Tasveer Advance: KATLAA CURRY [FISH CURRY]

Directing: B
Acting: B+
Writing: B+
Cinematography: B
Editing: B-

Katlaa Curry is only the second film ever made in the Gujarati language to tell a queer story (the first was a 2013 film called Meghdhanushya — The Colour of Life), and it happened as a stroke of fate, a quasi-accident. There is a key scene in which two characters who are destined to fall in love have a conversation over a dead fish, caught in the Narmada River (India’s fifth-longest river, and the longest one that flows through the state of Gujarat), a fisherman teaching the other one, who is very squeamish, how to get used to handling fish. The squeamish character, originally written as a woman, is meant to stick their finger down the throat of the fish—which the original woman actor refused to do. The production’s solution was to make the story a gay love story—simply because the only actors willing to stick their fingers down a fish carcass’s throat were men.

This was the second film I saw at this year’s Tasveer South Asian Film Festival, which was how I learned this behind-the-scenes story, as well as some other relevant details. The cast was made up of local theater actors. Director Prajapati Rohit shot the film in ten days. And there was no particular intention of pointed progressiveness when they first set out to make the film, but once the turn to a gay love story happened, the implications for how it might move the needle of local attitudes blossomed.

Side note: Gujarati is the sixth-most spoken native language in India, with over 55 million speakers. It is the official language of the state of Gujarat, spoken natively by 86% of the population there. Prajapati Rohit pointedly leans into this, with opening titles written in both English and the Gujarati script. There is no Hindi to be found anywhere in this film, which is Gujarati first and Indian second.

Katlaa Curry moves at a measured pace, first introducing us to Raaymal (Priyaank Gangwani), a local fish merchant. This is also notable as most of the Gujarati population is vegetarian, but Raaymal takes his boat further up the Narmada River to fish, then brings what he caught into villages and towns to sell. This is how he meets Ratan (Ranganath Gopalrathnam), who has attempted suicide and gets caught in Raaymal’s fishing net. Raaymal revives him, and ultimately befriends him.

A lot of time is spent on Raaymal and Ratan just getting to know each other, and it takes a while for it to become clear why Ratan has attempted suicide—because his lack of interest in girls has left him hopeless. Meanwhile, Raaymal helps build a kind of beach shack home for Ratan to live in since he doesn’t feel he has any family to go back to. The element of queerness kind of seeps into the narrative slowly and organically, first with a confession by Ratan that Raaymal responds to with laughter and a “What does it matter?” attitude. This attitude, among the characters of this film, becomes a bit of a theme, both quiet and extraordinary in the barriers it breaks.

They settle into a routine, Raaymal visiting Ratan every day, and eating the fish curry Ratan has learned to make even though he doesn’t eat fish, and which Raaymal loves. It’s when Raaymal gets pressured into marrying a woman that things get complicated—for all three of them. Kumati, the wife, is played lovingly by Kinnary Panchal, and I was left with a lot of questions about this whole scenario. At last night’s screening, it was noted that 80% of gay men in India are married to women, and it’s very common for these women to know about it and completely accept it. What they care about, we are told, is that they have shelter and food.

It struck me that sexual desire and fulfillment for women was never part of this conversation—neither within the narrative of the film nor in outside conversations about it. And I was sitting there thinking: What about her? Of course and as always, there is a great deal of cultural context to consider here, not least of which is how devalued women are in South Asian cultures, especially if they are unmarried (to say the least of when they are widowed). And in the discussion at the screening last night, to be fair, there was a brief comment on how, if movies like this can move the needle on cultural attitudes, perhaps over time fewer women will have to settle for situations like this. Still, all the conversations about gay men (and specifically Raaymal) falling in love, and getting their physical needs met, have this glaring ignorance of any of the women involved getting their needs met. I’m a little hung up on the fact that housing and food are not the only basic necessities they should be granted. Are we supposed to assume Kumati is asexual? That she’s content never having children? It’s odd that we never see any of the characters here even mention children.

This is Raaymal’s and Ratan’s story, and it’s a warm and lovely one—if a little overdone with dreamy close-up shots of dead fish swarming with flies. But it also has a very slight unevenness to the story that fails to address the many implications raised. There’s a deeply memorable scene near the end between Raaymal and Kumati in which they come to an understanding that shocks and relieves Raaymal. And we are happy and relieved for him, as we should be. But I am left with a feeling of sorrow for Kumati, which Katlaa Curry clearly does not intend, as we are meant just to be grateful to her, as Raaymal is.

It was also striking to me how, reportedly, none of the cast of this film is queer-identified, even though Priyaank Gangwani and Ranganath Gopalrathnam have a palpable erotic energy between them and real chemistry with each other. Here is where we get into cultural differences again, because in Hollywood the conversation has moved into the space of giving queer actors the queer roles. In India, they are still in the space of queer people being grateful for “representation” granted by straight actors. And what more could they ask for? The Indian film industry, Bollywood or otherwise, is not exactly swarming with queer actors who are out of the closet. These things can only happen one step at a time, and Katlaa Curry is but one of those vital steps.

A love that dares speak its name, at just the right time.

Overall: B

Tasveer Advance: WAKHRI [ONE OF A KIND]

Directing: B+
Acting: B+
Writing: B+
Cinematography: A-
Editing: B+

In 2016, there was a 26-year-old woman named Qandeel Baloch who had gained an unprecedented kind of internet fame three years after auditioning on Pakistan Idol. She has been called Pakistan’s first social media celebrity, as she gained both widespread popularity and widespread notoriety posting funny and audacious videos. In July of 2016, she was drugged and asphysxiated by her brother.

