Review: Harvest

Harvest

Dir. Benjamin Cantu

Country: Germany

Aus Rating: N/A

Running Time: 85mins

There are nearly 30 films listed on IMDb with the title Harvest. From such a roundly unimaginative title, however, comes a story that emerges out of a refreshingly unique location as Benjamin Cantu’s film explores the lives to two young men who stumble across each other within the confines of a farming apprentice program in the Nuthe Urstrom valley on the outskirts of Berlin. For all the internet pornography that has fetishised the lives of farmers, it’s a thoroughly unglamorous life and that’s just one of the surprises of Cantu’s debut feature – he has previously made short films and TV – that rarely lets the audience’s expectations come to fruition. That it takes some 50 minutes for the “queer” aspect of Harvest [Stadt Land Fluss] to finally manifest itself in a truly physical way is another, but what it may lack in overt gay DRAMA for audiences seeking little more that titillation, it gains in a slow-burning intensity that makes for fine viewing.

Opening with gorgeously lensed shots of Germany pastures, Harvest is able to very quickly paint a sense of place as it goes about showing the working lives of a class of farming students. The reserved Marko never speaks out of turn, doesn’t indulge in drinking like his fellow students, responds passively (or doesn’t even notice, it’s hard to tell) to the advances of a female student, and simply wants to learn how to be a farmer to make a life for himself that his troubled upbringing may have otherwise not allowed. Newcomer Jacob has recently quit a similar internship with a far more socially acceptable and well-paid institution (a bank). That the two become friends out of awkward necessity – neither of them feel quite right around other people – rather than some instant sex radar is what lends Harvest’s final sequences a rich authenticity. That they fall for each other isn’t surprising, what’s refreshing is that Cantu doesn’t treat their romance as Gone with the Wind.

Being gay and falling for somebody isn’t the only trouble plaguing these guys, Marko especially, but acknowledging these feelings will make them healthier and stronger, and therein lies the problem for Marko. He’s not sure what he wants; love seems like the least of his interests. At least at first. The performances are uniformly superb, with newcomer Lukas Steltner and Kai Michael Müller as Marko and Jacob proving to be quite stellar. The introverted performance by Steltner is particularly fine as his internal securities slowly begin to fade away. And, yes, they’re both good looking men but they lack a distracting prettiness that would belie their situation.

Handsomely photographed by Alexander Gheorghi, Harvest shares a similar brooding energy to the Danish gay romance, Brotherhood and its potency lingers far more than any cheap, crass, candy-coloured American import. Some may think it’s lack of horniness takes the sizzle out of it, but I found its more subdued take on the relations of young gay men was refreshing and all the slinkier. These two men don’t discover each other in seconds of gratuitous sex, but through evolving, fleeting moments. It has a quiet dignity about it that makes Harvest an impressive piece of work. B+

Check the MQFF website for screening details

Review: The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye

The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye

Dir. Marie Losier

Country: USA | Germany | UK | Netherlands | Belgium | France

Aus Rating: N/A

Running Time: 67mins

An exquisitely assembled, if still somewhat haphazardly made, documentary about the life of two industrial punk icons, Marie Losier’s documentary The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye is a spryly economical look at the face – definitely the face - of two identities who would rather be an underground somebody than a mainstream anything. Clocking in at only 70 minutes, there’s something to be said about Losier’s decision not to pad her debut feature directorial effort with needless nothings. Still, there does appear to be much left unsaid, some of which surely could have taken place of some of the more obtuse segments that float about within the documentary narrative like driftwood.

As if assembled from jaggedly cut puzzle pieces, The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye attempts to craft some sort of story out of the lives of Genesis O-Orridge and Lady Jaye Breyer P-Orridge, but focuses more on that of Genesis. Most famous for his work with industrial punk rock outfit Psychic TV as well as the esteemed William Burroughs, before embarking on a body experimentation in pandrogyny with Lady Jaye, his second wife, that aimed to blur the lines between body and gender. Before Lady Jaye’s death at the age of 38, the two had ventured headfirst into their body-morphing project of creating Breyer P-Orridge, a blending of the two through means of plastic surgery.

Lady Jaye, despite being so integral to the story that her name appears in the (rather nifty – something Marie Losie’s filmography shows she is capable of frequently) title, goes somewhat under-nourished by the filmmaker who prefers to stick with the still rather extraordinary life of Genesis. Losier’s frequent work within the realms of experimentation, having worked with the aforementioned Burroughs plus Guy Maddin and the Kuchar Brothers has leant this documentary a fractured texture. Mixing various types of film and video with art, old home movies, photography, original documentary footage and storybook narration, Losier’s film occasionally has the appearance of an unfinished, perhaps disregarded, art installation, and yet this lends it a messy, flighty authenticity.

