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Documenting desire

D.C. screenings slated for two arresting depictions of same-sex love

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‘The Secret Diaries of Miss Anne Lister’

7 and 9:15 p.m. tonight

Reel Affirmations’ “One in Ten”

D.C. Jewish Community Center

1529 16th St. N.W.

tickets are $12, available at

the door or at reelaffirmations.org

‘Undertow’

Starts today for one week

Landmark E Street Cinema

555 11th St. N.W.

All shows discounted before 6 p.m. Monday through Friday

and first show on weekends

Tickets at box office or

landmarktheatres.com

A scene from the gay-themed Spanish movie 'Undertow,' playing this week at Landmark E Street Cinema. (Photo by Hector Alvarez; courtesy of the Film Collaborative)

Editor’s note: The date for “Undertow” was changed to Jan. 28 after the Blade went to press.

It’s a good time for film. The Globes were last weekend, the Oscar nominations are coming Tuesday and two worthy gay-themed pictures are being screened today in Washington.

Look for a tight lead actress race for the Academy Awards between Natalie Portman for “Black Swan” and Annette Bening for “The Kids Are All Right,” each in a role with a lesbian or bisexual identity in studio films aimed at multiplex audiences of all romantic persuasions.

“Kids” was reviewed in the Blade when it opened last year but “Black Swan” is also worth noting. Portman plays a dancer, sheltered and repressed, who is haunted by her fears and obsessions in her quest for ballerina perfection to be chosen to play the coveted dual roles in “Swan Lake” as the innocent white swan and the sensual black swan.

Black or white, there are no shades of gray in this juicy, backstage melodrama steeped with sensuality and theatricality, a thematic mash-up of Roman Polanski’s “Repulsion” (1968) and Herbert Ross’s “The Turning Point” (1977) with a dose of Joseph Mankiewiczs’s “All Abut Eve” (1950) by director Darren Aronofsy (who helmed last year’s sleeper hit film “The Wrestler”).

“Black Swan” is dark and twisted, deceptive at every turn, depicting a psycho-sexual descent into madness — and laced with much-ballyhooed lesbian sex between Portman and her co-star, and screen rival for the role of the black swan, Mila Kunis. Love it as guilty pleasure or hate it as over-the-top preposterous, this is a thriller so utterly seductive it must to seen to be believed.

Beginning today there are also two indie films that deserve to be seen based on sheer visual quality, informed by LGBT sensibility and each a lyrical and luminous love story — “The Secret Diaries of Miss Anne Lister” (originally produced for BBC television) and “Undertow” (Peru’s entry in this year’s Oscar choice for best foreign film). The first is at the D.C. Jewish Community Center tonight only, the second begins a one-week run today at the Landmark E Street Cinema.

A much different but still stylish cinematic look at lesbian love — also boasting some scenes of steamy coupling — “Lister” bears the stamp of the BBC in a costume drama set in early 19th century England about the life and times of a real woman, the defiantly unwed Miss Anne Lister, the woman dubbed the first modern lesbian by scholars of sexuality and known with a snicker as “Gentleman Jack” by her scandalized Yorkshire neighbors. It will be shown at 7 and 9:15 p.m. tonight only, as the Reel Affirmations’ monthly film at the D.C. JCC.

From the opening scene, we know we are in England as a distant figure — it runs out to be the eponymous Miss Anne Lister — as she strides over the brow of a moorland hill, the sky slightly overcast as if to prefigure the moodiness to follow.

“I want you with me, at my side, always, to be my wife,” Anne tells her intended, Marianna Lawton, with whom she maintained a relationship, on again and off again, for 16 years. But Marianna already has a spouse, her faintly ridiculous and vastly unattractive, overweight and unbathed husband — who does offer, however, one undeniable attribute, an income of six thousand pounds a year, in those days a sizable sum.

Always desperate to find a way that they can live together, and wearing black in mourning because they cannot, Anne tells Marianna at one point, that by marrying a man — and not living together as two women in love — that she has succumbed to “legal prostitution” instead of following her heart.

“You broke my heart,” sobs Anne, when it appears they can never be together.

