(Wo)man after midnight   Although it didn’t preview here for the Gay & Lesbian Film Fest, Hedwig and the Angry Inch did win the Teddy (for Best Gay or Lesbian Film) at this year’s Berlin Film Festival, where I recall seeing it at the blurry end of a long long day of screenings. John Cameron Mitchell, the creator of this Off Broadway hit, wrote the screenplay and stars in the film, which turns Hedwig’s anecdotes into flashbacks as she recalls how she grew up Hansel in East Berlin, until an American GI (Maurice Dean Wint) offered to marry him and take him to America. But the necessary sex-change operation was botched, leaving Hansel/Hedwig with an " angry inch " and no hubby. In America, she hooks up with protégé Tommy Gnosis (Michael Pitt), but the " inch " makes him bolt as well, and then he claims credit for her songs. Mitchell is a riveting performer, and I can’t imagine that Hedwig fans will be disappointed, but the film is literal and serious and a little overblown where the stage version charmed with its off-the-cuff insouciance. By Jeffrey Gantz

Pride cometh before confusion, ambiguity, and doubt — or so most of the selections in the 17th Annual Gay/Lesbian Film Festival would suggest. Rather than pushing a militant or defined gay identity, these films and videos indicate that selfhood, social roles, and gender are far from clear-cut categories and indeed blur into a universal malaise that is as much existential as sexual.

Too bad such an attitude doesn’t make for better movies — too often the self-reflection in these selections comes off as narcissism. The feature films offered in the festival this year are the weakest in some time. (Three of the expected highlights — Julie Johnson, which opens the festival May 2 at 7:30 p.m.; the Sundance hit Southern Comfort, which screens May 5 at 2 p.m.; and the Sundance and Berlin hit Hedwig and the Angry Inch, which screens May 10 at 8 p.m. — were not made available for preview; but see below for a word on Hedwig.) Many of the shorter video offerings, on the other hand, are powerful and illuminating.

The best feature I saw was Cesc Gay’s charming, rough-around-the-edges Nico and Dani (2000; May 18 at 8:20 p.m.), an honest and mostly good-natured (though there is that troubling date-rape scene) story about growing up spoiled and horny in upper-class Spain. We first meet scrawny, down-to-earth Nico (sparrow-like Jordi Vilches) as he tries and fails to pick up an off-screen woman on the train going from Barcelona to the seacoast villa of his pal Dani (Eddie Haskell look-alike Fernando Ramallo). Undaunted, Nico announces to Dani that he intends to lose his virginity by the end of vacation, and a couple of cute local girls, themselves sexually curious and with agendas, seem likely candidates. In the meantime Nico and Dani practice at night what they call “krámpack” (the film’s Spanish title), a kind of mutual masturbation.

Talk about coming of age. The krámpack gets a little out of hand, with Dani developing a crush on Nico that hides sinister shadows of jealousy and treachery under the beachy sunniness. A kindhearted older gay writer adds a comforting and melancholy touch in this uncompromising but uplifting look at the heart’s strangeness and resiliency.

The boundaries between love and friendship are further explored in Japanese director Shindo Kaze’s visually splendid but otherwise gauzy Love/Juice (2000; May 4 at 8 p.m. and May 11 at 6 p.m.). The two friends here are Chinatsu (Mika Okuno) and Kyoko (Chika Fujimara), two women sharing a funky flat in the big city. Chinatsu is intense, reserved, and a lesbian; Kyoko is blithe, spontaneous, and a tease. Chinatsu has a crush on Kyoko; Kyoko leads her on while pining for the sullen man who works at the tropical-fish shop or flirting with the creep bartender at the bunny club where she and Chinatsu are unlikely waitresses. Alternately engaging and annoying, with a symbolic subtext (the fish; Chinatsu’s photography) that gets a little self-conscious, this is more juice than love.

Given a title like Big Eden (2000; May 11 at 8 p.m.), you expect paradisal mountain landscapes and a return to primal bliss. And so it might have been in Thomas Bezucha’s uneven romantic comedy had Henry (Arye Gross) not been such a self-involved nudge. He’s a successful Manhattan painter (I’m sorry, but all his canvases looked like cheesy screensavers) called back to his Montana roots when his feisty grandad has a stroke. There he’s reunited with local hunk Dean (Tim DeKay), his teasing, unconsummated schoolboy crush (that friendship/lover dichotomy again) who is now divorced with two kids and still unclear about his sexual direction. Henry spends a good part of the movie whining while his crusty neighbors (this is clearly not the Montana of homophobic hate crimes and militia groups) secretly try to arrange a liaison between Henry and Pike (Eric Schweig, the best thing in the movie), the strapping, black-maned, torturously shy demigod who runs the general store. This all collapses into contrivance, and it becomes painfully obvious that Pike is just too good for Henry.