The work of Losier on her own role as editor is both extraordinary, hypnotic and baffling. Acting as its own ferocious work of art that encapsulates the anarchic spirit of its protagonists, I nevertheless wished it had gleaned a more focused eye on one of the many tangents it goes on. Flashy visuals frequently smash on screen like the twisting mechanics of a kaleidoscope, capturing moments of bliss and poignancy as often as it does highlight the absurdity of their existence. The tagline claims “love is dedication”, and you certainly can’t say these two weren’t dedicated to each other and to their art. The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye uses its artist subjects to form its own work of art, and that is something altogether fascinating. However, like any unique work of work, the reaction it gets out of an audience will be Losier and P-Orridge’s reward. The final image of Genesis swathed in fabric feels curiously haunting, his image becoming obscured but never disappearing entirely. No matter the identity, there's always a personality, and that is what Genesis is seemingly all about. B-

Check the MQFF website for screening details

Review: Private Romeo

Private Romeo

Dir. Alan Brown

Country: USA

Aus Rating: N/A

Running Time: 98mins

Sometimes gay cinema feels like little more than an excuse to watch absurdly good-looking people in various states of undress. Pornography without the sex, if you will. Private Romeo reads like it’s potentially aiming for something more, but ends up being significantly less. Don’t get me wrong, there are many very attractive men walking around in nothing more than a towel, but there are plenty of other avenues for such imagery that don’t require sitting through a mediocre 100-minute movie. Where Private Romeo really fails is by letting its pretty cast carry the weight of its concept, and never truly embracing it in a cinematic fashion. Audiences are, I suspect, going to be far more interested in the beauty than the brawn of Alan Brown’s Shakespeare-meets-Active Duty romantic drama.

Beginning in a class room where buff military cadets read William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet with a mocking tone as jokes are made the expense of those reading out the feminine roles. Very quickly the lines are blurred between reality and Shakespearean drama and Private Romeo quickly becomes just another modern day retelling of the bard’s most famous work. Such a concept could most definitely work as members of rival academies work to tear two young lovers apart, but simply rearranging the genders so as the entire cast are gay men doesn’t make a movie. Brown, who also wrote the screenplay, appears welcome to merely let Shakespeare’s words work on their own without any of his own input.

Such are the perils of casting such routinely good-looking actors that they eventually all begin to look like one another. It certainly doesn’t help that rarely seem to have any distinguishing features to help decipher who is a Capulet and who is a Montague. Furthermore, as if the entire film is just one big drama class role-playing exercise, all the actors are credited as “Josh” or “Sam”, rather than the “Romeo”, “Juliet” and “Nurse” that they recite to each other. Sadly, the military academy setting is nothing more than a fetish check list – military, uniforms, locker rooms, high school jocks, authoritative, etc – and isn’t used to its full potential. One would think that setting a gay romance within the walls of a place of education and warfare would be ripe for deconstructing more pertinent issues. Unfortunately, the film fails to navigate any true ideas about homosexuality within school systems, within domains of cocky brute masculinity, and within a private world that has been plagued by “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” for far too long. Private Romeo really is just a bunch of pretty men reciting Shakespeare on a school campus and it’s hard to see what’s so special about that.

Alan Brown has taken much of Shakespeare’s words verbatim and placed them within the mouths of these young men of lithe bodies and boyish looks. The performances are all fine, although it would have been nice to have seen them act without the restrictions of language placed upon them. Only Seth Numrich makes much of a lasting impression as the love struck Sam/Romeo. Perhaps it’s because in the right light he looks like a swoony Chris Evans that I responded to him, but maybe he’s just a fine actor. Mimicking the camera style of a more restrained Dogme film, and occasionally lit as if through a lens of honey, Private Romeo frequently appears as handsome as its cast, but it again comes back to Brown’s reluctance to use Shakespeare’s text as a jumping off point for something bigger. Teenage love is epic and dangerous, powerful and all encompassing, and yet everybody here just seems to be going about their business is their khaki sweats and perfect skin.

The scenes of romance between Numrich and Matt Doyle’s Glenn/Juliet frequently tip into tender, but their love fails to grow by the film’s end, which takes great liberties with the original text. Their initial make cute is actually just that, a rather sweet moment of cute flirting and the two are well matched. Perhaps the fact that both appeared on stage together in Broadway’s production of War Horse helped that, and the very stagey aesthetic of Brown’s film maybe aided even further.

