FtF: Female to Femme

"The thing we intend is not to be seen," Masha Raskolnikov, a Cornell University English professor, says without seeming irony in Kami Chisholm and Elizabeth Stark's FtF: Female to Femme. The statement succintly summarizes primary discussion of this utterly confunding performative documentary. Although some clear and cogent arguments are made about gender politics throughout the film, its message is almost entirely obscured by artistic leaps and bounds. It's a film for the insiders of a counterculture and can claim little relevance or educational value for others outside its sphere.

Structured as a series of interviews with well-known femmes including actress Guinivere Turner, poet and performer Meliza Bañales and novelist Jewelle Gomez, FtF: Female to Femme seems on its surface a straight forward talking heads doc. In these sections, there is compelling exploration of and introspection about the relationships between feminity and power, the artifice of the femme lifestyle, the rage against and irony applied to society's expectations of women and the counterculture rejection of itself, how the outsiders can make outsiders of others who live with the same social constraints. Outside this thematic heaviness, and in a turn of attempted wit, Raskolnikov says, "If a femme falls in the forest, she's wearing heels that are too tall." There's a general sense through all these interviews that critical statements about what it is to be a woman are being made.

However, add in a semi-satirical support group for femmes, and the film loses its grounding entirely. In trying to recreate the performative bend of the femme lifestyle, Chisholm and Stark render these support group scenes not at all humorous or playful but simply flat out confusing and unnecessary. The honesty of the one-on-one interviews is such that they do not require and are only weakened by this failed narrative tactic. In fact, Stark, who makes an appearance, serves to obscure the artistic intent and thins the narrative thread even more. It's nearly impossible to listen to her dialogue for the mere fact that it makes little to no sense. Had some alternate method of demonstrating the performance and irony of the femme lifestyle been attempted, the film may have afforded cohesion. As it stands, however, the mockumentary-esque concept trips on its own cleverness.

Raskolnikov, who opened the discussion here, shall close it, saying essentially that appropriating the femme lifestyle is about, "loving the thing that you are and being more of it." The positivity of the message transcends the niche the film panders to, and it's one anyone can grasp, although they may be lost in the rest of the film's quagmire.

The film screens tonight, Monday, October 15 at 7:30PM at Theatre Decatur. For ticket information visit, www.outonfilm.com.. For more information on the film, visit www.altcinema.com/ftf.html.

One to Another

Seen on a surface level, Pascal Arnold and Jean-Marc Barr's One to Another is a study and borderline explotation of bodies. It's brutally physical and unforgiving, yet underneath this layer, the film explores the spiritual and moral confusion of teenagers unguided by adult notions of truth and reality.

Based upon an actual murder case, One to Another quietly watches the departure of childhood as Lucie (Lizzie Brocheré) investigates the killing of her brother Pierre (Arthur Dupont). Along with the sibling's gang of friends Nicolas (Guillaume Baché), Sébastien (Pierre Perrier) and Baptiste (Nicolas Nollet), Lucie dances mortality in a waking state, her only defense for mourning the raw and uncomplicated exposure of skin. Set fiercely in a physical present, therefore, One to Another dwells in nudity as if that alone were a message. Multiple scenes of sunbathing and orgiastic pleasures paint sex and sexuality as a conduit for power and manipulation. Pierre himself is the great catalyst for this thematic thread. His proclivity for pleasure and the monetary benefits of it render him perhaps the most base of the film's character studies. His sole focus is sensualist, and it's this that opens his morality to weakness.

While attempting to emulate her younger brother's epicurean lifestyle, Lucie, who harbors romantic notions about and incestuous feelings for Pierre, finds herself nearly incapable of obtaining answers but through rectitude. Her many attempts to use sex to extract information about the murder fail completely. While Pierre was of the moment always, Lucie is of the mind--of words, of poems and small moments. In a particularly endearing sequence, Pierre begs Lucie to explain to him how beautiful he is. As if she's his reflection in the lake, Lucie tells Pierre that he's as beautiful as a squirrel or a heart. She lists several of these comparisons with care and without the least bit of mockery, and he falls to sleep listening to her praise.