Pakistani director and co-writer Iram Parveen Bilal, working with Pakistani trans activist an co-writer Mehrub Moiz Awan; Indian and Bollywood film editor Aarti Bajaj; and Pakistani musician Abdullah Siddiqui (who also worked on the excellent 2023 film Joyland); have made a film largely based on Qandeel Baloch’s story. I did not know this when first going in, at its Opening Night screening at Seattle’s 19th Annual Tasveer South Asian Film Festival, and to be honest, there were moments when I felt ambivalent about the narrative choices. But then, near the end of the film, Bilal includes footage of Balcoh’s actual funeral procession in 2016.

Even a small amount of research reveals that some significant artistic license is taken with the story, which goes with the territory when the only claim is that it’s “inspired by true events”—not even based on true events, although Baloch experienced several things very similar to what the main character in Wakhri, Noor Malik (a luminous Faryal Mehmood, a Pakistani model in her first lead role in a feature film), goes through. Most critically, Bilal subverts how Baloch’s story actually ended, in a kind of empowering revisionist history. In a way, it’s an inverted version of what Quentin Tarantino did with history at the end of Inglourious Basterds.

Noor Malik is a school teacher, teaching a class of young girls she hopes to provide with better education than Pakistan can typically provide: she’s trying to secure funding for a new girl's’ school, predictably meeting with resistance from both potential benefactors and parents who believe all girls need to do is learn domestic pursuits and perhaps English, all to impress a potential male suitor. Frustrated with this, she puts on a disguise of a purple wig and a beaded veil, storms the stage at her best friend’s club, and goes on a rant that multiple patrons record on their phones and post to their socials, quickly going viral.

Noor’s best friend, Guchhi (a very charming Gulshan Majeed), is a striking presence in Wakhri: an openly queer person living their life in Lahore, completely self-actualized and experiencing both sorrows and joy—something queer audiences have reportedly expressed direct appreciation for. It’s difficult to say exactly how Guchhi self-identifies, as the film reasonably never takes pains to make clear; suffice it to say that, most of the time, they present as male, if often in makeup and unusually stylish clothing, but it soon enough becomes clear that this is due to societal pressures. There comes a moment when Guchhi gets their own moment of empowerment, albeit one that comes with dangers that are made plain. More to the point: Guchhi’s club has many patrons all over the spectrum of gender diversity, and this is depicted as a lived-in, vibrant community. There is little doubt that this is a realistic representation, but to American audiences conditioned to regard a country like Pakistan as undeveloped and unsophisticated (neither of which is true), it’s an unusual depiction to say the least.

It should be noted that I saw Wakhri in an audience of probably 90% South Asian people, from a diaspora that is both diverse and has certain distinct cultural characteristics which are very different from mine. The film was received with a kind of enthusiasm—well deserved—that might surprise Americans who would have expected a conservative response, except perhaps that these are mostly immigrants living in a very different culture from their forebears. Indeed, Wakhri received a great deal of virtriolic response very similar to that shown thrown at the Noor character—and to that which Qandeel Baloch endured. On the flip side, it’s worth noting that Wakhri actually had a theatrical release in Pakistan (albeit in the country’s very limited number of movie theaters); got a lot of positive response from people who actually bothered to see it; and it actually does not have any wide distribution in the United States.

There were certain lines of dialogue that felt a bit contrived to me, particularly when Noor is performing her rants for cameras, both at the club and later at home in front of a ring light—but, what do I know? There are multiple factors at play here, from what is inevitably lost in translation, to the English words chosen by whoever wrote the subtitles, to the fact that I’m just a White guy (a queer, girly one notwithstanding) writing a review of a feminist piece of art cinema created for an audience that could hardly be more different from me. They brought the film to the States, after all—but it was screened for a festival mostly aimed at South Asian expats and their descendants. Surely they want the film to gain a global audience that enjoys it, but there’s still little room for someone like me to criticize it with any real authority.

All that said, I still found myself genuinely impressed by Wakhri, and found many of the lines it boldly crossed—if not necessarily within its own culture, then certainly within the context of representation in South Asian cinema—to be extraordinary. The cast has infectious chemistry, and audiences quickly root for every major character onscreen. I am simply rooting for more people, both inside and outside of Pakistani, to get an opportunity to see this film.

Her disguises become less convincing as her audience still somehow doesn’t recognize her—but I suppose denial is a powerful thing.

Overall: B+

NATIONAL ANTHEM

Directing: A+
Acting: A
Writing: A+
Cinematography: A+
Editing: A

There’s a lot to say about National Anthem—all of it good. I can literally find nothing critical to say about this beautiful film, which I fell deeply in love with at first sight.

Maybe I should try harder? I did have it pointed out to me that the queer utopia of a rural ranch depicted in the film is populated almost exclusively by conventionally beautiful people. Not a single fat person among them, although Mason Alexander Park, as a nonbinary supporting character, while not in the least bit fat, at least has a body type that looks normal (insofar as “normal” even means anything). But, I found this detail very easy to overlook—very similar criticism has been thrown at defiantly queer pop singer Troye Sivan and his music videos featuring overtly queer sexuality. In either case, I would still consider it realistic: friend groups may not always consist of a broad physical commonality amongst its bodies, but they often do. It doesn’t inherently mean they are being intentionally exclusionary; sometimes it’s just how it happens.

And American Anthem is, after all, still a movie. And it should be noted that it is sprinkled with edited interludes of visual portraits, showcasing queer people who are not among the primary cast but are meant to be queer people in the rural sphere of this film’s world—and these run the gamut, nonbinary people to trans people to drag queens (at least as they appear: these distinctions are never made explicit), here with a wide diversity of both skin tones and body types.

