Film

Teenage Miguel (Diego Calva) has two major passions in his life.  His boyfriend Johnny (Eduardo Eliseo Martinez) who just happens to be the son of his wealthy family’s maid, and skateboarding. Whilst Johnny may share these passions ….. well, definitely the latter …. he also has a very jealous girlfriend too.  They all live in Mexico City albeit in quite opposite settings as Johnny is living rough on the streets and always on the look out to make some easy money.

These two young men jump at the chance of getting involved with some petty criminal plot that involves rounding up some desperately poor people off the streets to illegally donate blood to some drug gangsters. There is good money to be made, but on this particular occasion the deal goes horribly wrong when armed thugs suddenly herd the donors into a truck and just simply drive them away never to be heard off again.

When the boys go off to search for an explanation from the middle man who set the deal up, things go from bad to worse as they take matters into their own hands, and then Johnny betrays his one-time boyfriend and subsequently is left with no other choice than to immediately hot-foot it out of town.

This attempt by Guatemalan-Mexican writer-director Julio Hernandez Cordon to make a cool and edgy street drama with these young skateboarders ……one of whom likes nothing more than demonstrate his skills on the board whilst totally naked ….falls very flat on it’s face.  Whilst it started off by insinuating itself as a potential gay romance it instead unfolds into a ill-conceived and rather messy crime noir drama that fizzles out with a most unimaginative ending.

The cast made of up of total amateurs that Hernandez recruited via the pages of Facebook add a welcome rawness to the piece that at least has a very visual stylish look to it, but that alone is not enough to redeem it.  I Promise You Anarchy …..but what a pity he didn’t promise us a more interesting movie too.

It took the members of G-Voice South Korea’s oldest gay male choir a long time and a great deal of discussions before all the members agreed to this documentary to be made. Most gay Koreans are by nature quite conservative and they are usually reticence to talk about their sexuality, but in this instance as Lee Dong-ha the filmmaker was also a member of the choir, they let their guards down more than normal and seemed to throw themselves wholeheartedly into the project.

Since 2003 G-Voice has been meeting in Seoul every weekend to rehearse. In some cases their enthusiasm far exceeds their musical talents and after listening to some of the scenes of painful caterwauling, it is quite remarkable that somehow they manage to pull off such polished public performances in the end.  The music is of course not the main reason that they enjoy being part of the group, as it gives them all a welcoming and enjoyable social experience which helps counterbalance all the general homophobia of Korean society.

What strikes you from the start is all the infectious good humor and joy especially as they give accounts of all their dating experiences, several of which occur within the choir’s ranks. They seemed somewhat childishly innocent and so are visibly shocked when their cosy life as a group gets a rude awakening when they are being pelted with bags of human faeces whilst performing  at Korea’s first gay wedding.  (Their assailant is a Christian Pastor which is the least shocking part of the whole  incident).

In the second part of the documentary the choir’s political awareness steps up a notch or two and they go and sing in support of a steel workers strike.  Then when their attempts to be part of the 15th Korea Queer Festival Parade are halted by hoards of very angry Evangelical Christians defiantly sitting down in the streets of their route blocking they way, they are resigned and annoyed.  What is remarkable here is that despite the hours they stand there unable to proceed, and  with non-stop vitriolic abuse hurled at them, there is not even a hint of retaliatory violence which would probably occurred in western countries faced with a similar situation.

The point of the film is to celebrate the 10th Anniversary of the Choir with a spectacular concert which turns out to be quite a magnificent event albeit a very camp extravaganza.  They proudly write and produce all their own music and sing enthusiastically ‘dream the undreamable, reach the unreachable,’ and  I think they’ll manage to do that quite easily.

P.S. The movie won a Audience Award at the Berlinale earlier this year

Some people wait an awful long time before they start to come to terms with the fact there were born with the wrong gender, or indeed have the wherewithal to deal with it.  Gloria Stein is one such person as she waited until she was 66 years old until she transitioned.  In this slightly stranger-than-fiction story we learn that one of the main reasons that prompted her to start the process then was that as Bernard “Butch” Rosichan he wanted to avoid being sent to jail for not making his alimony payments to his second wife. To be fair to Gloria, this wasn’t the only deciding factor, but it was the pivotal point to carry through something she had been working towards for a very long time.

