Reviews from the closing week of the Philadelphia International Gay & Lesbian Film Festival

Following are reviews from the closing week of the Philadelphia International Gay & Lesbian Film Festival, July 1722. Tickets, $8.50 ($7.50 for Philadelphia Film Society members), are available at the venue on the day of the show or in advance from all TLA Video locations; by phone at 215-733-0608, ext. 4; and online at www.phillyfests.org/piglff. (Online tickets must be purchased 36 hours in advance.) An asterisk (*) after a screening time indicates scheduled director or other guests. All times are p.m.
Films recommended by CP critics are preceded by a

Venue Codes:

BROTHER OUTSIDER: THE LIFE OF BAYARD RUSTIN Born in West Chester in 1912, Bayard Rustin was raised a Quaker, and he held fast to the ideals of nonviolence and peace throughout his life. But despite a long career in political activism, which included organizing the landmark civil rights march on Washington, D.C., Rustin remained in the shadows. Even over the course of a feature-length documentary, Rustin remains elusive, the connection between the public figure and the private man barely probed. (Two of Rustin's lovers get about three minutes of screen time total.) The extent to which Rustin's homosexuality likely motivated his activism far more than it hindered it remains unexplored. Though it's a laudable and informative work that gives credit where it is sorely due, Brother Outsider still leaves us on the outside. --Sam Adams (7/19, 5:15, ISM*)

THE EDGE OF EACH OTHER’S BATTLES: THE VISION OF AUDRE LORDE A pivotal figure in black feminism and lesbian poetry (and, really, in any way you recombine those four words), Audre Lorde is celebrated in this documentary by Jennifer Abod. Declaring that "black feminism is not white feminism in blackface," Lorde established an aesthetic based on the principle of difference, which will sound pretty familiar to anyone who's, oh, been to college in the last 20 years. Despite testimonials from friends and women she affected, not to mention footage from the 1990 "I Am Your Sister" conference celebrating Lorde's work (the subject of another Abod film), The Edge of Each Other's Battles only partly succeeds in explaining Lorde's importance outside an academic context, which greatly limits its appeal to non-grad students. --S.A. (7/20, 4:45, PMT)

THE EVENT A made-for-TV movie that would never be made for TV, The Event follows a young assistant D.A. (Parker Posey) as she investigates the seemingly natural death of a man with end-stage AIDS. As it's almost instantly clear that his friends have helped him die, the police-thriller format provides no suspense and little conflict, unless you count tepid exchanges like, "There's no law when it comes to dying that way." "That's where you're wrong." An impressive, mainly Canadian cast (Don McKellar, Sarah Polley, Olympia Dukakis, Jane Leeves) is squandered on mawkish scenes that might provoke tears but not thought. (Polley, whose character is an aspiring actress, gets a particularly gruesome number where she goes through the motions on a feminine-hygiene commercial just after she's learned her brother is positive.) There's no doubting the issue of assisted suicide is important -- too important, in fact, not to deserve a better movie. --S.A. (7/17, 9:30, PMT; 7/20, 2:30, R5)

GENDER BIAS Given the sour economy in this country, I recommend we call our genders quits, board a boat to Brussels and live the extravagant life. That is, until our transsexual trick-turning pals get knocked off one by one by some loon on the loose. Enter Bo Ancellin (Robinson Stévenin): striking trannie with a face torn from a Maybelline ad and an infatuation with a sadistic neighbor (Stéphane Metzger) who peddles cocaine from his back porch and screws old hags in mink coats. Directed by Francis Girod and based on the novel by Brigitte Aubert, this murder-by-numbers mystery unravels when a crooked cop (Richard Bohringer) targets Bo as the main suspect in a series of ghastly murders. More or less unfazed by the slaying of her best friends, Bo trades her stilettos for a sleuth handbook and attempts to front her own investigation. It's refreshing to see a transsexual plunged into such an ordinary role, but the lackluster whodunit plot and implausible situations (hookers living like millionaires, chefs overlooking the corpse chilling at the back of the restaurant meat locker) overshadow Stévenin's compelling performance. Shock value: zero. Thrills: negative. Aftertaste: sour. --Ashlea Halpern (7/17, 5:00, R5)

HELEN BACK: UNDER THE MUSIC Assaulting your body like a bad case of VD, Helen Back and the Str8 Razors have in a matter of months established themselves as one of the city's most dangerously fun live bands, so it's not surprising that the best parts of Mary DiLullo's mock-doc are the generous helpings of live footage. The rest is a middling satire on rock-star exposés that finds Jimi Mooney playing not just his attitude-endowed drag alter ego, Helen, but Helen's straight-outta-Fishtown brother and his psychiatrist as well (not to mention re-enacting a scene from the Sopranos pilot). Hard to know how this'll play to people who aren't in on the in-jokes, but the Str8 Razors' performance later Saturday night (at the William Way Center) will be raucously self-explanatory. --S.A. (7/19, 7:30, ISM*)