This really gets to what I perhaps love most about National Anthem, in that it is packed with the iconography of rural America, the kind of imagery and culture we have long been conditioned to believe is to the exclusion of the queer community—and makes it queer. We see active participation on rodeos, ranch hands handling bales of hay and horses. It should be stressed that none of this is presented as camp, as we are also conditioned to expect. We just see queer people—including people in drag—earnestly participating in cultural activities they love, that just happen to be in rural, small-town America.

National Anthem doesn’t get directly into the politics of queerness, although we see many clips of beautifully shot Progress Pride flags flapping in the wind, the way we often see slow-motion clips of the American flag flying. This is not to the exclusion of the American flag either, which we also see waving—this is the unique visual palette of America, not seen in any other country; it simply belongs to queer people too. What National Anthem clearly understands is that frankly depicting queer relationships as opposed to queer politics is still in and of itself a political act. These images of Pride flags still have meaning.

The story follows Dylan (a wonderful Charlie Plummer), who takes care of his little brother Cassidy (Joey DeLeon) who is a bit neglected by their checked-out, recovering alcoholic mother (Robyn Lively). Fiona, the mother, makes sporadic income as a hairdresser while Dylan supports the family with sporadic construction work. One day, he gets hired to work on a local ranch called “House of Splendor,” a place populated with a kind of queer commune, a community Dylan has never been exposed to, and his world opens up.

So here’s another thing I love about National Anthem. This may be different with younger generations of viewers, as this film is not the first with this distinction, but it’s still a very recent change in the evolution of queer cinema: there is no turn of plot that hinges on queer trauma—there really isn’t any queer trauma in this film at all, although there’s a sprinkling of queer discomfort. Still, I come from an era where years of queer cinema would have me expecting a horrible event to befall the queer protagonist: a gay bashing, or his parents disowning him or kicking him out of the house. Nothing of the sort happens here, although his mother betrays a bit of homophobia on her part: the first time she picks up Dylan from work on the ranch she says, “You see they had one of those flags? You can just never be too careful with people.”

And then: Dylan’s relationship with his mother does become a plot point in the film, but both a minor one and a seamlessly integrated one. And that is because this is not a movie about “coming out,” but rather a coming-of-age story about a young man who finds himself welcomed into a community of people who already know who they are and are comfortable with who they are, and who lead by example. Dylan finds himself falling for a trans woman named Skye (Eve Lindley), the only slight complication being the romantic dynamics of her open relationship with a beefy Latino man named Pepe (Rene Rosado).

Mind you, I may be using these terms, like “trans” and “nonbinary,” just to offer clarity on how these characters are presented—but National Anthem is entirely unconcerned with the terminology of identity, and these words are never used by the characters. None of them ever even uses the word “gay,” and all of this feels like a subtle yet subversive move on the part of the film’s director and co-writer, Luke Gilford (in a stunning feature film debut), with two other writers, Kevin Best and David Largman Murray (this also being their feature film debut). There’s a wonderful moment when Dylan’s little brother Cassidy asks Carrie (Mason Alexander Park), “Are you a boy or a girl?” When Carrie replies, “Neither,” Cassidy’s retort is a chipper “Cool!” And of course, this is the common response of children when introduced to such concepts, as opposed to what reactionaries of the far-right (and, frankly, far too many in the queer community itself) might have you believe.

I’m not sure I have fallen so hard so quickly for a film like this since Moonlight (2016). And while that film distinguished itself by showcasing queer Black characters, I would say the distinction with National Anthem, while centered on mostly White characters, is its beautifully shot showcasing of gender diversity. I will admit, there’s a lot here that is very personal to me. It would take me a while to think of the last film that so directly and deeply spoke to me.

The casting in this film is superb all around, with Charlie Plummer truly shining as the lead. (Strange side note: he was also the lead in a very good 2018 film called Lean on Pete, and between that film and this one, one wonders whether Plummer has a thing for films in which a horse meets a horrible fate.) I find myself tempted to call National Anthem a flawless film, and its relatively mixed reception by audiences—predictable for a film focused on queer characters (some of this may just be the typical online “review bombing” by bigots)—only makes me want to defend it harder. There’s a strong argument to be made that this is the best film of the year, regardless of how much of the year is left. The race is over, we can close it out with a beautiful rendition of the National Anthem by a trans person, just like this movie does.

You’ll want to reach out and take part in the warmest queer group hug ever.

Overall: A+

SIFF Advance: THE SUMMER WITH CARMEN

Directing: B
Acting: B
Writing: B
Cinematography: B+
Editing: B-

There’s a lot of dicks in The Summer with Carmen. It’s largely set at a clothing-optional queer beach in Athens, Greece, where platonic friends Demosthenes (Yorgos Tsiantoulas) and Nikitas (Andreas Labropoulos) hash out the plot points of a movie script. Nikitas is directing and Demosthenes is maybe starring, and they are co-writing the story based on Demosthenes’s recent life experiences, including an ambivalent love life with Panos (Nikolaos Mihas) and a passive aggressively homophobic mother (Roubini Vasilakopoulou). We see the scenes they discuss play out in flashbacks, regularly cutting back to this day at the nude beach, where occasional hookups are playing out in the open around them, but Nikitas and Demosthenes are concentrating on their scripts, occasionally taking breaks to swim.

There is always a subtle, tongue-in-cheek presentation to The Summer with Carmen, where the story playing out pointedly reflects the plot constructions of their script, or even more on the nose, the script writing book Nikitas has with him as a reference. There’s also the unseen producer they talk about, who wants their movie to be “fun, sexy”—and so, Greek director and co-writer Zacharias Mavroeidis wants us to think of The Summer with Carmen as “fun, sexy” primarily by giving us plenty of close up shots of butts and cocks attached to generally hot bodies at a nude beach.