Butch had been an aggressive loud-mouthed Jewish macho owner of a South Florida auto-wrecking company. Balding, pot-bellied and hardly attractive but evidently he was quite the ladies man.  In fact in this new documentary on her life, Gloria kept emphasizing that Butch loved women so much he thought he may just as well become one.  A slight simplification for what was obviously more her more profound reasons, nevertheless Gloria’s goal in her transitioning was to become the woman that Butch would have wanted to marry.

Gloria’s fascinating tale is one of the most unexpected and surprising journeys of a fiercely determined woman with a very infectious high-spirited personality whose transitioning also enabled her to come to terms with some of her past life choices that she made as Butch and which she now regretted.  Her nephew Stephen who had served time in prison for his drug addiction somewhat bitterly testified how obnoxious his Uncle had treated him in the past. In fact at the beginning of this film, which had been shot over a couple of years, he was adamantly refusing to reunite with Gloria.  They did however affect a happy reconciliation. but to everyone’s regret they couldn’t manage one with Gloria’s two sons that she hasn’t seen for decades.

Gloria had named herself after her two idols – Gloria Estefan and Gloria Steinem, and starting her life all over as a senior citizen simply empowered her to do whatever she wanted too. After her sex realignment surgery she even became a dominatrix for some time, and then to her complete surprise fell in love with Dan a rather timid  FTM transgender man who obviously totally adores her.  However what gives this rather inspirational and very compelling story a particularly happy ending is that Gloria has used her experience to now become an leading activist for the transgender community. As an outreach speaker to youth groups in Florida she tells her story and always encourages her young audiences with her very simple creed “if you want to do something, do it now because tomorrow may never come.”

Written and directed by Emmy Award Winning filmmaker Robyn Symon

Beatrice (Juliet Stevenson) and her 15 year old son Elliot (Alex Lawther) have arrived at their family’s getaway vacation home in the South of France for one last time.  As the house is now to be sold as Beatrice and her husband are finally getting a divorce, they are there to pack up all its contents.   After flailing around for decades in a marriage for which she confides to her neighbor never ever really brought her much joy, it is time to move on.  Not that she looks any happier at the thought of a fresh start as she always appears so thoroughly depressed and about to burst into tears.

Her humor is not helped by the fact that she has spoilt her only son to such an extent that he is a self-absorbed prig who cannot bear to be in the house with her let alone, actually help with the arduous task of sorting all the possessions out. When he is out having fun just wandering around the countryside he comes across a semi-naked slightly older extremely handsome boy about to go for a swim in the reservoir.  Clément (Phénix Brossard) is also here a visitor to the area but when we discover his dark secret we realize that he is certainly not on vacation.

Clément is however quite bemused when he spots how a very earnest Elliot is immediately infatuated with him.  They have totally different natures and in fact Clément teases his new very wordy admirer for being a budding poet ‘such a cliche’ he says. Nevertheless they take to hanging together at Elliot’s house and it does at least mean that Beatrice has finally got a helping pair of hands with all the packing, and someone who is finally nice to her.

On an outing to the nearby town it is in fact Beatrice that steals a kiss from Clément, an incident that Elliot manages to witness, but later on he gets his new friend alone and he is finally permitted to go even further.  By then Elliot’s father (Finbar Lynch) has arrived to ostensibly sign the Sale papers for the house, but before he does that, more family secrets are revealed, and Beatrice gets even more unhappy.

This very gentle drama from Brit theater and TV director Andrew Steggall unfolds at a very languid pace and but somehow it never totally engages you or quite fulfills its promise.  Despite a valiant performance from Lawther (last seen on our screens as the young Alan Turing in The Imitation Game) it is difficult to warm to such an insufferable character, and even harder to appreciate why these two totally opposite young men really would become friends. Stevenson, one on the Uk’s most talented actresses, has been given little to grasp onto as her character is too one dimensional, although at least she doesn’t have to repeat her campy performance of a newly divorced mother of a gay boy that she gave in ‘Food of Love’.

Beautifully photographed and with a delightful soundtrack which does make up for it a little.