British actress Maxine Peake plays Anne Lister as proud and determined to live life only to love women, not men. In this she follows the sensibility of Lister, whose copious diaries are the basis, scripted by Jane English, for this film.

Directed by James Kent and filmed on location in Yorkshire, the film evokes the period well, the sense of chill in the air, the rustle of the wind in the gorse on the moors, the repression of sexual feeling. But a much different setting — one marked by aqua-blue seas and sweeping sunlit beaches — comes in the second film, “Undertow,” a film suffused in a seductive and sensual spell and shown first locally last year in an earlier One in Ten event. It opens today at the Landmark E Street Cinema.

The “undertow” of the title (in Spanish called “Contracorriente” and shown in Spanish with English subtitles) is the pull the protagonist, Miguel, a fisherman living in Cabo Blanco on Peru’s Northern coast, feels tugging at him as he tries to resolve the competing claims he feels — from the wife he loves both emotionally and physically, and his clandestine love affair with the handsome gay artist, Santiago, who visits the small fishing village to paint and remains there to seek a life together.

But Miguel, who is clearly bisexual himself, cannot express his feelings for Santiago in the open. Instead, they must pretend not to know one another and can meet only in isolated coves where they frolic unclothed in the waves with erotic gusto not seen since Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr did the same (albeit clothed) in “From Here to Eternity.”

Miguel hopes to live a double life, his secret passion remaining undisclosed, until Santiago vanishes in the surf, caught by his own undertow, and then reappears as a ghost, courtesy of the Latin American tropes of magical realism. For he is a ghost that only Miguel can see.

Thus, the irony is underscored that now they can be together openly, because one of them is no longer visible to others. In the claustrophobic village culture of “machismo” and homophobia, it is a genuine joy to watch the expression on Miguel’s face to be able to walk hand in hand with Santiago, unafraid for the first time of what others might think.

But that’s not the happy ending it may appear. Miguel would love things to remain as they are, his double life now protected from prying eyes. But Santiago wants to “move on” as a spirit, but cannot do so, it is understood, unless and until he is first buried at sea according to local custom blessed by church and community.

So to free his dead lover’s spirit from eternal torment, Miguel struggles with how to let his wife and the villagers know what must be done, and first they must find Santiago’s body, lost at sea. To do so, he must decide to “come out,” especially after paintings of him, naked and recognizable as him, have been discovered in Santiago’s abandoned beachfront shack.

The film’s director, Peruvian former physician Javier Fuentes-Leon, who is gay, has said that he made this film — his first that is feature length — “born out of a personal quest to define what it is to be a true man and how manhood relates to sexual identity.” “Undertow” is a fable that confronts this task with honesty, never cutting corners, and always recognizing that in the triangle his wife Mariela is also equally compelling and sympathetic.

This film, winner of the 2010 Sundance Film Festival audience award for best drama, will challenge viewers both gay or straight, or like Miguel in between, with lessons about love and loss, honesty and integrity, family and community.

The three leads — Bolivian actor and musician Cristian Mercado as Miguel; leading Peruvian actress Tatiana Astengo as Mariela; and as the smoldering Santiago, blockbuster Latin American film star Manolo Cardona, named by “People en Espanol” as one of the 50 Most Beautiful People in 2005 — vividly convey their intensity and pain.

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Neo-noir ‘Femme’ offers sexy, intense revenge fantasy

A work of real and thrilling cinematic vision

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George MacKay and Nathan Stewart-Jarrett star in ‘Femme.’ (Photo courtesy of Utopia)

They say “revenge is sweet,” and it must be true. Why else would so many of our popular stories, dating all the way back to “Medea” and beyond, be focused on the idea of getting “even” with the people who have done us wrong?

It’s a concept with obvious appeal for anyone who has felt unjustly used by the world – or, more accurately, by the people in it – but that has particular resonance, perhaps, for modern queer audiences, long used to being relegated to the status of “victim” in the narratives we see on our screens. In “Femme” — the new UK indie thriller helmed by first-time feature directors Sam H. Freeman and Ng Choon Ping, now in limited theatrical release and expanding wider over the next two weeks — it provides the irresistible hook for a gripping tale of calculated vengeance in the face of anti-queer violence. Like the best of such stories, however, it’s as much a cautionary tale as it is a wish-fulfillment fantasy.