The metatextual approach was once something I found myself really into as a narrative device—I used it a lot in my own writing 25 years ago—but it has long since lost its novelty. What I’ll give to The Summer with Carmen is the casual way it’s used, in a very laid back, beach-stained story. I use the word “beach” loosely here, as this queer beach is mostly large rocks. I have clearly gotten old, because in one scene, Demosthenes bounds up some rocks in the nude, and rather than admiring his incredible body I just worried about how badly he could hurt himself if he slipped and fell.

There’s a fair amount of sex in this movie, but very little of it at this beach where you might expect to see most of it. The few times it does come up is as humorous asides, such as when Nikitas feels bad for an older man trying to get a “pervy peek” at two other guys who tell him to fuck off. The sex actually serving the story happens in the flashbacks that make up the scenes Nikitas and Demosthenes are writing, in which Demosthenes hooks up with guys in the wake of his breakup with Panos, all the while leaving Nikitas unattended to as his close friend.

That is what The Summer with Carmen is about, really: Demosthenes and Nikitas’s friendship. I always enjoy when a movie focuses on friendship more than romance, as it still gets sidelined most of the time, and especially when it’s between two characters that many writers would want to give some kind of romantic tension. Even in stories about gay friends, writers often throw in something about how they tried to be romantic and it never worked. There is no indication that Demosthenes and Nikitas ever had any romantic or sexual interest in each other, only that they have always been close friends and collaborators.

That said, the cynical side of me doesn’t feel that bad for Nikitas. Romance taking priority over friendship is just the way the world works, and it kind of feels like Nikitas is just pouty and doesn’t understand that. Through the course of this movie, though, we get title cards about the rules of script writing, while it identifies Demosthenes as “The Hero” (and Nikitas as “The Heroe’s Friend”), and that according to the basic rules of script writing, The Hero must learn something and change in some way by the end. In The Summer with Carmen, Demosthenes changes, to one degree or another, in both his romantic and platonic relationships. Except he very directly addresses the fact that scripts only end there and never reveal the frequency with which people just go back to their old habits.

There is a certain cleverness to The Summer with Carmen—the Carmen of the title is a dog, by the way, which Panos adopts after the breakup, and then Demosthenes becomes attached to after offering to pet sit, it’s a whole subplot with a somewhat nebulous reflection of the primary plot. It also has undeniable charm, especially with its breezy yet frank reflection of sexuality among gay men in their thirties.

There is nothing profound or deeply memorable about this movie, nor does it aspire to these things. In fact, it’s very direct about its aspirations to be simply fun and sexy—although Demosthenes and Nikitas also discuss the complications of throwing in heavy themes like homophobia and an ailing parent. The Summer with Carmen never gets too heavy with these things, though, and uses them only to give its characters a measure of weight. I felt the editing could have been tighter, the ton of this movie being more suited to a breezy 90 minutes than even the 106 minutes it runs. But, I still had a lovely time with it.

Sun’s out, plot turns out: Nikitas and Demosthenes rehash their lives in a script written in the buff.

Overall: B

SIFF Advance: SEBASTIAN

Directing: B
Acting: A-
Writing: B-
Cinematography: B+
Editing: B

There’s a lot of gay sex in Sebastian. Many of these scenes go on longer than you might expect, and are unusually frank, it not overly explicit. It seems to be part of the point, given the title character is engaged in sex work in nearly every case, and he comments on how sex workers using modern technology regard it as a job, like any other.

As always, it’s the context that matters. “Sebastian” is actually a pseudonym, used by Max, a 25-year-old writer working for a magazine, getting short stories published, and working to finish a novel. This is where Sebastian’s premise gets particularly compelling: evidently unable to dream up scenarios for his fiction that feel authentic, Max’s “research” involves engaging in actual sex work.

Sebastian has far less to say about sex work, actually, than it does about the ethics of representation. Max is constantly telling people he gets the details for his content from interviews with sex workers; he’s not telling anyone he’s doing the work himself—and, somewhat predictably, he gets in over his head in this endeavor. Why Max doesn’t just do the actual interviewing of seasoned sex workers instead of lying about it is really never made clear. Perhaps he’s genuinely interested in sex work but can’t admit it to himself.

We never get a straight (so to speak) answer to this. There’s a memorable line during a conversation with Max about his novel in progress, another man tells him he spoke to a woman sex worker once, and asked about how she must, inevitably, find some of her clients repulsive. “She said it was never about them,” the man says. “It was always about her.”

Clearly we are meant to infer the same to be the case with Max/Sebastian. But why? To what end? This is, to me, the open mystery of Sebastian. There’s another exchange where Max complains about his own work having nothing to say. His friend retorts that his work need not always have something to say, it need only be true. The tension I constantly felt with this film was whether it’s presenting itself as something “true,” or if it indeed has something to say. I found it difficult to gauge, which kept me at a distance from it.

Which is not to say I didn’t find it engaging, if for no other reason than Ruaridh Mollica’s stellar performance as Max. There’s a moment when another character, another person in the home of one of his clients, says something that could have been the casting call description Mollica responded to: “You have this wholesome, boy-next-door look. But underneath. it’s all filth.” Mollica plays Max with a stunningly calibrated level of nuance, a guy who is eternally uneasy and vulnerable, but with a sturdy sexual confidence. I can’t think of any other character in film that I have ever seen quite like him.

Max’s clientelle tends to skew toward older men, and to Sebastian’s credit, these characters are all very well drawn, and feel like people with real-world dimensions. This film rightly doesn’t judge any of them, even as they have varying reasons for hiring a sex worker. Max has these experiences with them. and the way writer-director Mikko Makela puts this film together, it cuts mid-experience to Max at his laptop later, writing about the experience but from the perspective of Sebastian. This makes it impossible to tell how much truth there is to the rest of these hookup scenes, and how much Max is embellishing or inventing for his novel.

