Reviews - Three from Wicked Queer
A trio of titles playing at the Boston film festival with the coolest name.
Founded in 1984 by local film programming legend George Mansour as the Boston Premiere Gay & Lesbian Film Festival, Wicked Queer, the LGBTQ+ fest with the best name evah kicked off last weekend and unspools throughout the coming days with dozens of features and shorts at the Brattle Theatre, the Coolidge Corner Theatre, the Somerville Theatre and the Museum of Fine Arts. Here’s an early peek at three titles worth your time.
ERUPCJA. Starring Charli xcx, Lena Góra, Will Madden, Jeremy O. Harris. Directed by Pete Ohs. Unrated. 71 minutes. Screening Friday, April 10 at the MFA.
Every time Bethany and Nel get together, a volcano explodes. It’s a heavy-handed metaphor for their combustible chemistry in a movie that’s otherwise lighter than air. Cinephile pop starlet Charli xcx continues to impress in front of the camera as Bethany, a sad-eyed British tourist in Warsaw dragging around a clingy boyfriend (Will Madden) who pees sitting down. He’s looking for a romantic place to pop the question, while Bethany’s looking for her ex-girlfriend Nel (Lena Góra). The eruption that ensues is a minor one, but not without its charms. The two gals use the seismic activity as an excuse to ditch their responsibilities and respective partners, getting lost in each other for a few days.
“Erupcja” was entirely improvised – director Pete Ohs shares writing credits with the principal cast – and while they should all be commended for avoiding the fuckword-heavy histrionics common to such exercises, the result can feel vague and frustratingly unfinished. (I had to check the screener before writing this to remember how it ended.) The low-stakes, twentysomething solipsism is a throwback to the mumblecore era, with Ohs employing an arch, third-person narrator a la early Godard. It’s a surprisingly chaste treatment of a passionate story, cutting to brightly colored, empty screens whenever things threaten to get too sexy.
Still, there are worse ways to spend 71 minutes than this wispy tale of youth and self-absorption, which contains the not unmemorable sight of Charli xcx reciting a Byron poem whilst sitting barefoot on the floor amidst piles of old books. It’s always nice when a movie panders to my aesthetic interests so specifically.
BARBARA FOREVER. A documentary directed by Brydie O’Connor. Unrated. 102 minutes. Screening Saturday, April 11 at the MFA.
This portrait of lesbian experimental filmmaker Barbara Hammer at first feels like a typical trailblazer hagiography, chronicling her attempt to create an archive of queer life in America via hundreds of short films and the documentary feature “Nitrate Kisses.” Brashly showcasing her nude body and occasionally explicit acts, Hammer’s movies boasted titles like “Dyketactics,” “Sappho” and “Natura Erotica” and had a hard time finding a foothold in the dude-centric avant garde film community. The doc begins with Hammer and wife Florrie Burke in the process of packing up her archives for exhibition at Yale’s Beineke Library, and that’s when a more complicated subtext begins to emerge.
Director Brydie O’Connor allows Hammer – who died of uterine cancer in 2019 – to tell the story herself, relying on old interviews and home movies instead of the usual documentary talking heads. Since Hammer filmed herself so often, there’s an incredible wealth of footage for O’Connor to draw upon, so a lot of the time it feels like an self-portrait assembled by someone else. (I was reminded more than once of Steven Soderbergh’s remarkable Spalding Gray documentary “And Everything is Going Fine,” a feat of editing that allowed the late monologist to write his obituary in his own words.)
Hammer can come off as a workaholic, narcissistic and more than a bit of an exhibitionist, as you might expect from anyone who’s spent this much time photographing themselves naked. But as her health begins to decline, one feels a poignant urgency in her assembly of the Beineke collection, an insistence that these films – this life’s work – continue to be shared and shown long after her passing. The artistic drive is, quite movingly, inextricable from her desire to live forever. In that respect, she may very well be immortal.
THE DIVINE TRAGEDY. Starring Artús Chávez, Pablo Gómez, Eduardo España, Christian Ramos. Directed by Sergio Tovar Velarde. Unrated. 101 minutes. Screening Saturday, April 11 at the Brattle.
A naughty, big-hearted party of a movie, writer-director Sergio Tovar Velarde’s freewheeling sex farce finds uptight, middle-aged Cristian (Artús Chávez) dumped by his husband of 24 years and stuck moving in with his decades-younger, wildly promiscuous hairdresser half-brother Roy (Pablo Gómez). It’s a gay “Odd Couple” with a generational twist, as the twentysomething kid sibling finds himself teaching his timid big brother how to navigate a brave new world of hookup apps while instructing him to shave his “big ‘80s bush.” Roy could stand to cool it a bit on the poppers and one-night-stands, and these two disparate personalities manage to meet somewhere in the middle, both ending up better off for it.
Not at all the “tragedy” teased in the title, this is a bawdy, ebullient film full of colorful costumes and even more colorful supporting characters. There’s a psychic roommate who instead of palms reads another part of the anatomy — with her mouth— plus the boys’ disgraced old high school teacher who’s finally out and living his best life. Sort of. It’s a messy, happily horny movie and exactly the kind of thing we come to festivals like this to celebrate.
Wicked Queer runs through Thursday, April 16.