With will and grace

The 16th annual Boston Gay & Lesbian Film Fest

by Scott Heller

I confess: I like Will and Grace. The NBC sit-com about a dizzy straight girl and her straight-arrow gay best friend has moved from watch-it-when-you-can to must-see, or at least must-tape, TV. Yet as with many television comedies, it isn't the leads that keep me coming back for more. It's the second bananas -- flamboyant Jack and nasty Karen, both hilariously self-involved -- who provide the surest laughs.

So I don't mean to damn with faint praise many of the films in the 16th Boston Gay and Lesbian Film/Video Festival when I say that their creators could fit comfortably on staff at Will and Grace. Museum of Fine Arts film coordinator Kathleen Mullen has combed the waterfront to put together an ambitious, up-to-the-minute program. The thing is, the waterfront isn't quite as seedy or transgressive as it used to be. There's less Jean Genet and more Jean Arthur. Comedy is queen.

The festival does feature several mainstays, including Monika Treut (Gendernauts, May 14), Yvonne Welbon (the uplifting Living with Pride: Ruth Ellis at 100, May 13), Greta Schiller (The Man Who Drove with Mandela, May 20), and Rosa von Praunheim. Yet even the notorious German bad boy seems to be, well, inching closer to the mainstream, thanks to a generous budget and the presence of porn icon Jeff Stryker. Praunheim's 30-minute "Can I Be Your Bratwurst, Please?", a rude marriage of John Waters and Paul Bartel, is a highlight of the short-film program on May 7.

Can it be a gay-and-lesbian event without RuPaul? She's in the house, all right, but forget the wig, the nails, and the mascara. It's RuPaul Charles to you -- the performer in a serious mode, narrating a documentary and playing butch in Jamie Babbit's But I'm a Cheerleader (May 5). Billed as the "women's" opening-night feature but likely to appeal as much to camp-loving boys, the glossy comedy ekes out just enough laughs to do justice to a terrific premise. Natasha Lyonne is Megan, a suburban everygirl gone bad. She's become a vegetarian, she has a Melissa Etheridge poster on the wall, and she can't bear her jock boyfriend's wet kisses. Her parents and friends stage an intervention -- at True Directions, a re-education camp for teenagers straying from the straight and narrow. Enter as a skinhead, a sissy, a goth girl, or a nice Jewish mama's boy -- under the watchful eyes of RuPaul and Cathy Moriarty (looking exactly like Joan Rivers), you'll leave rehabilitated as a "happy heterosexual," or else. Writer Brian Wayne Peterson runs out of plot too soon, but the fanciful production design and over-the-top performances go a long way. And the film slyly suggests that repression, not recruitment, will swell the gay-and-lesbian ranks. Megan doesn't think she's a dyke until she's trained not to be one at True Directions. Dressed up like pink bobby-soxers, the girls learn how to cook, clean, and kiss the right way. (Boys are taught to throw a football and chop wood.) Yet sparks fly every time Megan shares a scrub brush with Graham (Clea DuVall).

Kieran Turner and Nick Katsapetses are far more assured as writers than as directors. Still, their no-budget films -- 24 Nights (May 7) and The Joys of Smoking (May 18), respectively -- are sharp debuts. Iffy casts hamper both films, though Turner is blessed by strong supporting performers like Aida Turturro and Mary Louise Wilson. What's interesting are the wildly different sensibilities displayed by these recent film-school grads, Turner from NYU and Katsapetses from the San Francisco Art Institute. Maybe it's the rents in the Bay area, but the Smoking director is in a refreshingly sour mood. Imagine a film by Fran Lebowitz about a commitment-phobic couple on the verge of a commitment ceremony. Stir in their friends, who include a lesbian stalking her ex-lover until she "processes" their break-up. Make fun of the Tom Hanks of gay cinema, Rupert Everett. Resist a happy ending. And smoke, smoke, smoke.

24 Nights, by contrast, is unafraid to bare its foolish heart. Inveterate slacker Jonathan Parker works in a bookstore, lives with his sister and her husband, and worries he's going to die a "gay spinster." Even more troubling, he believes that only Santa Claus can find him a boyfriend. No sooner does he write to the man in red than Toby, the toothy Southern boy of his dreams, enters the picture. Turner saves his moony hero by placing the story inside a recognizable urban gay milieu, replete with jealousy, temptation, and relationships that open and close like the bookstore door. Toby likes Jonathan's attentions, but he also wants to hold on to the studious boyfriend who brought him to New York. To figure things out, Jonathan has to confront the childhood hurts he's never gotten over. 24 Nights is full of '70s pop-culture ephemera. "Every time I think I remember something," Jonathan says, "it turns out to be an old TV show or movie." He's wrong; he's a lot wiser than that. So is the film.

