha Morton), a fellow casualty of ennui and chaos. Despite Morton's visceral performance, she's less of a presence than the sometimes heavy-handed messianic iconography. Crudup and director Maclean come close to re-creating Johnson's epiphanies, but it's the hyperkinetic Jack Black as Georgie, Fuckhead's co-worker in a hospital ER, who brings the film to life; his moments involving a man admitted with a hunting knife protruding from his eye, or featuring a litter of baby bunnies and a mystical drive-in theater, capture the poetry and dark hilarity of Johnson's original.

More so than Suicides, Son evokes the spirit of doom and bad craziness that was the '70s. It's a period Penelope Spheeris limned unforgettably in her documentary of late-'70s punk-rock nihilism, The Decline of Western Civilization. After taking a detour with heavy metal in The Decline of Western Civilization, Part II, Spheeris returned to the scene in The Decline of Western Civilization, Part III (1998; April 15 at 10 p.m.), and one hopes that there's no place to go but up. The music sounds much the same, but it barely registers as background noise for the benighted squalor of what remains of the LA punk scene. These are not the pierced, mohawked, leather-clad kids who hang out in Harvard Square and then go home to the suburbs -- they're homeless, alcoholic, abused children who live on the street and in squats and whose beatific, furious despair is utterly convincing. With its devastating epilogue and Beckett-like humor, Decline suggests that regardless of gender, the human race is damned.

Which makes the benighted household in Set Me Free (1999; April 16 at 7:45 p.m.), Léa Pool's memoir of growing up in '50s Montreal, seem nostalgic. Hanna (Karine Vanasse) is 13 and confused. Her Holocaust survivor father (Miki Manojlovic) is an aspiring poet who takes out his frustrations on Hanna, her brother (Alexandre Mérineau), and their depressive gentile mother (Pascale Bussières). In between mom's suicide attempts and dad's rampages, Hanna takes refuge, like Antoine Doinel in The 400 Blows, at the movies. Her favorite is Godard's Vivre sa vie, but she can't decide whether she wants to be Anna Karina's prostitute character or is in love with her. The film shares a similar identity crisis, wavering between sentimental if offbeat coming-of-age tale and incisive, disturbing critique of the patriarchal family and gender roles.

Such indecision never seemed to be a problem for the subject of Yvonne Welborn's documentary Living with Pride: Ruth Ellis at 100 (1999; April 15 at 3 p.m., with director Welborn present). Today, Ellis is spry, smiling, and radiantly content, a silver-haired elf who can still dance the night away like a woman half her age. The challenges of being black, 100 years old, and a lesbian seem like nothing at all. A cultural treasure and inspiration to the lesbian community, she's lived through race riots both white and black; she established one of the oldest black gay and lesbian salons in Detroit, lived for 34 years with her companion Babe, had her last one-night stand at the age of 95, and shows no signs of shutting down soon. Despite Welborn's clumsy filmmaking, Ellis shines through.

She has the kind of clarity and contentment that the heroines of Australian Pip Karmel's Me Myself I (1999; April 17 at 3:15 p.m.) and American Valerie Breiman's Love & Sex (2000; April 14 at 3:45 p.m.) long for. Karmel's conceptual comedy is a more trenchant version of Gwyneth Paltrow's unctuous, reactionary Sliding Doors. Rachel Griffiths is plucky, downtrodden, and sexy as Pamela, an award-winning journalist whose success is no balm to her loneliness. Should she have said yes when Robert popped the question back in high school? A chance fender-bender propels her into that "what-if?" scenario, and Pamela discovers that she is in fact Bob's wife, a mother of three grotesque children, a domestic slave with no career or respect. How to reconcile the two lives? Me's cutesy dialectic doesn't convince, but Griffiths's nebbishy charm and Karmel's occasional absurdist wit do.

As for not-so-successful journalist Kate Welles (Famke Janssen), the beleaguered protagonist of Breiman's Love & Sex, her life has been a series of what-ifs taken and rejected -- affairs with men that fizzled. When her imperious editor (Anne Magnuson) gives her till the end of the day to write an article about successful relationships that doesn't include detailed descriptions of blow jobs, Kate rambles into her tape recorder about her time with Adam (Jon Favreau), a bad painter and a big-bodied doofus who was the love of her life and, more important, her "best friend."

Confusing matters are Adam's annoying personal habits, Kate's flings with a wanna-be Robert De Niro and a would-be bigamist, and Breiman's less-than-graceful flashback structure. About halfway through Love, you might realize that you've seen this movie before -- maybe not with Woody Allen, but certainly with John Cusack in the recent High Fidelity. Which begs the question, is it progress when women switch roles with the whiny guys who struggle to understand them?