The 22nd annual Philadelphia Film Festival screens at area theaters Oct. 17-27. Among the 100-plus films from 35 countries are nearly a dozen that represent the best in queer and queer-themed filmmaking.
Two of the most highly anticipated films at this year’s festival are a pair of sexually explicit French films.
“Stranger by the Lake,” written and directed by Alain Guiraudie, depicts a love triangle that develops at a cruising area as Franck (Pierre Deadonchamps) befriends Henri (Patrick d’Assumçao), but lusts after Michel (Christophe Paou). Even though Franck spies Michel drowning his boyfriend, Ramière (François-Renaud Labarthe), he can’t resist coupling up with the murdering hunk. However, he is frustrated that their relationship is limited to their lakeside assignations. Curiously, both men lie to Inspector Damroder (Jérômre Chappatte), who is investigating Ramière’s death.
This seductive erotic thriller — which is shot in a series of hypnotic, repetitive sequences — plays with issues of attraction and voyeurism, trust and truth as the characters strip down on the beach, swim naked in the lake and stroke and sometimes suck each other off in the woods. Guiraudie’s film is incredibly atmospheric and uninhibited, and viewers will be breathing heavy during the erotic trysts and as the tension increases in the final reel as a series of violent murders occur.
In an interview after a New York screening of the film, Guiraudie cited a familiarity with the location (which is near his home in France), and discussed how he approached filming naked men on the beach.
“Looking directly at them, if they have their legs spread out, their sexual organs appear large. I thought I could move the camera off to the side but in the end, we decided it was better to do it in this very frontal way,” he said. “That’s how it is! I’ve gone to these kinds of nude beaches. You look directly at them, and that’s what you see. Nothing is hidden. Some things need to be hidden [for the story] but nothing about the body needs to be hidden.”
His full-frontal strategy is not just to titillate viewers, but also to focus the audience’s point of view.
“It was predominantly about how to look, and how things look,” Guiraudie said. “How do I ‘show’ what you are looking at? How do we look at things? And how are the ways we look at things received by the object that we are looking at? You can have the same look and one point of view can be benevolent and loving, but the next day, you can be looking at the same image or view, and suddenly, it can seem very disturbing, threatening and oppressive.”
“Stranger by the Lake” plays well with these conflicting points of view — merging Franck’s vision of the murder with the narrative in one dazzling long sequence — but the entire film is mesmerizing.
The Cannes Palm d’Or award winner “Blue is the Warmest Color,” which portrays a teenager (Adèle Exarchopoulos) who becomes infatuated by a blue-haired woman (Léa Seydoux), has its Philadelphia premiere at the fest (and was not available for preview).
Two other films depicting young women coming of age (and also not previewed) are “Puppy Love,” a Belgian film about a teenager named Diane (Solène Rigot) who becomes entranced by a British girl (Audrey Bastien) who attends her school, and “Young & Beautiful,” the latest film from prolific queer filmmaker François Ozon, which chronicles a year in the life of Isabelle (Marine Vacth), a teenage girl who has a series of sexual adventures after losing her virginity.
Two highlights of the Philadelphia Film Festival include “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?” a sweet and sentimental Taiwanese import about a handful of interconnected people who are unhappy in their lives and relationships. Weichung (Richie Jen) is a married optometrist whose manager leaves the store in his hands, and literally flies away in the pre-credit sequence. When the adorable Thomas (Wong Ka-lok), a flight attendant, comes into the store looking for eyeglasses, the glum Weichung has found someone who makes him smile and float. Meanwhile, Weichung’s wife, Feng (Mavis Fan), struggles with a decision to have another child and grapples with stress regarding a merger at work. In addition, Weichung’s sister, Mandy (Kimi Hsia), rejects her fiancé and seeks romantic advice from a soap-opera character that visits her in her bedroom. The various romantic crises help these characters — who are all scared and living with secrets and lies — find happiness and see things more clearly. While “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?” has moments of melancholia, writer/director Arvin Chen imbues the film with a mostly sunny disposition. He makes Feng’s karaoke performance of the title song a buoyant sequence, and audiences will be charmed by this fun and sunny comedy-drama.
In an email exchange from Taipei, Chen, who is straight, discussed the tone of his bittersweet romantic comedy.
“The way I approached it was to look at individual scenes and try not to intentionally make them funny or sad,” he said. “Instead, I just thought about how the characters would behave in that situation, and I found different tonal things to play with. My favorite scenes in the movie are ones where it’s visually funny or magical-realist on the surface, but the actual underlying emotion is very melancholy, like in the karaoke scene.”
While some viewers may think the queer characters in “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?” are stereotypes, Chen justified his portrayal of the gay men, who are dramatically different from the conservative Weichung.
“I tried to be sensitive in the portrayal of the gay characters, and several of the gay characters are directly modeled after friends of mine — even their dialogue,” he said. That said, Chen also observed, “One odd thing, however, is that most gay friends or audiences who have spoken to me about the film always say that Feng is their favorite character and the one they identify with the most — not any of the gay characters.”
The Philadelphia Film Festival is also showcasing the bracing documentary “God Loves Uganda” about gay rights in the African country. Filmmaker Roger Ross Williams chronicles the insidious behavior of American evangelicals who come to Uganda to inspire a new generation of Africans. These missionaries impose their values and beliefs on African villagers and blindly espouse the ideologies of International House of Prayer senior leader Lou Engle. When they encounter Muslims in traffic, these Christian youth still try to talk with them about Jesus. “God Loves Uganda” also shrewdly addresses the country’s condom and abstinence campaigns to fight HIV/AIDS.
When LGBT ally Bishop Christopher Senyonjo acknowledges that abstinence policies are not realistic, his message is contrasted with scenes that show that such campaigns are done to secure American financial support. The film also introduces inspiring gay-rights activist David Kato, who was murdered in a hate crime, and whose funeral is seen in the film being disrupted by protestors. They are contrasted with antigay activists David Bahati, who introduced a bill to parliament that would punish people who engage in same-sex relationships with jail or death, and pastor Martin SseMpa, who riles up his congregation by showing and discussing explicit images of gay sex acts. The evenhanded approach may make queer viewers’ blood boil, but “God Loves Uganda” is an important and potent documentary.
Another documentary with queer appeal is “Elaine Stritch: Shoot Me,” a profile of the Broadway performer as she mounts her final show.
Additional films with LGBT characters include:
“Vic + Flow Saw a Bear” is a deliciously nasty Canadian film by Denis Cote about the title characters — lovers who met in prison — seeking a new life together in Vic’s uncle’s cabin after release. Vic is visited by gay parole officer Guillaume (Marc-Andre Grondin of the queer classic “C.R.A.Z.Y.”), and someone is out for revenge. Cote’s style is unconventional, but so too are his characters.
“Honeymoon,” an award-winning film from the Czech Republic, concerns an uninvited stranger turning up at a wedding only to cause considerable trouble. The film features a queer twist — but it is reportedly quite nasty (homophobic violence).
The Philadelphia Film Festival also allows viewers to take a trip in the way-back machine — to 1993, with a 20th-anniversary screening of “Philadelphia,” the first Hollywood film to address the AIDS crisis. Yes, the film was criticized on release for not making the relationship between Tom Hanks and Antonio Banderas more affectionate, but there is no denying the affecting, Oscar-winning performance by Hanks as the film’s justice-seeking protagonist.
See you at the movies!
For more information on the Philadelphia Film Festival, visit www.filmadelphia.org.