Set in London, it centers on Jules (Nathan Stewart-Jarrett), aka Aphrodite Banks, a popular drag performer in the city’s queer club scene who, after a performance one night, steps out in full costume to buy a pack of cigarettes and becomes the victim of a traumatic “gay bashing” incident at the hands of a young man goaded to violence by a thuggish gang of friends. Months later, though he’s recovered from his physical injuries, he is still deeply affected by the inner scars that linger. Robbed of the confidence that allowed him to perform, he’s withdrawn into a reclusive life, until concern from his friends and housemates prompts him to finally venture out into the world for a night of cruising at a gay sauna – where he encounters his bully doing the same thing. 

Unrecognizable and anonymously masculine out of his drag persona, Jules finds himself beginning a dangerous and duplicitous game in which he plans to “out” his former attacker – whose name, as he learns, is Preston (George MacKay) – in the most humiliating way possible. As his scheme begins to play out, however, he encounters an obstacle: in getting to know the closeted Preston, he is surprised to discover not only empathy for someone living their life in terrified camouflage, but a mutual attraction that develops despite the horrific history between them.

Framed as a self-described “neo-noir” story, a designation that implies a certain flavor of moral ambiguity as much as it does a tense and shadowy tale of intrigue or a psychologically complex tone, it’s a movie that relies heavily on style in order to sell its conceptual premise. Realistically, we might question the boldness that permits our protagonist to enact such a potentially hazardous scheme, but in the context of its genre trappings we are lulled into accepting it. And while most of us are likely “jaded” enough to question the possibility of tenderness between its two leading characters, the accepted conceits of the film noir form are enough to sell it to us – or at least allow us to grapple with it alongside Jules, whose righteously Machiavellian master plan is threatened by the feelings he “catches” in spite of himself.

That, of course, is part of the whole point. “Femme,” though it establishes itself by virtue of its very title as a testament to the struggle to “pass” for straight in a world that places a value judgment on perceived adherence to a strict norm for gender and sexuality, hinges on the idea that such things aren’t quite as clear-cut as we want to make them. Despite the black-and-white certainty we cling to when it comes to the subject of abusive or toxic relationships, there’s an emotional component that can only be ignored or dismissed at our peril, and even our most resolute intentions can be undermined by the shades of gray we discover in our hearts. 

Freeman and Ng – who also wrote the screenplay, adapting their own BAFTA-nominated short film from 2021 (starring Harris Dickinson and Paapa Essiedu) into a feature-length expansion – seem bent on challenging our snap judgments, on forcing us to sympathize with our oppressors by showing us the ways in which they, too, are prevented from living a fully authentic life by the expectations of their cultural environment. Even more challenging for many modern audiences, perhaps, may be the unavoidable observation that, in enacting his plan of revenge, Jules crosses the line between being a victim and being a victimizer – a fine point that may trigger uncomfortable implications in a social environment that has become marked by divisive moral constructs and hardline ethical posturing.

Before we scare you off with discussion of high-concept themes and “culture war” rhetoric, however, it’s crucial to bring up the elements that lift “Femme” above and beyond the level of so many such narrative films and makes it a somewhat unexpectedly potent piece of cinematic storytelling – and all of them have to do with the skill and intention behind it.

As to the former, the movie’s first-time directors manage a remarkable debut, steeping their film in moody, genre-appropriate visuals and murky morality. They pave a path beyond the easy assessments proscribed for us by conventional thinking, and force us to follow our sympathies into a disquieting confrontation between what we “know” as right and what we feel as true; at the same time, they push back against any natural sentimentality we might have about the situation, stressing the toxicity of the relationship in the middle of their film, the ironically-reversed insincerity of its dynamic – and, perhaps most importantly, the reality of the defining circumstances around it. While we might find ourselves longing for a happier resolution than the one we expect, the film makes no pretense that these two men might overcome the deep denial and traumatic associations – not to mention the calculated lack of honesty on the side of its de facto protagonist, to achieve some kind of “happy ending” between themselves. Nevertheless, we hope for it, in spite of ourselves.

