Gender by genre

Lines get crossed at the Berlin Film Festival

I caught a glance, but just a glance, of the cotton-candy coiffure of bejeweled Kim Novak as she wiggled through applauding Germans to a special Vertigo showing. Sorry, no interviews. But I'm more regretful about missing at the 47th Berlin Film Festival a one-on-one with another breathy American shining star, Holly Woodlawn: transvestite flame of comatose Joe Dallesandro in the immortally subterranean 1970 Trash.

Most first-generation filmic cross-dressers -- Candy Darling, Jack Smith, Divine, etc. -- are dead and gone. Holly, doing famously, was in Berlin to present the Teddy Awards, the festival's juried prizes for the best gay and lesbian films. "I brought every imaginable gown I had," she told Owen Levy, the lucky reporter for Moving Pictures invited to watch her unpack. Holly confided that her autobiography, A Low Life in High Heels, has been bought by the movies. Christopher Ciccone, Madonna's brother, is set to direct.

Was she planning to partake of Berlin's nightlife? "I'm traveling with my husband," Holly said, noting companion Brian Lund. "So much for getting laid."

The biggest scandal of this year's fest was a petite one: the banning of a five-minute Belgian short, "Cream and Punishment at the 49th Festival of Cannes." The film documents the 1996 Cannes antics of anarchist comic Noel Godin, who tossed a cream pie into the face of Daniel Toscan du Plantier, president of Unifrance, the mighty Gallic film organization.

Monsieur Toscan du Plantier fumed upon learning that the film was scheduled for Berlin's market. He contacted Berlin's festival head, Moritz de Hadeln, and threatened to withdraw all French pictures.

Something had to give: Brussels Avenue, the Belgian company selling the short, was pressured to cancel the screening. (I watched this merry-prankster pieing privately, on a TV monitor.) Brussels Avenue executive Jochen Girsch complained about the banning: "It's back to the 1930s."

Not exactly. Hitler would shit in his pants: Berlin in 1997 remains the freest major festival on earth for showing risky, beyond-the-edge, often sexually polymorphous cinema. This year, American independents, some flowing from January's Sundance Fest, dominated, setting the audacious tone. Two kinds of indies were especially evident: "gender-sliders," with adolescent and Gen X characters shuttling about, often with minimal guilt or self-consciousness, from gay/lesbian to straight to gay/lesbian couplings; and children-of-Crumb documentaries celebrating angry-fucked-up artist types.

Gregg Araki's Nowhere is a Valleytalk comedy with a cast of shake-their-booty female stars (Traci Lords, Christina Applegate, etc.) and pretty LA boys cruising each other haphazardly, crossing sexual boundaries without even noticing them. Kevin (Clerks) Smith's Chasing Amy tells of a female cartoonist who segues from girls to guys and back. Her boyfriend is turned on by her lesbianism, but he's also threatened because years ago in high school she was the two-at-a-time blow-job queen.

The best American gender sliders at Berlin were women-directed. Kristine Peterson's absorbing Slaves to the Underground is about the sexual involvements in a Seattle grrrl band. Lead singer Suzy (Marisa Ryan) is furiously man-hating; she even (new for cinema) beats guys to the ground in fistfights. Shelley (Molly Gross) commutes between Suzy's bed and that of her boyfriend. A groundbreaking sexual scene: Shelley orders her male beau to masturbate for her. While he uncomfortably diddles, director Peterson holds her camera on Shelley's delighted voyeur face.

My favorite film at Berlin (it opens theatrically in April) was All over Me, a mesmerizing story of the precarious friendship of two New York City adolescent girls. Claude (Alison Foland, the gawky high-schooler in To Die For, even more brilliant here) pines sexually for pal Ellen (Tara Subkoff, a pint-sized Jean Harlow type), but Ellen is consumed with drugs and screwing her gay-bashing boyfriend.

All over Me is a Rebel Without a Cause for the 1990s -- an intense, tender, physical 24-hour night of deeply felt teenage angst, and with the gay subtext of the James Dean/Sal Mineo friendship moved significantly to the surface. Hail to genuine new cinema talents: director Alex Sichel and screenwriter Sylvia Sichel, sisters.

As for the "Good Crumb, Bad Crumb" entries, Sick: The Life and Death of Bob Flanagan, Supermasochist, is a surprisingly stirring bio of the late performance artist whose self-flagellating act climaxed with him -- on screen!! -- hammering a nail through his penis. Flanagan battled until his death at 43 with cystic fibrosis; his masochism was his defiant way to rail against this fatal genetic disease.

Bad Crumb? R.I.P Rest in Pieces is a misplaced hagiography of satanic Joe Coleman, who at a notorious Boston Film and Video Foundation performance several years ago bit off the heads of two live mice, Mommy and Daddy, then set himself (and almost the BF/FV) on fire when he detonated explosives lashed to his vest. In this film, he talks bemusedly from New York about this awful Beantown moment: "I hated my father, so I spat Daddy's head into the audience. But Mommy's head I swallowed."