When Max develops a nonprofessional affection for one of his older male clients, Nicholas (Jonathan Hyde), he incorporates this turn into the novel he’s writing. Ironically, his publisher announces that this turn away from all the emotionally detached sex work is something that doesn’t work for the novel, while it’s the very thing that makes Sebastian more interesting. Max even makes reference to it being a means of handing down queer history between generations of gay men that might never have otherwise had anything to do with each other. I’d have loved for Sebastian to explore this more, but evidently the movie is as interested in that as Max’s publisher is.

By the end, Sebastian does manage to shift into a space I did find moving. But, overall, it feels like something is missing, something vital left unexplored. At least Ruaridh Mollica very much elevates the material with his performance, and I’ll be thinking about it for a while.

A perfect performance in an imperfect story.

Overall: B

SIFF Advance: MERCHANT IVORY

Directing: B
Writing: B
Cinematography: B
Editing: B+

How could I have gone this long, literally decades, without fully registering that Ismail Merchant, the producer half of the legendary filmmaking duo (and production company) Merchant Ivory, was an Indian man? I need to start paying attention! At this rate, I’ll never become a bona fide elegant gay elder of refined taste.

There was sure a lot of those at the SIFF screening of this film I just attended. This, I suppose, is one of the pitfalls of a documentary portrait of towering figures late in their lives: who else is left around to remember them? Or, at least, to remember their early days?

Ismail Merchant has been dead now for 19 years, having died in 2005, at age 68, after surgery for abdominal ulcers. Thus ended a personal and professional partnership with James Ivory—an American man born in 1928 who grew up in small-town Oregon—that lasted more than forty years. With Merchant producing and Ivory directing, much of the time also working with longtime collaborators writer Ruth Prawer Jhabvala and composer Richard Robbins, they made 44 films together.

A large number of them, of course, were British period films—the very thing they became most well known for, although they did make some films with contemporary settings. The most enduringly famous, however, included A Room with a View (1985); Maurice (1987); Howard’s End (1992); and The Remains of the Day (1993). Many years later, in 2018 James Ivory became the oldest person ever, at age 89, to win an Oscar, for his Adapted Screenplay for Call Me By Your Name, a film that really fits into the Merchant Ivory pantheon, particularly as an updated gay love story.

The gayness of it all is largely explored in this new documentary feature film, Merchant Ivory, directed and co-written by Stephen Soucy. He interviews Ivory himself extensively, inserts many clips of archival interviews with Merchant, and features a star studded array of other subjects from the duo’s storied film history: Hugh Grant, Helena Bonham Carter, Emma Thompson, a characteristically spitfire Vanessa Redgrave, as well as some of the writers and costume designers of the films, among others. There are also some notable absences, including Daniel Day-Lewis (hardly a surprise; he hasn’t given an interview to anyone in years), and Anthony Hopkins, who sued Merchant Ivory for unpaid wages after his performance in the 2009 film The City of Your Final Destination. It was the last of four Merchant Ivory films he was in.

Anyway, Maurice was a groundbreaking film in mainstream gay cinema, especially having come right after the success of A Room with a View. Many of the interview subjects discuss how rightly impressed they are by that accomplishment. Conversely, James Ivory himself is relatively cagey about questions regarding his sexuality—fairly frank in answering some questions, but somewhat evasive in others. Merchant Ivory is, at least in part, a fascinating portrait of a privileged sort of existence among gay men who once lived not exactly closeted, but as an open secret. Ivory and Merchant might as well have been a longtime married couple, but their relationship was not without volatility, with both of them (but evidently, especially Merchant) taking on other temporary lovers as time went on.

The thing about this documentary in particular, is it would qualify as a pretty niche interest. It’s for lovers of sophisticated period dramas, and for anyone interested in the subtle history of queerness in cinema. That does make for a Venn diagram with significant overlap. But outside of that, I’m not sure how much interest this film will hold, especially among younger audiences (and by “younger” I mean, say, younger than 50). Overall cinephiles may find it interesting.

I certainly did, and it compelled me to make a list of Merchant Ivory films I want to revisit, or see for the first time. I have only seen a handful, but of course only a select few would be considered essential in the oeuvre. That said, Merchant Ivory the documentary is fairly simple and straightforward, a compelling document but also mostly something to serve as a jumping-off point. The films they made have a sumptuousness that inherently makes them more interesting than the filmmakers themselves.

The powerhouse Hollywood couple you knew little about.

Overall: B

SIFF Advance: STRESS POSITIONS

Directing: B+
Acting: B+
Writing: B+
Cinematography: B+
Editing: B-

It’s possible I might decide Stress Positions absolutely sticks the landing if I watch it, like, five more times. That’s not likely to happen so I don’t know what to tell you. Except, I suppose, that I feel like, in the end, its narrative conceit went way over my head.

It’s too bad. Director, co-writer, and costar Theda Hammel was at the SIFF screening I attended, and in the post-screening Q&A, she very quickly revealed herself to be whip smart, and ready to answer unusually incisive audience questions with surprising specifics of intention. It’s clear that nothing that happens in this film is an accident, and the intersecting narratives and changing points of view were deeply intentional. For all I know, Hammel could find this very review (I hope not) and deduce that I am an idiot who just didn’t get her art. In that case, she’d be half right.

For a “covid movie” (a pretty reductive way of referring to it, actually), there’s a lot going on here. It’s a movie contextualized by Millennials who came of age in between two era-defining catastrophes: 9/11 and, nineteen years later, the covid-19 pandemic. Hammel finds a way for her characters to refer to this directly by saying ignorant things about Bahlul (Qaher Harhash), the 19-year-old model recovering from a broken leg in the Brooklyn apartment basement of his White uncle Terry (John Early, giving perhaps the best performance I’ve seen him do in anything).

