BFI Flare: Under Pressure

Though the festival has finished, I am slowly working my way through titles I did not have access to while it was on. Today I am looking at films that feature characters in sticky situations. 

The Divide opens with a woman frantically texting her sleeping partner who is in bed next to her snoring. Great opening and from there the film wends its way, equal parts humour and trauma, as various characters find themselves at a local hospital as the gilets jaunes protests take place in Paris. Not having paid that much attention to French politics, I was not entirely clear what the sides where in this dispute, but writer-director Catherine Corsini uses this particular divide to map out a complex range of positions, loyalties and identities. The lesbian couple, Raf and Julie, were breaking up before they arrived at the hospital and as tensions rise, the strains on everyone show. At one point, someone shouts, "The hospital is falling apart!" and I thought of our dear NHS, so badly treated by successive governments. Special shout-out to nurse Kim who holds it all together. A brilliant piece of work. 

In Invisible: Gay Women in Southern Music, the pressures are caused by bigotry, tradition and homophobia. We meet a range of queer women who work or have worked in the field of country music. Awesome to think how many hits were written by lesbians. But, as the film shows, Nashville is not nearly so understanding of queer women performers and some of those on show, such as Dianne Davidson, lost their careers as performers when they came out. But the film is a bit meandering and director-screenwriter TJ Parsell could easily lose 20 minutes or so to make it more punchy and impactful. I was also annoyed at how Chely Wright is introduced about 65 minutes in as a cautionary tale and then just left hanging. I googled and found she is still making music and has become an activist. So, why not tell us that? There are also a couple of shocks, as veteran performers turn up and don't quite look as we remembered.... 

BFI Flare: Boulevard!

It seems appropriate as the stars gather in Hollywood tonight to celebrate their successes at the Academy Awards that we consider the queer art of failure. Boulevard! A Hollywood Story does just that, charting the quite incredible but true story of Gloria Swanson's attempt to turn her cinematic triumph Sunset Boulevard into a Broadway musical in the 1950s.

As camp as Sunset Boulevard is and especially the character of Norma Desmond, a faded star who launched a thousand drag numbers, the queer interest in this documentary is found in the two young men who wrote the musical, Dickson Hughes and Richard Stapley, who were a romantic as well as professional couple. 

As the three attempt to make the show work, the collaboration falls apart when Swanson falls for Stapley and the two men break up and go their separate ways. And it gets stranger. 

Hughes, Swanson and Stapley at work

As the documentarian Jeffrey Schwarz makes calls and unearths dusty boxes of ephemera, the truth unfolds in a way scarcely credible. Stapley had a film and TV career as actor Richard Wyler, while Hughes played piano for Marianne Williamson. 

Swanson of course continued on her merry way being a star, long after the roles dried up. All three found the later years difficult, mirroring Ms. Desmond. A Sunset Boulevard curse or the unforgiving nature of Hollywood? 

BFI Flare: Melodrama Queens

 I approached Fragrance of the First Flower with great interest. Lauded as Taiwan's first GL, it features a great meet cute that proves to be a meet again cute as two women who knew each other in high school get reacquainted. But how well did they know each other before? And how close will they get? The problem with the film is it is not really a film but a web series that has been stitched together, which creates problems with pacing and story-telling. At only 99 minutes, it still felt quite drawn out to me and by the end I was losing interest owing to the lurch into melodrama. Would it be too much if a story involving two women could be a bit more upbeat? Apparently, a second series is in the works. Probably best watched in episodes online. 

Similarly, the short Fever sets up a good premise as an inter-racial couple head to one guy's house for his mother's birthday party, before underlying issues in their relationship come to the fore. The explosive finale plays out as rather am-dram and totally undercuts the build-up of tension that precedes it. Quite disappointing.  

BFI Flare: Queering the Archive

 Almost a week into the festival and I have finally completed a feature! And what a film! Ultraviolette and the Blood Spitters Gang is a French art doc with an extraordinary backstory. Director Robin Hunzinger collaborated with his mother Claudie to tell the story of Emma and Marcelle, two young women who met in 1923 and had a love affair which played out in the latter stages in letters sent by Marcelle to Emma (Robin's grandmother and Claudie's mother). After Emma's death, the two descendants found the letters and have used them to narrate this beautifully realised, affecting story of persistent desire. 

It took me awhile to realise most of the images were not of the two lovers but from found footage also also from art films. I recognised scenes from Meshes of the Afternoon and Mädchen in Uniform but the credits revealed work by Leger, Dulac and Moholy-Nagy as well. It's a bold move to drop those into such a personal story. I also admired the strong use of archive footage, the queering of images of women in the countryside, women dancing, women on bicycles, women wearing ties. This was truly a queering of the archive. 

Separated by work and academic commitments, Marcelle writes passionately about her feelings for Emma but also about her own life philosophy, stating she has "le goût de la vie". Diagnosed with tuberculosis, she finds herself confined to a sanatorium, where she meets three other rebellious young women and the four of them form a gang. A very queer gang. Marcelle, despite her love for Emma, is quite happy to play the seducer and even brags about it in her letters. Who knew a sanatorium could be such a pick-up joint, especially in 1928?

There are resonances for current day concerns: young women lying in beds in close proximity, attended by doctors, none of them wearing masks. Young women facing death from a communicable illness. Marcelle writes of her friends facing death, which she refuses. She wonders if a lost friend will return to visit. She has the most brilliant way with words, and one wonders if she went on to become a writer, as one of her friends did. 

Needless to say, there can be no really happy ending, not with fatal illness and impending world war. I felt shaken at the end and thrilled to have made the acquaintance of such vibrant beings from another time.

BFI Flare: Shortsighted

 By now I would have hoped to have seen several films and be mulling over themes arising in ye olde fest. But, owing to technical problems, I have not seen any features and only a handful of shorts, all of them available online for free. 

Among this year's crop of Five Films for Freedom is the evocative Frozen Out (dir Hao Zhou), an arty exploration of dislocation through a series of gorgeous static shots of a man marching through snowy settings while a voiceover asks searching questions like "Where am I?". All five films are available to view until 27 March.

Among the shorts available on the BFI player is Do This For Me (dir Marnie Baxter), which unfolds as a bit of a mystery as five women gather in someone's home and record a series of videos addressed to a missing member of their group. This felt a bit like a web series to me and the ending is a bit abrupt, but the women's gossipy interplay is quite well done.