[REVIEW] Four movies

[rfmcdonald]

Three of these films are GLBT-related; the fourth isn't. FYI I suppose, though if you've any issues with my choice of filmed entertainment you probably shouldn't be reading this blog. (Go here instead.)

• At a friend's prompting, I went with him to the reelout queer film and video festival here in Kingston, to see the French film A cause d'un garçon (2002). The film was a standard coming-out story, concerning a high school swim team and academic star who was closeted until a chance encounter reveals everything--to his classmates, his teammates, his best friend, his girlfriend, his family . . . Of all of the televisual descriptions of the coming-out process I've seen, I think Buffy did the best job in the second-season "Becoming, Part 2" and the fourth-season "New Moon Rising." A cause d'un garçon was an enjoyable treatment of this situation, though, and not only because of the cute actors.


• Friday night, again at reelout, I saw Tipping the Velvet, based on Sarah Waters's first novel of the same name, was a three-part description of five formative years in the life of a young lesbian in 1890s London, beginning with her first attraction to a male impersonator, continuing through a sordid life as the "tart" of a female dominatrix, ending with her rehabilitation as the lover of a social reformer with a revived stage career (and even as a surrogate parent). It was entertaining, and the cinematography was quite good. I just wish that the film didn't carry an aura of historical authenticity about it.


• Saturday night, I saw Mambo Italiano on DVD with a friend. It left me flat, truth be told. The story just didn't seem to be well-constructed--the storyline seemed rushed in some places and drawn out in others, the characters weren't developed so as to make the view feel much sympathy with them, and at the end I felt dissatisfied with a conclusion composed of an unsatisfied aggregate of events. The quality of shooting didn't impress me either, given how the colours seemed too intense. I didn't mind seeing Mambo Italiano; then again, I wasn't doing anything of note Saturday night.


• I saw Les invasions barbares this afternoon with a friend at The Screening Room. Denys Arcand definitely deserved that Oscar for best foreign-language film. Rémy Girard's performance stood out, as did those of Stéphane Rousseau (his capitalist barbarian son, fresh from London's futures markets) and Marie-Josée Croze (the drug addict daughter of a former mistress, procuress of his heroin). It paints an interesting picture of a Québécois society transformed utterly, beyond its mythologized pre-Quiet Revolution state and beyond the original social-democratic of this film's elder generation. I really want to see Le déclin de l'empire américain now.