In the clear vision of Brocheré, Lucie is both a savage and saint. She bears all the sadness of the film with both fury and resignation. Brocheré's focused silence admits Lucie's emotional upheaveal, and there's an undeniable strength of commitment in Brocheré's reserve. She seems to know instinctually which moments to suppress and which to exploit. The only other character who approaches a similiar emotional territory is Paul (Karl E. Landler), the awkward neighbor who spends his time spying on Lucie and the only one who knows throughout the course of the film the truth about the murder. In Landler's performance there's an unflappable dedication to the moment. For all his character's hesitation and stuttering, there's not a break in the acting itself. He, along with Lucie, then becomes the barometer for righteousness for the rest of the film.

While much American media has focused on and lamented over the physical plane of this film, it's the emotional and spiritual plane of the film that Arnold and Barr seem to concern themselves with. Through Lucie they explore the questions: "How after a loss does one build oneself again? How does one recover when a necessary part of the duality of man is removed forever from his consciousness?" If the explicit sex and nudity seem overbearing throughout the film, then so too are its visceral aspects. It's a film, like the real life case its based upon, of extremes, one metaphorical part pitted against the other, although both must exist, and do exist most contentedly, together.

The film screens tonight, Monday, October 15 at 9:30PM at Landmark's Midtown Art Cinema. For ticket information visit, www.outonfilm.com..

Shelter Me

There are two major themes vying for first place in Marco S. Puccioni's Shelter Me. One deals with the hot button issue of immigration by improvished foreigners into economically stable European countries. The other deals with love and its many complications. Neither overshadows the other throughout the film, but ultimately the two ideas don't bond in a satisfying way, their concluding intersection, much like the end of the film, leaving much to be wanted.

On a return trip from Tunisia, couple Anna (Maria de Medeiros) and Mara (Antonia Liskova) find they've unwittingly and illegally ushered Anis (Mounir Ouadi), a young Moroccan man looking to find work, into Italy. Unwilling to let him fend for himself, the overly compassionate Anna invites Anis to live in their home after she finds out that his uncle in Milan has left the country to find work elsewhere. While Mara at first resists this carte blanche decision on the side of her lover, she bonds quickly to Anis, particularly over feelings of loss and financial insecurity. Without meaning to, Anis slowly tears Anna and Mara apart.

Pivotal in the framework of the film is the fact that Anna has the money. It's her house, and it's as if Mara and Anis are guests in her life. Working in a managerial position, Anna helps to oversee the shoe factory that her family runs. Meanwhile, Mara works on the assembly line and Anis stacks boxes in the shipping area. There's an inherent economic heirarchy here, and both Mara and Anis cling to Anna as much for her kindness and good spirit as for the security she affords them both. In a way, Anna's allowed to be generous with her thoughts and feelings. She's never had to struggle as Mara and Anis have.

The acting is in every moment a pleasure to watch live out. De Medeiros and Liskova create a realistic space as a couple. Despite their differences, they seem very much in love with one another. To counter that relationship, Ouadi commands a quiet attention to detail. He listens not only to others while acting but also carefully and unconsciously to himself. This is particularly apparent in scenes where he lies alone on the couch. It's as if Ouadi is very much in Anis unsettled and insecure headspace. Cinematographer Tarek Ben Abdallah's work also stands out as a critical emotional element in the film. The frames deliberately feel alternatingly confining and expansive at times, a compositional tactic that focuses the emotions on both the epic and minute.

There's a great deal done well in Shelter Me, none of which is later negated by an incomplete ending. Throughout the film the trajectory to meaning is initially much too slow, and then as the climax draws near, much too fast. It's as if Puccioni got stuck in contemplation and then realized too late that the film had to end. In such, the wrap-up errs on the side of the artsy, and in so looks and acts like so many existential exploratory films. It's an ending that begged for more care and more planning to avoid the expected.

The film screens Tuesday, October 16 at 7:30PM at Theatre Decatur. For ticket information visit, www.outonfilm.com..