These relationships get sort of convoluted: Bahlul’s mother is Terry’s sister, but we never see her face, only blurry images from behind in flashbacks narrated by Bahlul. There’s a pointed image of her blond hair peaking out from under her head scarf, evidently after she emigrated to Morocco and had a child with a man there. We never fully meet the sister (Bahlul’s mom) or even see Bahlul’s father; we only meet Bahlul, a beautiful young man, often casually lounging around (recovering) in bed or on a couch shirtless, or sometimes in his underwear. This becomes a frequent topic of conversation among Terry’s friends, none of whom seem like great people, which Terry is understandably exasperated by, though his inclination to hide the young man from them, evidently for fear of them exoticizing him, is less understandable.

There’s a lot of voiceover narration in Stress Positions, divided between Bahlul, and Terry’s friend Karla, played by Theda Hammel. It’s relevant to note that both Hammel and the character she plays are trans women, and Karla comes over to the apartment and brings some influence on the impressionable Bahlul. Qaher Harhash is himself an actual model, incidentally, although I cannot find anything online to indicate his sexuality—he certainly read as “queer boy” to me onscreen, but that has no bearing on Harhash himself. Much is made among the characters that Bahlul is straight; whether he is also trans, it seems, Stress Positions leaves open for discussion.

There’s a kind of refreshing irreverence to Stress Positions, sometimes to the point that some might consider taboo. Hammel treats it all very casually, from when Karla says “Tell him your friend who used to be a man says hi,” to one exchange between two cisgender men in which one refers to all the “trannies” who live in the building. It would be a lot easier to get uncomfortable with that if not for the fact that a trans woman directed and wrote the film, notwithstanding a word now widely regarded as a slur being put into the mouth of a cisgender character.

There’s certainly something fun about this depiction of a group of people who have no particularly bigoted attitudes toward each other’s fluid differences of sexuality and gender (ignorance is another story), but are still all messy. They may have no fucks to give about matters that Boomers have spent decades giving themselves aneurysms over, but that doesn’t mean they know what the hell they’re talking about at any given time either. In particular, conversations about Bahlul being a brown person has all the White characters telling on themselves, not understanding the myriad nuances of the Muslim world, the Middle East, and where the two do or do not intersect.

This is especially the case with Terry, a character who provides by far the most comic entertainment, a guy who exudes and attracts chaos (all while Bahlul hangs out calmly in his leg cast), more than once throwing out his back when something startles him and he trips or falls in the kitchen while cooking. Terry is the guy who thinks of himself as a model progressive, while often betraying his own ignorance, particularly when it comes to his nephew’s multi-ethnic heritage. (A couple of funny scenes have characters, including Terry, queuing up a YouTube video called “What Is the Middle East?”)

Terry is also deeply paranoid about covid, this story unfolding in the summer of 2020—in Brooklyn, no less, where covid cases were catastrophic in a way few other places in the U.S. ever got. I have mixed feelings about Terry’s paranoia played as excess, because he actually has a point when he says, “We wouldn’t need a curfew if you all just stayed home.” Yet, he still lets Karla in when she comes to help after he throws his back out, and keeps bringing Coco, the weirdly voyeuristic landlady from upstairs (another trans woman, played by Rebecca F. Wright), inside to fix the Internet even though he’s constantly admonishing her to put her mask on.

There’s a curious element, an odd sort of vibe, about Stress Positions taking place during the height of the pandemic. There was a period where people clearly did not want obvious covid references in their entertainment, as they preferred to use that to escape from it. Now it’s four years on, and people are still getting covid, but it’s no longer the global catastrophe it once was. The audience at the screening last night seemed entertained by the comic references to an era we’re all glad is behind us, but I have no idea whether non-festival audiences will be as into it.

I haven’t even mentioned the fact that Terry has a husband, who has found a new man and served him divorce papers. We actually meet Leo (John Roberts) later in the film, at one of the “social distanced” parties held in the apartment backyard that is shockingly large for a New York City apartment. And his presence gets intertwined with Bahlul, who has already been narratively intertwined with Terry, and Karla, and Karla’s partner Vanessa (Amy Zimmer) who wrote a book in Karla’s voice—it’s a whole thing—and even, at lest in terms of narrative structure, with Ronald the GrubHub delivery guy (Faheem Ali), who himself intersects problematically with Karla.

I’d ask if you were able to follow all that, except it’s unclear to me if it even matters. I’ll tell you this: there are countless scenes in Stress Positions with crackling dialogue, well delivered, a sequence of conversations I could have listened to indefinitely, almost as if written by Richard Linklater if he were a messy queer Millennial. I really, really enjoyed the experience of this movie. I just didn’t quite understand the layers of turns it took in the end.

You might feel like Terry here by the time the movie ends.

Overall: B+

HOUSEKEEPING FOR BEGINNERS

Directing: A
Acting: A
Writing: A-
Cinematography: B+
Editing: B+

I don’t know why, until I actually watched Housekeeping for Beginners, I thought it was a Spanish-language movie. It even took a few minutes into the beginning of the movie for it to register: this doesn’t sound like Spanish. For a hot second I thought it was Portuguese. Was this movie Brazilian? I looked it up: of all places, this film is from North Macedonia. Have I ever seen any North Macedonian films before? Apparently, I have—Honeyland, a documentary I actually felt was the best film of 2019. And while that one was the true story of a rural beekeeper, this one is about an urban, blended queer family in the North Macedonian capital of Skopje. (It turns out, I even saw the previous film by the director of Housekeeping for Beginners: You Won’t Be Alone, about a shape shifting witch in 19th century Macedonia, which I did not like nearly as much, and did not have North Macedonia as a producing country, while this one does.)

