Flugt (Flee, Jonas Poher Rasmussen, 2021)
Whilst animation tends to make us think of Disney, there’s a whole world of adult animation such as Persepholis (Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud, 2007) and Waltz with Bashir (Aru Folman, 2008) from the documentary genre. Flee is an autobiographical account of “Amin Nawabi” confessing his life history to a friend (presumably Poher Ramussen) in Denmark and New York.
Continue reading →Sequin in a Blue Room (Samuel Van Grinsven, 2019)
Love Is the Devil: Study for a Portrait of Francis Bacon (John Maybury, 1998)
Jumbo (Zoé Wittock, 2020)
Postcards from London (Steve McLean, 2018)
Théo et Hugo dans le même bateau (Paris 05:59: Théo & Hugo, Theo and Hugo, Olivier Ducastel and Jacques Martineau, 2016)
I think three of these films were distributed by Peccadillo Pictures, a distributor of gay-themed films of varying quality. These were at the better end of the scale, beginning with Sequin, the story of sixteen-year-old Sequin’s (Conor Leach) conflicting search for anonymous sex with older men and for the attractive man he met at the orgy at the private and mysterious The Blue Room. Unfortunately, one of his hook-ups is with B (Ed Wightman), who wants more than a one-night stand. The narrative mutates into something closer to thriller, but feels a bit disjointed. Unlike Théo & Hugo, there doesn’t seem to be any concern about HIV.
Continue reading →La Belle Saison (Summertime, Catherine Corsini, 2015)
I spent a day grumbling about the sense that this was two films which didn’t quite dovetail together — but then I read an abstract about Nancy Astor and thought about her niece Joyce Grenfell and things slid into place.
Continue reading →Make Up (Claire Oakley, 2019)
So, there may be a spoiler here — it’s there, frankly, in the categories and tags (don’t look!) but it may well be there in other reviews. Stop, if you care. Maybe no one is reading, anyway.
Summerland (Jessica Swale, 2020)
It must be the end of the world — this is the second first time female directed lesbian themed film I’ve seen this week…
Querelle (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1982)
I think I’ve seen this before.
(There’s a spoiler in the final paragraph.)
Girl (Lukas Dhont, 2018)
Trans issues are a hot button topic right now — not least because some feminists have an issue with people declaring themselves to be women and sounding in the process as if they have an essentialist view of women closer to the conservative side of the debate. A programme such as Woman’s Hour can have a presenter claiming that sportswomen will no longer succeed as suddenly a lot of male athletes will claim to be women. And a few years back there was a lot of controversy over the (problematic) The Danish Girl, since Eddie Redmayne was a cis actor. Were there any trans actors who could have played the role? Would the film have been funded with one?
This was commissioned for a project that seems to have vanished, but I needed to write a couple of sentences for a chapter on the topic… I thought this text would be on my harddrive, but it’s hiding if it is. Fortunately I rarely delete emails.
Welt am Draht (World on a Wire/World on Wires) (Westdeutscher Rundfunk, 1973)
Adapted from Daniel F. Galouye, Counterfeit World/Simulacron-3 (1964)
(Dir. Rainer Werner Fassbinder; Sc. Fritz Müller-Scherz and Rainer Werner Fassbinder; Pr. Peter Märthesheimer and Alexander Wesemann; Cin. Michael Ballhaus and Ulrich Prinz; P.D. Horst Giese, Walter Koch and Kurt Raab; starring Klaus Löwitsch (Fred Stiller), Barbara Valentin (Gloria Fromm), Mascha Rabben (Eva Vollmer), Karl Heinz Vosgerau (Herbert Siskins), Wolfgang Schenck (Franz Hahn), Kurt Raab (Mark Holm)) Continue reading →
Love, Simon (Greg Berlanti, 2018)
Stop me if you’ve heard this before – gay films tend to the gay gothic where one or more of the gay characters has to die at the end. For the ‘clean’ gay – the noble heroic one – he or see might be driven to suicide by despair or killed as a result of homophobic society, or succumbing to HIV related conditions; for the ‘unclean’ one – the villain – the sentence is to be killed by the hero, at best to be imprisoned. Even a recent, and reasonably delightful, film such as Love is Strange, kills off one of its leads rather than give us a happy ending.
eCupid (J.C. Calciano, 2011)
In one of those it’s my blessing and my curse moments, I keep realising 90% of the way through a film that I should have been taking notes because it is relevant to my Research Project.
Most of the time the film is pants.
Valerian, say.
Subject to Change 