The Curiosity of Chance

In a throwback to the 1980s quirky and wit driven comedies, Russell P. Marleau's The Curiosity of Chance uses humor and kitsch to explore a teenager's experience of the issues of gay identity.

When army brat Chance Marquis (Tad Hilgenbrink) enters a new high school, populated by several attractive and intimidating Europeans, he's immediately faced with a typical set of dilemmas: bullies spouting that he's a faggot, a foul-smelling vice principal who grills him and the pervasive lack of fashion sense that grates on his nerves. There's a general easiness and lack of self-consciouness in Marquis' character at the beginning. He's flamboyant without shame, and it's this space that's he's comfortable inhabiting. In meeting the cantakerous fashionista Twyla Tiller (Aldevina Da Silva) and eccentric photographer Hank Hudson (Pieter Van Nieuwenhuyze), and also later befriending the music-loving soccer player Levi Sparks (Brett Chukerman), Marquis however challenges himself to find out more about who he actually is outside that is identifying himself by his sexual preference.

Much credit is owed costume designer Loret Meus and production designer Kurt Rigolle for visually recreating the 80s in an interesting way. The small details of their work went a long way to punch up the humor of the scenes. The actors carry the humor and light-hearted sentamentality off as well, though the general impression they give is one of watching a Disney tweener sitcom. Easy on its surface and easy at its core, The Curiosity of Chance is fun if not terribly memorable and much more like an extended television episode than a fully realized film.

The film screens Wednesday, October 17 at 7:15PM at Landmark's Midtown Art Cinema. For ticket information visit, www.outonfilm.com.. For more information on the film, visit www.thecuriosityofchance.com.

Dos Patriais Cuba y la Noche

Memorialized in Julian Schnabel's Before Night Falls, the literary work of Cuban poet Reinaldo Arenas serves as the narrative binding for Christian Liffers' Dos Patriais Cuba y la Noche. Following six gay Cuban men, the film allows Arenas' writing to play its conceit, to show how the gay community was and still is underground and often persecuted throughout the country.

Set against the seemingly unlimited expanse of ocean, the film delves into the constraints of a lifestyle literally policed out of the national morality. There are club raids and party bans, all of which run, when they run, illegally. There are no organizations for people within the gay community, and as Abraham Buena Garcia, an AIDS patient who works by singing in drag, admits, there's very little hope that there ever will be a supportive group.

In many ways the film is a collection of beautiful sayings, and this alludes not to Arenas' writings but to the simple-hearted statements of the six men. "Love is such a beautiful word but has no meaning for me," says Alexey Castillo Quinones, a professional dancer whose father, since he discovered his son is gay, no longer speaks with him. "And, by my otherness I earned only incomprehension," explains Eduardo Hernandez Santos, an introspective photographer who lives without companionship but that from his mother. By far though, Isabel, a transsexual born Ahmed Esponda Perez, barters in the most beautiful and poetically told personal stories. In describing her upbringing, she admits that she's rarely felt loved, and as she retells the most memorable occassion of feeling so, her tears cling to the edges of her eyelashes. She's fully aware of her otherness, and she has little hope of reconciling that not for herself but for other people. Yet within that, she doesn't ask or demand love. She merely hopes not to be placed in the same machismo light that men are placed in within that society.

In tandem with Arenas's writings, Liffers also makes use of a bard, and to integrate his character, a few shots of the documentary do fall into a performance-driven sphere. As a new story is introduced, the interviewees pass by this bard, none of them recognizing him although all are aware that he is around and representative of the conscious alienation and sorrow each feels every day. This narrative move is at first jarring, but, after its introduction, is innocuous, serving small function to relay information and large funtion as transition.

While not nearly as lyrical or probing as Wim Wenders' Buena Vista Social Club, a documentary capturing Cuba and its current nature in true form, Dos Patriais Cuba y la Noche manages to live up to that film's lack of political judgement. Although on one level the film calls for an examination of social themes, it also calls very simply for compelling stories to be heard.

The film screens Wednesday, October 17 at 9:30 PM at Landmark's Midtown Art Cinema. For ticket information visit, www.outonfilm.com..