“Sorry Angel”
Christophe Honoré’s films aren’t for everyone, but with this 1990 set period piece he’s arguably made his most personal work yet. It follows the sort-of long distance love affair between a university graduate in Brittany, Arthur (Vincent Lacoste), and Jaques (Pierre Deladonchamps), a well known Parisian writer who is slowly dying from complications from AIDS. The two have great chemistry, but Honoré’s screenplay simply keeps them apart too long for you to really care at the end. It’s a nice bookend to last year’s “BPM,” but simply not as memorable.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IpNvBJd33E0
“Rafiki”
It’s rare to find a narrative film about LGBTQ people in Africa, but director Wanuri Kahiu has braved the odds to tell this love story of two twentysomething Kenyan girls. Kena (Samantha Mugatsia) and Ziki (Sheila Munyiva) can’t stay away from each other despite living in an intensely homophobic society and the fact their fathers are running against each other for political office. The narrative beats of their love story are nothing new, but Kahiu transcends the genre with some wonderfully cinematic moments and two fantastic performances from Mugastsia and Munyiva. In fact, someone needs to get Munyiva a European or North American agent stat. She’s a star in the making.
“Knife + Heart”
What a mess. Word is Yann Gonzalez‘s over-the-top, murder mystery was the last film selected in competition and likely because a Netflix title pulled out. That might explain why it felt like it should have been with the sidebar selections in Un Certain Regard. Set in 1979, this thriller finds Vanessa Paradis (the Cate Blanchett meets Laura Dern of France) as a lesbian movie director who excels at making campy gay men’s porn (well, maybe the camp is unintentional). When a mysterious figure starts murdering her stars with a dildo* that has a deadly knife that pops out of the end of it she takes it on herself to discover who he (or she) is. The whole endeavor feels like a ’90s gay movie trying to evoke the style of an indie ’70s movie and Gonzalez just can’t make it work. It’s hard to make magical surrealism work and in this case, the picture needed to be simply funnier or chronicled in a slightly more realistic manner. It also doesn’t help that the sex scenes aren’t sexy whatsoever (and if that’s a statement on porn, in general, he could have made that point once and not bore us multiple times).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p3D4Pm_4sQo
*Dildos were an unexpected trend at this year’s Cannes popping up in a number of films. Who knew?
It’s likely that Joel Edgerton‘s “Boy Erased” and Marielle Heller’s “Can You Ever Forgive Me?” will hit a couple of the fall festivals and, in theory, “Bohemian Rhapsody” could be a TIFF premiere even without a director to front it (O.K., that’s debatable). So, as noted, this current resurgence in queer cinema isn’t going away any time soon. And yet, these higher profile releases will be hard pressed match the gay majesty that caused a stir for a fortnight in Cannes.
Now, if we could only get an out gay or lesbian hero in a Marvel Studios movie…