JIM IN BOLD Produced in collaboration with PBS, Philadelphia filmmaker Glenn Holsten's Jim in Bold weaves together the story of Jim Wheeler, a gay youth from Lebanon, Pa., who committed suicide with a cross-country journey into the heart of young, gay America. The two parts of the film work together to paint big cities like Philadelphia as small beacons of acceptance in a hostile nation. Along the way, the road-trippers interview a group of queer Mormons in Salt Lake City and minority gay high-school students in Wilmington, Del., struggling for acceptance from peers, family members and the community at large. But splicing together the two parts of the documentary, each interesting in itself, makes for a disjointed, bipolar epic. One moment we're watching Jim's father talk about his dead son, the next we're in the manic handheld-camera world of the gay youth road trip. --Daniel Brook (7/17, 7:30, ISM*)

THE LIFE AND TIMES OF COUNT LUCHINO VISCONTI Two solid hours seems excessive for Adam Low's straightforward historical documentary, but then restraint was hardly one of his subject's virtues. A devoted communist whom one actor recalls as being "a little like Hitler," a neorealist who dramatized the problems of the working classes but forbade his servants from speaking, Luchino Visconti styled himself as a man so large that opposite impulses could exist within him without fear of collision. Life and Times is overly generous with the early years of Visconti's (admittedly extraordinary) life, particularly when it comes to his quasi-royal upbringing, but the good stuff is worth waiting for, especially testimony from Visconti's ex-lovers, Franco Zeffirelli and Helmut Berger (a former ski-resort waiter whom Charlotte Rampling recalls Visconti molding, inch by inch, into one of Europe's biggest movie stars). From the people's poetics of La Terra Trema to the gilded excess of The Leopard and the languorous decadence of Death in Venice, Life and Times captures every era of Visconti's development, though it's a shame the video projection won't nearly do justice to the clips included. --S.A. (7/20, 5:15, ISM)

LILY FESTIVAL Bridge games, quilting bees and penning wistful letters to the grandkids? Think again. When 75-year-old ladies' man Mr. Miyoshi moves into a retirement home teeming with feisty women, he triggers an all-out girlhood rivalry. Backs are stabbed, kimonos dropped and friendships wrecked as seven spinsters vie for Don Juan's attention. As fantasies are unlocked and desires explored, two women are led to an intimate, touching affair with one another. While the dubbing is out of sync in parts and some of the characters' voices are so shrill your ears will bleed, this uplifting, character-driven portrait of lust after 60 is a giant leap forward in Japanese cinema. Directed by Sachi Hamano, a veteran of pinku eiga (low-budget, softcore porn), Lily Festival puts a feminist spin on young love in the geriatric set. Makes you think twice about dumping Mom at that retirement home. --A.H. (7/17, 7:15, R5; 7/19, 12:15, R5)

MADAME SATÃ Karim Aïnouz's portrait of life in the slums of 1930s Rio de Janeiro boasts vivid imagery (courtesy of Behind the Sun and Central Station cinematographer Walter Carvalho), but a thinly conceived central character. João Francisco dos Santos, eventually known as Madame Satã (though long after the movie's events have ended), is something of a legendary figure, a tough-talking, short-tempered sometime-pimp, sometime-transvestite who, as portrayed by Lázaro Ramos, can also do a spinning kick like nobody's business. The trouble with the movie's João, whether on the level of script or performance, is that he's always flying into a violent rage, the transition so instantaneous and frequent that it begins to lose meaning, despite the ample provocations provided. Madame Satã has its striking moments, but it eventually wears you out. --S.A. (7/18, 7:15, R5)

MANGO SOUFFLé This Cowardesque bedroom farce is all about your standard indie-film love triangle -- woman-man-man -- but it might actually be important. Adapting from his own play, Mahesh Dattani has made the first feature-length Indian movie about gay men and their relationships. There's no music, not much actor or camera movement and the often-stagy dialogue, of which there is a lot, is mostly in English; you get the distinct impression the film was made for the international film fest audience rather than the Bollywooders. It would be a shame, though, if the crispy drolleries on this earnest and compelling tolerance casserole didn't get the movie seen in India, where homosexuality is still technically illegal and socially suspect. It's telling that the characters are all upper-middle-class and that the setting is an expansive and apparently isolated country home, as if homosexuality is not yet a viable or acceptable lifestyle for Vijay Q. Public. --Ryan Godfrey (7/19, 10:00, R5; 7/20, 12:30, R5)

