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By Justine Elias, Globe Correspondent, Boston Globe, May 10, 2006
Love beyond the borders of age and war, rebels on the road, and young voices struggling to be heard dominate the latest edition of the Boston Gay and Lesbian Film/Video Festival.
With maverick visions predominating, the fest, now in its 22d year and making its home at the Museum of Fine Arts, features several US premieres, 13 feature films, seven documentaries, and 25 shorts. The closing-night documentary, ''Fabulous! The Story of Queer Cinema," argues that gay, lesbian, and transgender voices have become the truest expression of post-1968 US independent cinema. That ''Fabulous!," directed by Lisa Ades and Lesli Klainberg, is sponsored by and will air on a cable TV network (IFC) is sure to inspire interesting discussion at a panel that same day.
For the second time in three years, a film by Seattle filmmaker Q. Allen Brocka leads off the men's program. In 2004, he made the raunchy comedy ''Eating Out"; this year he's made a more sophisticated but still sexually explicit romance. In ''Boy Culture," which plays tomorrow night, a well-to-do Seattle hustler (Derek Magyar) tries not to fall in love with his roommate (Darryl Stephens), whom he calls ''perfect boyfriend material -- for someone else, of course."
Like Michael Caine's Alfie before him, the hero tells himself -- and the audience, too, in snappy, wiseacre voice-over -- how he's got everyone else's lives coolly figured out. Patrick Bauchau, too, is most appealing as one of the nameless hustler's more mysterious clients. When a movie and a hero are as sleek and unapologetically good-looking as in ''Boy Culture," they're sure to be dismissed as trash; not so here.
The film undercuts all the characters' juvenile illusions, and the jaunty title carries an appropriate echo of musical-comedy plot shenanigans, from ''Love Parade" to ''Swing Time."
The festival's other opener, ''Left Lane: On the Road With Alix Olson," which plays tonight, puts pedal to the metal with the live-wire Northampton-based performer. She has stage presence to burn and a killer sense of humor, but these are essentially a fan's notes. The director, Samantha Farinella, is Olson's road manager, and, as with most concert movies, if you like the act, you'll wish you were seeing it live.
The rap documentary ''Pick Up the Mic" might spark excitement for 20 rising artists in the queer hip-hop scene. Directed by Alex Hinton (''Queercore"), this film is an energetic look at young performers in London, San Francisco, and elsewhere who comment on race and gender in unexpected ways. If artist CDs aren't available for sale in the lobby, complain.
Cinema maverick Barbara Hammer (''Nitrate Kisses") has consistently uncovered the marvels of her medium as well as the heroes of gay and lesbian history. In ''Lover Other," she creates a shimmering dual portrait of Claude Cahun (1918-1954), the photo collage artist and writer, and Marcel Moore (1920-1972), her life partner and fellow artist-diarist. Cahun and Moore met as teenagers, became stepsisters when Cahun's father married Moore's widowed mother, then became lovers and innovators in Paris's surrealist scene. (Their black and white photographs, which look like Vogue magazine circa 1928, or 2028, are breathtakingly modern.)
Yet ''Lover Other" is no mere portrait of ''eccentric ladies," as one of their Jersey Islands neighbors affectionately describes them. The Channel Islands were the only UK territory occupied by the Nazis during WWII; both women were Jewish. Despite that, the couple joined the resistance, were tried, and were sentenced to death, a penalty that was never carried out before the island was liberated by the Allies. Hammer says her subjects' lives and art demanded a nonlinear telling. Yet she has somehow created a surrealist thriller, one that ought to inspire new, explosive film landscapes.
''When I'm 64" has the kind of complicated, slow-burning emotions found in Hollywood love stories of the 1930s and '40s. There's a chance encounter -- a taxi driver picks up an intriguing passenger, a shy schoolteacher; the conversation turns wistful. But this BBC telefilm takes a daring aim at taboo subjects: disrespect of the aged and less-than beautiful. Alun Armstrong, a beloved but unbeautiful face from British TV (''Bleak House"), plays the retired schoolmaster, while Paul Freeman, who usually plays villainous toffs, is cast against type as the taxi driver.
What might sound like the brass of insult (''You're a noofter, then?" ''If that's what I think it is, I think I might be.") is actually flirtation. And what is uniquely pleasing about ''When I'm 64" is the way it suggests how easily, and uneasily, these two disparate lives might become one.
The Argentine drama ''A Year Without Love" is as bleakly brilliant as ''When I'm 64" is warm and easygoing. Set in 1996 Buenos Aires, the film follows what may be the last year in the life of the protagonist, Pablo (Juan Minujín), an HIV-positive translator who expects to die before his 31st birthday. Refusing to take AZT -- the best drug available at the time -- he explores a solitary life of writing and S&M that becomes, in a surprising way, more stimulating than giving in to despair.
Director Anahi Berneri lets Pablo's nighttime journeys speak for themselves. Even when hope arrives, in the form of new drugs, the change in Pablo's outlook won't be the obvious or the expected one. This is a remarkable, unsettling film in which the refusal to engage in false hope can be as intoxicating as denial.
''Gypo," directed by first-time feature director Jan Dunn, tells the story of anti-immigrant sentiment in a British coastal town. The film's muted Dogme style, relevant-but-earnest plot and hot, out-of-nowhere lesbian attraction is undermined by the incongruous excitement of seeing one of the beleaguered Czech refugees portrayed by the regal, red-haired Rula Lenska, whose late-1970s TV commercial endorsements preceded her actual stateside fame. The film won acclaim at Cannes and in the United Kingdom, which is interesting, since nearly every man in the movie is depicted as a brutish type or a roving psychopath.
The 22d annual Boston Gay and Lesbian Film/Video Festival begins tonight at the Museum of Fine Arts and runs through May 21. For tickets, call 617-369-3306; for more information, call 617-369-3907 or visit www.mfa.org/film.
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