One might rightly wonder how the hell I started from Spanish to that: within a European context at least, this film could hardly be further from Spanish. Such is the legacy of colonialism, I suppose—the English are hardly the only ones in the world to have such a history. Spanish is actually the second-most spoken native language in the world (behind Mandarin), which can make it easy to forget: there are 16 times as many people in the world who speak some other language. In North Macedonia, the dominant language is Macedonian, but there are other officially recognized languages, including Albanian, Turkish, Bosnian, Serbian, and one that becomes a key plot point in Houesekeeping for Beginners: Romani. That last one is the language spoken in the neighborhood of Shutka, an autonomous Roma community on the outskirts of Skopje.

It turns out, there is a lot to learn about this small corner of the world—a country of just under 10,000 square miles (barely larger than Vermont), a population of 1.8 million (about the population of West Virginia), its capital a metropolitan population of 537,000 (about the metro population of Huntsville, Alabama). Such is the case with just about every international location you can think of, actually—but here, writer-director Goran Stolevski, an openly gay thirtysomething man born in Macedonia who grew up in Australia, finds a unique way to turn our attention to it.

It’s not often we get queer stories in global cinema that blend queer life with racial and ethnic concerns, making Housekeeping for Beginners an unusually intersectional story. When the film opens, we see what appears to be two teenagers, Ali (Samson Selim) and Vanesa (Mia Mustafi), belting out along to a song they both apparently love, using household items as fake microphones. It’s a deceptively charming and simple scene, and only moves into a portrait of a rather chaotic household.

And the home includes a lesbian couple, Dita (Anamaria Marinca) and Suada (Alina Serban), and their gay housemate Toni (Vladimir Tintor). As we just hang out with this household for several minutes, it takes a little while to fully register what all the relationships are. Vanesa, and insanely cute little Mia (Dzada Selim) are Suada’s children. Ali, just a few years older than Vanesa, is Toni’s 19-year-old hookup—the opening scene of him singing with Vanesa really driving home how he’s rather young.

But, there are several other queer teens who also hang out at the house, which serves as a de facto safe house for kids who are rejected by their families or communities. And here, in a country with no legal recognition of same-sex couples or their children who are not blood relatives, this chaotically supportive mini-community they have created for themselves is massively disrupted when Suada is diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.

The first third or so of Housekeeping for Beginners focuses on this lesbian couple, how they deal with a prognosis understood early on to be hopeless, and how they drag their feet in regards to informing the family. It’s not a spoiler, per se, to say that Suada dies, because the overall point of this film is Dita dealing with both her promise to Suada that she will be the children’s mother going forward, and in particular Vanesa’s passionate rebellion against that scenario, all while navigating the legal hoops and deceptions necessary for her to stave off any threat of the children being taken away. Toni, for his part, is resistant to being pressured into playing the part of a straight father / family man type. Ali organically settles into his own position in the family, his relationship with Toni having complications of its own.

I was fully absorbed and moved by ths movie, a rare feat of ensemble storytelling in which every principal character has dimension and character development. It should be noted, also, that both Ali and Suada happen to come from the aforementioned Shutka community, a people for whom “gypsy” is considered a bigoted term, and they are people of color—making Dita and Suada not just a lesbian couple, but an interracial couple, and then Dita a White woman raising children of color. There are many references to this dynamic in the film, and when Vanesa insists on seeking out a grandmother in Shutka she hasn’t seen in several years, deep cultural differences quickly become apparent.

I can only imagine Housekeeping for Beginners would be seen in a far more intricate way by Macedonian audiences, and I would be fascinated to learn how the film was received there—it was indeed their submission for the Best International Feature award from North Macedonia, but, criminally, it did not make the cut among last year’s nominees. This is a film that absolutely deserves attention, both in its home country and abroad—even the most frustrating characters are deeply human, and the domestic situation portrayed is emblematic of evolving ideas of family the world over. I won’t soon forget this one.

Love makes a family, and so does not taking any shit lying down.

Overall: A-

DRIVE-AWAY DOLLS

Directing: C
Acting: B
Writing: C+
Cinematography: B-
Editing: C-

Here’s a protip: if you go to the movies a lot, and you see the same trailer before every single one of those movies, that’s a move that smacks of desperation. This is doubly the case if the movie in question opens in February, otherwise known as “Dumpuary,” the month when studios dump their movies they know aren’t going to work. And they they market the shit out of it (Argylle, anyone?), hoping to maximize opening weekend receipts before bad word of mouth can tank it.

Why did I even bother going to see Drive-Away Dolls then, you might wonder? Well, this one has relatively mixed, almost teetering into positive, reviews. And more importantly, it’s directed and co-written by Ethan Coen, writing with his wife and longtime collaborator Tricia Cooke. And Ethan Coen, along with his brother Joel, have long been among my all-time favorite directors—when they are working together. In 2021, Joel branched off on his own to bring us The Tragedy of Macbeth—he went highbrow, while Ethan went decidedly lowbrow. The secret to their success has historically been a unique blend of the two. It’s clear that these two just aren’t as great apart as they are together. Unfortunately, Drive-Away Dolls doesn’t quite work.

I wish I could tell you that Drive-Away Dolls were the “proudly unimportant lesbian comedy” that it was reportedly intended to be. It’s the perfect time for such a thing. This movie, however, could have been a tight, hilarious, 30-minute film short, which Ethan Coen managed to turn into the longest 84-minute movie I’ve ever sat through. How do you make a movie with interstitial scenes that feel like filler? Coen pulls off a genuinely dull magic trick. To be fair, in the end these psychedelic interludes—one of which inexplicably renders a twirling pizza with its toppings floating away—prove to be crucial to the plot. That doesn’t change how inessential and overlong they feel in the moment.