THE MUDGE BOY And I thought I had it rough as a kid, being the fat one with acne and crooked teeth sitting alone with a tray of nachos in the back of the school cafeteria. After delicate Duncan Mudge (Emile Hirsch), better known as "Chicken Boy" to the local redneck hoodlums, loses his mother to a heart attack, he and his blistered-palm farmer father (Richard Jenkins) struggle to cope with the everyday chore of living. Duncan takes over the henhouse (once his mother's responsibility), shares conversations with her where he both asks the questions and provides the answers and sleeps in her fur coat at night. Befriended by a beer-guzzling, trash-talking older boy (Thomas Guiry), Duncan learns the hard way about adolescence and that niggling burn in his loins. At times predictable and even anticlimactic (you can stuff a chicken's head in your mouth only so many times before you tread on Alice Cooper territory), but never contrived, director Michael Burke's debut is a luminous, literate and superbly acted film that makes even the most troubling scenes (namely where Duncan is anally raped in a barn wearing his dead mother's wedding dress) passionate and unforgettable. --A.H. (7/18, 9:30, R5; 7/20, 5:00, R5)

MY LIFE ON ICE It takes a while to get used to the aggressively analog style of this video-shot feature by Olivier Ducastel and Jacques Martineau (The Adventures of Félix). Fashioned as the videotaped diary of a French teenager (the French title translates as My True Life in Rouen), My Life on Ice offers no explanatory narration, just a series of images and situations that take us further and further inside the thoughts of Etienne (Jimmy Tavares), who among other things must come to terms with his mother dating again after the death of his stepfather and his own burgeoning homosexuality. The trick of My Life, and it becomes a fairly sublime one, is the way the camera is not just Etienne's eye, but his mind's eye: When he trails his handsome geography teacher around town to shoot him unawares, or plies his best friend with questions about his own nascent sex life, we can see the picture while Etienne's still fumbling for the light switch. A welcome twist on a familiar genre, My Life on Ice is less about coming out than going in. --S.A. (7/19, 2:30, R5; 7/20, 7:15, R5)

RENO: REBEL WITHOUT A PAUSE In what is probably the first standup comedy film about the events of Sept. 11 and their aftermath, outspoken lesbian comedian Reno delivers a monologue about the embattled state of the union circa October 2001. Filmed by Nancy Savoca, most recently known for the HBO lesbo-drama If These Walls Could Talk, Rebel is a straight-on account of Reno's show, and all its flaws are Reno's. At first, Reno's personal remembrances of the catastrophe are worrying, not for their seditious overtones, but for their small-mindedness, and they are neither funny nor particularly insightful. It's not until she starts skewering the Bush administration, blind patriotism and Ashcroft's lopsided justice that she hits her stride, unleashing the full barrage of her wit, and saying things that, in October 2001, must have seemed positively subversive. Two years and two wars later, Reno's commentary is still relevant and it still -- at least the second half -- is entertaining. --Elisa Ludwig (7/18, 7:30, ISM*)

RISE ABOVE: THE TRIBE 8 DOCUMENTARY "Penises are OK, so long as they're detachable -- and every penis is," cackles Lynn Breedlove, the sexily androgynous leader of queercore pioneers Tribe 8, in this rough and sweaty tour diary from debut filmmaker Tracy Flannigan. Formed by Breedlove and guitarist Silas "Flipper" Howard (of By Hook Or By Crook and S.F.-based Bearded Lady Cabaret fame), this pack of balls-to-the-wall dykes turns the table on the machoistic power dynamic (groupies, groupies, groupies!) so rampant in rock 'n' roll. Footage from Tribe 8's scandalous live shows --topless shakin', dildo-suckin', mock-castratin' -- are deftly spliced with sobering backstage snippets and interviews with Tribe 8 mothers and ex-girlfriends. Themes of drug addiction, racism, oppression and violence temper the trivial tone of this cunt-happy circus, but overall, it's a ride well worth taking. --A.H. (7/19, 12:15, PMT)

SISTERS IN CINEMA Anyone who's inclined to think feminism's usefulness is past need only take a look at the film industry, where female feature directors are still a rare breed. The situation only worsens when you focus on women of color, which is what makes Yvonne Welbon's Sisters in Cinema such a useful and informative tool. The product of a years-long search to find African-American female feature directors, Sisters rounds up the usual suspects (Julie Dash, Darnell Martin), but takes in a few you might not expect (Zora Neale Hurston, who directed ethnographic films; Maya Angelou, who made her directing debut at 70; even, ladies and gentlemen, Miss Debbie Allen), and a host of names all but the most devout scholars will never have heard. Sisters in Cinema's greatest service is not outlining the problems facing female directors of color, which unfortunately haven't changed much, but how many women of color have bucked the system, creating movies that, however difficult to find, still exist for those willing to seek them out. Too bad Welbon didn't (or couldn't) include more clips. --S.A. (7/19, 2:30, PMT)