Flickipedia by Michael Atkinson

Author:Michael Atkinson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
Published: 2008-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

COMING OUT

“I really wanna kiss you, man.”

—River Phoenix, My Own Private Idaho

A pivotal life moment if ever there was one, with no corollary among the experiences of the hetero majority. Resonant gay films are not huge in number, but the tradition is not new and the best of them have a universal relevance.

Michael (1924) This forgotten German Expressionist treasure by Carl Dreyer is as antiquated in its ideas about art and class as it is thoroughly twenty-first century in its subtle depiction of gay love. Cowritten by Mrs. Fritz Lang, Thea von Harbou, the film explores a tragic love triangle among a “master” artist (filmmaker Benjamin Christensen), his young model-boyfriend (an unrecognizable Walter Slezak), and a penniless Russian countess (Nora Gregor).

Mädchen in Uniform (1931) Made on the eve of Hitler’s ascension to power, this powerful and sensitive early-talkie melodrama about a monstrously oppressive girls’ school was banned in Germany for its overt depictions of lesbian love. Or was it because of how gay desire represented the only salvation in the face of militaristic dehumanization? Cowritten and directed by women (Christa Winsloe and Leontine Sagan, respectively), it’s a forgotten breath-stealer.

Un Chant d’Amour (1950) This notorious semipornographic short, directed by budding writer and former crook Jean Genet, is a potent twenty-five minutes about men in prison. But it’s euphoric—Genet converts the grim, deprivative lifestyle of the inmates into an achingly romantic tribulation, in which the walls and bars that separate his lonesome, lovelorn muscle men become the fetishized definition of their desire. Another avant-garde unmissable: Kenneth Anger’s Scorpio Rising (1964), a half-hour mood piece that essentially defined American gay iconography and nascent queer culture for several generations of horny guys.

Desert Hearts (1985) A modest, pure-hearted period indie in which a buttoned-down 1950s professor (Helen Shaver) goes to Nevada for a quickie divorce and ends up falling for a rancher’s saucy daughter (Patricia Charbonneau). The convert-a-straight scenario, ripe as it is with dramatic discovery, has rarely been as convincing or sexy.

Maurice (1987) Edwardian England was not the best environment for letting your same-sex preference hang out, and this E. M. Forster adaptation is the Brokeback Mountain of snooty Brit-lit movies. (Unsurprisingly, the novel wasn’t published until years after Forster’s death.) Here, the mutual attraction between two upper-class students (Hugh Grant and James Wilby) is battered on the anvil of English propriety, leading one to tragically repress his true self in exchange for a “normal” social existence and the other to fall off the aristocratic grid by embracing his bliss.

My Own Private Idaho (1991) See “Road Trip,” p. 267, and try not to dwell on the confluence between River Phoenix’s tragic death and the lonesome, doomed odyssey of his street hustler in this film, a gay Rebel Without a Cause for the late twentieth century.

The Living End (1992) A road movie apotheosis: no one’s ever had as much a reason to fuck the system (sometimes literally) and take off for the horizon as guerrilla director Gregg Araki’s HIV-positive pair of hard-luck misfits (Craig Gilmore and Mike Dytri).

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