While I have no doubt that some audiences will find the idea of Shakespeare done gay as a particularly novel twist – it’s certainly better than the last one I can recall, the atrocious Were the World Mine – but it lacks something that makes it inherently cinematic. The original text was used far more effectively by Baz Luhrmann in William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet, and it is given little reason to be revisited here for any reason other than to say a gay version of Romeo and Juliet with the original text exists. Fleeting and weird YouTube scenes of pop lip syncing fail to add any zest, and instead just confuse. As it stands Private Romeo is a disappointing, but frivolously gratuitous, high school drama production. It deserves better. C-

Check the MQFF website for screening details

Jeffrey Was Here

Purely by accident, I found myself watching two films within the same evening dealing with the AIDS epidemic. That they do so in such wildly different ways, however, made it a richly rewarding double.

I'm not quite sure where Christopher Ashley's Jeffrey fits into the world of gay cinema, but it was a strange viewing experience nonetheless. Made in 1995 - too late to be revolutionary, too early/small to skirt mainstream (although it's American box office of $3.5m suggests it struck a nerve with audiences, mostly likely New Yorkers) - this film takes a comedic approach to its subject matter, with moments for reflection and pathos. It's a curious film, for sure, and one that has its stage origins flaring at the peripheries, but one that succeeds by being completely its own beast and like no other that I can recall. It stars Steven Weber (you've seen him on television, no doubt) as a gay man who finds himself deciding to abstain from sex until the HIV/AIDS crisis dissipates. It's certainly a plot that would all but begs for wacky high jinks if it weren't for the prickly central issue, but it's still quite startling to see the topic being played with in such a flighty manner. That Weber's Jeffrey - Weber, by the way, looks remarkably like Christian Bale as Patrick Bateman at times and it was quite disconcerting to say the least - falls in love with an HIV+ man forms the rest of the film and the multitude of ways in which Jeffrey can be told he's missing out on a good thing because of his own prejudices.

What struck me most of all about Jeffrey was that it was so over-the-top in almost every way: Colours are vibrant, the characters are loud (oh hai there Bryan Batt from Mad Men), and there are so many funny cameos that it's easy to forget you're dealing with a subject that was and is still a very sore subject. I admit that it's definitely a-okay to watch Weber and Michael T Weiss act like cute lovebirds with one other, just as it's fun to watch everyone from Patrick Steward to Sigourney Weaver and Olympia Dukakis kick up their heals and sashay around with effervescent glee. As many films that err on the side of flamboyant tend to get, it's taste levels are questionable from time to time: a spirit from the afterlife? bizarro half-dressed fantasy sequences that attempt to break the fourth wall? Hmmm. In the end, despite some misgivings, it was quite refreshing how Jeffrey took such a different tact with the material. It never dismisses the tragedy of the events, but defiantly resists in letting the seriousness of the topic dictate its own agenda. Thankfully the actors are all game and it sounds awfully trite, but it certainly helps that it is competently made (which is something I can't say for some of the other queer films I've watched recently). B-

The subject matter gets a far more serious and detailed look in David Weissman's documentary We Were Here. Screening as a part of the upcoming Melbourne Queer Film Festival, this Oscar shortlisted documentary proves that no matter how many films are made on the topic of AIDS, there is always something new to learn. Less a straightforward history of the crisis that hit San Francisco in the 1980s than a series of talking head interviews with survivors of the era, We Were Here is an incredibly moving account of a time that truly does warrant the tag of a shameful moment in American history. We Were Here is both a film that mourns the loss of thousands of innocent people, but also a celebration of the people who unwittingly found themselves vital players in the fight against a curse that not only changed gay culture, but sexual culture the world over for as long as we'll live. Weissman, and co-director Bill Weber, have assembled a wonderful mix of people and simply allowed them to speak so eloquently about the subject that would essentially define their life. As one of the interviewees says, at least she can't look back on her life and she never did anything.

Recalling Word Is Out: Stories of Some of Our Lives and The Times of Harvey Milk, We Were Here is economical talking head documentary filmmaking at its finest. So much fascinating video, previously unseen by me, and photographs from the era are a constant fascination. We Were Here will stir up anger, fear, tears and joy; its existence always essential despite a plethora of other titles exploring the same thing and that is a telltale sign of a great film. B+

Check the MQFF website for screening details