The one genuinely good thing in this movie is Beanie Feldstein, in a supporting role as a cop ex-girlfriend of one of the two protagonists. The leads, Margaret Qualley as Jamie the thick-accented Texan living in Philadelphia and Geraldine Viswanathan as Marian the repressed bookworm friend, have genuine charisma. They are also both straight women playing lesbians, and Feldstein feels a little like “legit lesbian cred” getting tossed in there for us queer audience members actually paying attention to these things.

(The original title was supposed to be Drive-Away Dykes, and then it got sanitized. And while it’s entirely possible either of the two leads could identify as queer, they are hardly the kind of out-lesbian actors that would have been more appropriately cast in the roles. Furthermore, and I did not realize this when first writing this review and am having to go back and edit a bit, Ethan and Tricia are essentially in a polyamorous relationship, still married to each other but both with other partners, and Tricia partnered with a woman. This would seem to give the film more “queer cred” than I initially assumed, but here’s the thing: it really changes nothing about how this film comes across.)

Feldstein, who was truly wonderful in Bookstmart (in which, ironically, she plays a straight girl best friends with a lesbian), really needs to be cast as the lead in another comedy that’s actually good. It’s what she deserves. It’s what we all deserve.

Should I tell you anything about the plot? It doesn’t matter, you don’t need to see this movie, but whatever. “Drive-away” is a term for drivers for hire who take a rental car from one location to another. Jamie and Marian take a quasi-spontaneous getaway, from Philadelphia to Tallahassee, by means of such a job—and wind up taking someone else’s job by accident, thereby also making off with the horrifying and/or hilarious contents of a hat box and a metal briefcase stashed in the trunk.

Coen apparently called in a lot of favors, because the cast of characters Jamie and Marion encounter on this road trip is truly stacked with stars: Pedro Pascal in a shockingly small part; Colman Domingo as the leader of the trio on Jamie and Marion’s tail; Bill Camp as the car rental clerk; Matt Damon as a Florida senator. For some reason, this movie is set in 1999, maybe so that the many questions Jamie asks at Florida businesses about whether they support queer people won’t feel too politically charged. Except, of course, this movie still exists in 2024, and the references stick out to the point of distraction, especially considering how little it has to do with the actual story.

Which brings us back to that “proudly unimportant” bit. Even proudly unimportant movies should aspire to something better than pointless at best and tedious at worst. More than once I thought while watching this movie, What are we doing? For most of its time, it’s just killing time. And a movie that is just killing time feels like an eternity—not what you want for what’s supposed to be a breezy, quirky comedy. To be fair, it did get a couple of good laughs out of me, especially one visual gag involing a dildo. It comes along far too late, after I grew exasperated with this movie’s inability to settle on a tone.

A collective less than the sum of its lesbian parts.

Overall: C+

THE ORIGIN OF EVIL

Directing: C+
Acting: B+
Writing: C+
Cinematography: C-
Editing: C-

Here’s something I’ve never said about a movie before: The Origin of Evil might just be too French or its own good. Full of unlikably arrogant people, with an inflated sense of self. Not all of the French are like that, I’m sure; these are stereotypes. But this movie isn’t doing them any favors.

In spite of its bevy of talented performers, The Origin of Evil lost me early on. It gets progressively weirder, in less compelling ways. Nathalie (Laure Calamy) is visiting a father, Serge (Jacques Weber) she’s never met before. She progressively gains his trust, to the suspicion of his wife, Louise (Dominique Blanc); his daughter, George (Doria Tillier); his grandaughter, Jeanne (Céleste Brunnquell); and their longtime housekeeper, Agnès (Véronique Ruggia), all of whom live in a giant, overly cluttered house together. I won’t spoil the many narrative left turns that follow, even though one of the few things that impressed me about this movie is how unremarkable it is for all its twists.

I will say this: we never get a sense of Nathalie as a whole person, or what really informs her actions. I knew little about this film going in, and when Nathalie is shown dialing Serge on the phone, she appears nervous to the point of terrified—a detail that makes less sense in retrospect once the film is over. “What are you playing at?” is something she is asked at one point, and I was already asking it. There are moments early on when it feels like The Origin of Evil will be a straightforward family drama, the title notwithstanding, but things prove to be far more complex than that. Just not in any way that particularly satisfied me.

This film has many unearned pretensions, not least of which is the title—these are shitty people, basically all around, but evil is a bit loaded for what ever actually happens onscreen. Nathalie works at a fish packing factory, and the opening title card appears superimposed over lined trays of fish, with ominous music. You would think the fish, or the factory, would play a particularly crucial part in the plot. They don’t.

If there is anything to love about The Origins of Evil, it’s the ensemble cast of nearly all women, with only one exception: Serge is the only principal character who is a man. He’s an asshole, but all the other women also prove to be either assholes in their own right or sociopaths, with the possible exception of Jeanne—but given the fucked up family she’s in, give her time.

The film runs slightly over two hours, though, and the first half in particular moves so slowly, it might play a lot better with a good fifteen or twenty minutes cut out. Things do pick up in the second half, and get a bit more exciting, but for me it was too little too late. I spent more time thinking about when this movie would end than I did about what was going to happen next.

I have to mention the cinematography, because some of it just plain sucks. Why the hell is a movie like this employing the use of retro split screens, with thick black lines separating the different feeds? The first time it happens, Nathalie is just sitting at a table having dinner with Serge and his family—five people, three sections of a split screen, each of them cutting to a new person saying something or making noise, including every time Jeanne gets a text notification. Why do we care about all this? I have no answer. A few later scenes employ the split screen as well, and you get the sense that director Sébastien Marnier thinks he’s doing something clever with this material. He isn’t.

I have to acknowledge that talent went into the making of this film, particularly the cast, and the set design. I’d love to see all of these people’s work in a less tiresome movie.

It’s not nearly as fun as this might suggest.

Overall: C+