Of course, if you're going to revel in '70s nostalgia, then go right to the top of the charts: Sister Sledge, whose music is the heartbeat of Patrik-Ian Polk's Punks, which opens the festival on May 4. "We Are Family" is for mere beginners. The friends who gather at a West Hollywood club boogie down to obscurities like "She's Just a Runaway," thanks to Crystal, the chief diva in a drag tribute group called the Sisters. Firmly set in the upscale precincts of black gay LA, Punks has its cultural references down cold. It's a pleasure to hear gay men dish Snoop Dogg and LL Cool J and weigh in on Brandy versus Monica instead of Bette versus Joan. "Babyface" Edmonds is the film's executive producer, and the soundtrack rocks. Yet like The Best Man and other recent romantic comedies, Punks is better for what it represents -- black cinema without guns or drugs -- than what it is, glib and old-fashioned. Seth Gilliam stands out as Marcus, the hopeless romantic who pines for Darby (Rockmond Dunbar), the putatively straight neighbor-next-door. You think you're in fresh territory when Marcus invites Darby over to watch a video and the movie turns out to be Mahogany. But when a lovelorn Marcus roams the streets, in a sequence that screams "heartbreak montage," or when he and his friends primp at the mirror in the club, you realize you've seen these scenes a million times before. Squint and you could be watching Foxes.

A title like When Love Comes (May 19) promises melodrama, and director Garth Maxwell delivers in the story of Katie Keen, a one-time pop singer who returns to her native New Zealand to pick up the pieces of a shattered dream. Regally played by Rena Owen (Once Were Warriors), Katie falls back in with her gay best friend, Stephen, who in turn is struggling to salvage his relationship with a much younger rock singer. Two lesbian punks make a funky Greek chorus. Stephen's infatuation with the zoned-out singer sometimes strains credibility, but When Love Comes is smart about how women and gay men punish themselves for growing old. And it unwraps a scrumptious handful of new pop baubles worthy of Dusty Springfield.

If only Stephen and his young friend had the staying power of Bertram Ross and John Wallowitch, the graceful cabaret duo who are paid elegant tribute in Wallowitch and Ross: This Moment (May 13). Ross, a former Martha Graham dancer, and Wallowitch, a songwriter more talented than famous, have been a couple for 30 years. Like characters in a Stephen Sondheim song, they've been through wartime, bad mothers, bad Martha, and a lot of analysis and, dammit, they're still here. Watching Ross collect his once-grand body to teach a young generation of dancers is among the most moving moments in the festival. And if there's any justice in the world, the sublime ballad that gives the film its title will be a standard forever.

Another unsung musician is given her due in But I Was a Girl . . . : The Story of Frieda Belinfante (May 11), a Dutch documentary co-presented by the Boston Jewish Film Festival. Nazi persecution interrupted Belinfante's European conducting career, but she landed on her feet in Southern California, becoming the first woman conductor in the United States to have her own chamber orchestra. Director Tony Boumans makes the most of limited footage by stylizing interviews with the aged Belinfante, whose personal fortitude shines through an otherwise wizened face. The plaintive poker face of William Yang, an Australian photographer, dominates Sadness (May 6), the superb film adaptation of his stage monologue. Speaking directly to the camera, Yang tells the stories of friends who have died of AIDS and traces a shocking episode in his family's history. Re-created tableaux and Yang's compelling photographs help to weave both threads into an elegiac whole.

Directors Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato could just put a camera on Tammy Faye Bakker-Messner, roll film, and they'd have a movie. But there's more to The Eyes of Tammy Faye (May 12). The filmmakers locate mind-blowing early footage of Jim and Tammy Bakker, whose televangelism empire, we find out, began with a children's puppet show on a fledgling Christian network. Drunk on this stranger-than-fiction tidbit, the directors use talking sock puppets to introduce various sections of their tale, and it's a bad and smarmy idea. (RuPaul's breathless narration doesn't help, either.) Much better is the reunion they stage between Tammy Faye and the journalist who became famous for unmasking the Bakkers. And the film persuasively plays up Tammy's embrace of gay men, including AIDS patients otherwise demonized by the Christian right.

Following Tammy today through the rough waters of a celebrity afterlife as she pitches crummy talk-show ideas to network executives, you can't help rooting for her. After all, if NBC can make room for delicious cartoons like Jack and Karen (and that Will and Grace), then there must be a place for Tammy Faye.