GAY
FILM REVIEWS BY MICHAEL D. KLEMM
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GAY
FILM REVIEWS BY MICHAEL D. KLEMM
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Lesbian Nation First
Run Features, Carmelita
Tropicana:
Lavender
Limelight: First
Run Features, Director:
Starring:
Unrated, 56 minutes
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Shorts
Ala Sappho
Lesbian Nation is an intriguing anthology of lesbian-themed short films, each released during the mid-1990s as LGBT films began to proliferate into a major genre onto itself. As I wrote a few months ago, when I reviewed a few gay short film collections, the nice thing about shorts is that they are, well... short. With the exception of the documentary that concludes this DVD, each of these filmmakers understands that these little vignettes are not meaty enough to sustain a feature film and they are all to be commended for not trying to do so. Shorts are the perfect venue to explore non-epic ideas and, oftentimes, a nice way to just have fun. The final film, a documentary entitled Lavender Limelight: Lesbians On Film, is also available as a separate, stand-alone DVD with additional directors' bios. |
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Leading off this anthology is the extremely funny Carmelita Tropicana: Your Kunst Is Your Waffen. Directed and co-written by - and also starring - Cuban-born Alina Troyano (1997's Latin Boys Go To Hell), this delightful short was originally produced for public television's Independent Television Service (ITVS). Troyano stars as a Latina performance artist named Carmelita Tropicana who is mugged while walking home from one of her shows. She wakes up the next morning to a pair of frantic phone calls. One is from her father, the other from the leader of an activist group. It seems that Carmelita is late for a counter-protest in front of an abortion clinic but first she has to stop to fix the boiler because her upstairs tenant is out of hot water. |
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Troyano's small character touches are wonderful. The straight sister is first seen reading a magazine entitled For Today's Hispanic Woman which dispenses "fashions tips for corporate success" such as not wearing big gold earrings or Steak Tartar lipstick. (What she is wearing, of course, violates every rule in the magazine.) Just to annoy her sister, who is furious that she is in jail, Carmelita and her activist girlfriend break into a dance, singing: |
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The mood is totally farcical and tongue-in-cheek while, at the same time, it is also a celebration of Latina culture. The disc is worth a look just for this short film alone. Carmelita Tropicana won the Teddy Bear award at the Berlin International Film Festival |
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Jumping The Gun, from director Jane Schneider, features a young woman author who wakes up from a one-night stand and fantasizes a relationship from honeymoon to break-up. At first there is rapture. Her very dirty and cluttered apartment transforms into a botanical garden of earthly delights as she cooks breakfast for the lady, who lies still asleep, in her bed. This short film is very artsy, at times surreal, and also a bit confusing. Clocking in at only 10 minutes, it is the cinematic equivalent of a daydream and should be enjoyed as a pleasant interlude and nothing more. |
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Little Women In Transit, from writer/director Barbara Heller, based on her short story, is a brief black & white snippet from a family's hellish vacation car trip. Jennie, 12 years old, is seated between her sisters in the back seat as she tries to write a melodramatic story. The girls poke and pull each other's hair. The two sisters tease Jennie that her favorite writer, Louisa May Alcott, is a lesbian. Short and sweet, (7 minutes), that's about it in a nutshell. That, and the father yells at them to behave. |
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Playing the Part is a mockumentary by Mitch McCabe in which she plays a film student who tries to come out to her very conservative family in Grosse Point, Michigan. Her family is a parody of the typical suburban, all-American dream in which any deviance from being as perfect as possible is not to be tolerated. She learns that resistance is futile as her many attempts to tell her parents fail miserably. The film is shot mostly as a series of home movies and interviews while McCabe's deadpan musings skewer upper class mores and her bohemian lesbian rebellions. She thinks it's "sorta weird" that her father's private practice as a plastic surgeon, specializing in mastectomy restorations, pays for her college tuition. Her mother's life is a debutante ball on a tape loop, and coming out would "destroy everything [her] family has built." Most of Playing The Part is amusing but after awhile the repetition becomes tedious and the ending is a cop out.
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Lavender
Limelight: Lesbians In Film The final entry is Lavender Limelight: Lesbians In Film. Marc Mauceri's documentary concerns seven noted lesbian directors, most of whom came to prominence during the second wave of the New Queer Cinema during the mid-1990s. While hardly a comprehensive and all-encompassing study (this film could have easily been much longer), each of the short interviews, illustrated by clips from their movies, offers fascinating insights into the thoughts, politics and filmmaking strategies of each of these remarkable women. It should be noted that this documentary was filmed in 1997 and so, for example, director Rose Troche's involvement with The L Word, and Maria Maggenti's acclaimed Puccini For Beginners, is many years in the future. |
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While the middle three films are a bit "iffy," Lesbian Nation is bookended by two terrific films that make this DVD an essential addition to the collection of any serious student of queer cinema.
More On Rose Troche: More On Cheryl
Duyne: More On Marie
Maggenti: More On Monika
Treut: |
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Carmelita
Tropicana: Your Kunst Is Your Waffen, 1994
Carmelita
rushes with her girlfriend to the clinic just as things are beginning
to get ugly . A posse, consisting entirely of middle-aged white men, is
screaming epithets like "You Lezzie Commie Baby Killers!" The leather-clad
dynamic duo is arrested, along with Carmelita's conservative sister and
they are thrown into a jail cell with the woman who mugged Carmelita the
night before. The rest of the film is a delicious send-up of women's prison
movies, feminist activism, Broadway musicals and patriarchal Latin archetypes.
As
they pass the time in prison, the mugger speaks of being a gang member
and Carmelita tells a story from their family's history which unfolds
as an old black & white Spanish film parody scored to cliched Flamenco
guitar. The doors to the jail cells open and the women emerge dressed
as Carmen Miranda and dance to an elaborately choreographed and overdone
Telemundo television extravaganza, complete with funny feminist lyrics
and a sing-along. 
Jumping
The Gun, 1996
Little
Women In Transit,
1996 
Playing the Part, 1995
First
up is Jennie Livingston, best known for the popular Drag Ball documentary,
Paris Is Burning (1990). Livingston talks about attending one of
these balls and watching the ways in which the participants deconstructed
their very identity, class and gender. She recounts contacting famed German
filmmaker Werner Herzog (Aguirre, the Wrath Of God) who told her
that film is not about making money and that she should follow her heart
and make the films that she wants to direct. She became aware
of her own sexuality as she made this classic film about queer subculture,
and describes filmmaking as a process of coming out.
Next
is 
German
filmmaker 
Maria
Maggenti is the auteur of 1995's charming 
Su
Friedrich, the daughter of German immigrants, first crafted documentaries
about her parents' experiences in Nazi Germany before turning to a fiction
film about a girl who falls in love with a nun in 1987's Damned If
You Don't. She is best known for Hide And Seek (1996), a film
about young girls who grow up to be lesbians. 
Heather
Lyn MacDonald speaks of making documentaries in Russia and coming out,
after 12 years of marriage, when she was 30. Her best known title, Ballot
Measure 9 (1995), recorded the events surrounding an anti-gay ballot
introduced in Oregon in 1992 that led indirectly to an increase in violence
against gays and lesbians. She was drawn to the subject for the opportunity
to contrast such conflicting emotions and some of the footage is pretty
scary. 
Finally,
Cheryl Duyne speaks of filling a void in which she saw no films being
made by African American lesbians. Following a series of shorts, she wrote
and directed