So what do gay men want? Don’t ask the characters in Julie Davis’s All Over the Guy (2001; May 3 at 8 p.m.) or they’ll bend your ear with their answers. Up to the film’s bathetic last third, the talk (written by Dan Bucatinsky, who also stars) is mostly brisk and witty. Then, as the plot and the schmaltz thicken, the dialogue gets glib — and worse. Two guys, one a needy Jewish anal-retentive looking for Mr. Right (Bucatinsky), the other a Joe-six-pack gentile slob looking for Mr. Right Now (Richard Ruccolo), meet on a blind date and despite tedious recriminations, flashbacks, self-help therapy, contrived subplots (the straight friends pair up), gratuitous cameos (Christina Ricci, Lisa Kudrow), and the repeated asking of the question “What do you want?” still don’t know what they want. And you won’t care.

So far these have all been movies in which the protagonists have projected their own inner confusions onto the world. As we all know, it works the other way — the world imposes its confusion onto us. Especially when it comes to defining our sexuality and social roles, as Barbara Hammer demonstrates in her ambitious documentary collage History Lessons (2000; May 12 at 3:30 p.m.). Combining a variety of archival footage ranging from World War II newsreels about WACs to silent-era lesbian pornography, it provides ironic commentary on the mixed messages popular culture sends to women about their desires and duties. Sometimes wry, sometimes belabored, Lessons succeeds less as a polemic for feminist and lesbian freedom than as a beautiful artifact, a palimpsest of crass, corroded, oddly touching abandoned images.

Surely some corner of the world remains untainted by the distortions and tyranny of patriarchal civilization? Samoa comes close, as Heather Croal’s endearing and subtly subversive Paradise Bent (1999; May 20 at 2 p.m.) suggests. A subculture of transvestites, or fa’afafines, has thrived there for centuries with relatively little friction. When the Christian missionaries came in the 19th century and suppressed the native population’s free and easy sex lives, particularly those of women, the fa’afafines flourished, taking the place of women in public displays of feminine allure. This terse, funny, provocative documentary focuses on Cindy, a fa’afafine whose relationship with Peter, an Australian government worker, takes a melodramatic twist because of the intrusion of the documentary crew itself. It’s an intricate but exhilarating investigation into the interconnection and clashing of societies, mores and social roles, not to mention the responsibility of the filmmaker and the viewer.

Who we are and how we are perceived and labeled are among the issues probed in Julie Wyman’s A Boy Named Sue (1999; May 19 at 4 p.m.), a fascinating video documentary compressing five years of transformation in the life of a transsexual. Never comfortable as a woman, Sue decides to begin a hormone treatment that some of her friends describe as “suicide.” As hair grows and her voice deepens she experiences the thrill (shaving! masturbation!) and the agony (who am I? will I ever get laid?) of male adolescence, and that threatens her stable domestic relationship with Lisi, who finds that what started out as a more-or-less traditional femme/butch relationship is now turning into an uneasy alliance with an increasingly macho “fag” who is apparently attracted to gay men. Never sensationalistic, intimate but not exploitative, Sue makes this extreme case of blurred boundaries and thwarted labeling familiar to anyone who has tried to comprehend a changing relationship.

Similar in form and theme to Sue is Australian director Jacqui North’s Chrissie (1999; May 20 at 3:30 p.m.). This documentary also covers several years of changes, but in this case they come from the devastation of AIDS. Chrissie Napier experienced more than her share of pain in her 27 years: sight-threatening eye ailments as a child, diabetes, sexual assault at the age of 17 followed by a hysterectomy. She ran away from home and by the age of 18 was diagnosed as HIV-positive.

And this is a family-values picture. With all her friends dying from the disease or otherwise abandoning her, Chrissie returns to her three younger sisters and mother, to whom she had never let on that she was gay, let alone suffering from AIDS. They embrace her without reservation, and the film succinctly and vividly recounts the last days of a bright, funny, irreplaceable individual who suffered and desired and was loved and died. Chrissie reduces all the vagaries of self-definition and definition by others to fundamentals: our relationships with the original social unit, the family, and with that ultimate destination, death.

Issue Date: April 26-May 3, 2001