That delicate dynamic works largely because of the movie’s lead actors. Both Stewart-Jarrett (“Candyman”) and MacKay (“Pride”, “1917”) deliver fully invested, utterly relatable performances, finding the emotional truth behind their interactions with as much palpable authenticity as they bring to the chemistry between them. They force us to abandon our preconceived ideas about each character by finding the human presence behind them, and it makes the story’s final outcome feel as heartbreaking as it does inevitable.

As for intention, “Femme” – which premiered at last year’s Berlin International Film Festival and went on to gather acclaim across the international film fest circuit – might be a little hard to take for the easily triggered, we won’t deny it. Still, it’s a work of real and thrilling cinematic vision that goes beyond easy morality to highlight the tragedy that comes from being forced to live behind a mask for the sake of societal acceptance. It’s also exciting, smart, and unexpectedly sexy – all of which make it a highly- recommended addition to your watchlist.

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Tommy Dorfman makes directorial debut in ‘I Wish You All the Best’

Film premiered at SXSW

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(Courtesy photo)

Editor’s note: Jack Morningstar attended SXSW.

Based on Mason Deaver’s novel, “I Wish You All the Best” follows Ben DeBacker (Corey Fogelmanis), a nonbinary teen who is thrown out of their house and forced to move in with their estranged older sister and her husband.

The film premiered at SXSW last week and stars Corey Fogelmanis, Miles Gutierrez-Riley, Alexandra Daddario and Cole Sprouse, Lena Dunham and was produced by Matt Kaplan and Tommy Dorfman. In addition to directing and producing, Dorfman also adapted the screenplay. 

“I had never read a book that centered on an experience that mirrored mine so vividly — just being a queer kid from the South — so I immediately was interested in adapting it and was putting myself up for that,” she said.

The heartwarming film brings awareness to the plight of LGBTQ kids who grow up in conservative families and communities, while also emphasizing that, as Dorfman noted, “safety can be found in many places.” In this case, the main protagonist, Ben, finds refuge in their friendship with Nathan. Fogelmanis, who plays Ben, explains that “together they have so many first-time experiences. Learning to let your walls down with someone that is a stranger, or that you don’t have a biological bond with is really scary. And then just to see all the stuff that comes up and have that person still accept you is just the greatest thing for Ben.”

Fogelmanis and Gutierrez-Riley were obvious choices for the roles of Ben and Nathan.

“It was really clear to me from a filmmaker perspective. There were a couple of people for each role that I was interested in and enjoyed working with, but Fogelmanis, from that first tape to the last chemistry read made it so clear who Ben was, who Ben is, and who Ben could be. Miles, who plays Nathan, is so amazing as well,” Fogelmanis added. “It was really effortless in a way. Reading Tommy’s words was super easy to find my way into.”

Dorfman found it particularly easy to work with Gutierrez-Riley as well since they attended the same acting program at Fordham University. 

“I remember when I was working with Miles in the audition process, I was like, oh, I know how to talk to you. That’s huge. It helped me as a first-time director,” she said.

Dorfman wanted to be careful “not fall into the trap of dramatizing Ben’s gender or coming out too much. It is important to remember that viewing people solely through the lens of their gender or sexuality diminishes their vast and complex humanity. For instance, my life extends beyond my trans identity. I’m an artist, a wife, a mother to two dogs, a sister to four siblings, an avid reader of classic literature, 10 years sober, have ADHD, enjoy arranging flowers and charming tableware, to name a few things.”

“Similarly, my film’s protagonist, Ben, doesn’t have an identity exclusive to being a queer teenager. Although their coming out experience is crucial and worth exploring, an obvious jumping-off point in my film, it’s what happens after they’re able to open up that inspired me to make ‘I Wish You All The Best,’ Dorfman added. “My film examines the discomfort of being seventeen, falling in love with a classmate, forming friendships, finding a voice through painting and self-expression, learning to love and be loved, navigating anxiety and depression, and coping with the pressures of growing up. These are universal and very human experiences that shape Ben beyond the limits of representation or perception.” 

Dorfman describes being one of the few openly transgender directors as “an honor and a disappointment.” She added, “I wish there were more of us, but there will be. It’s exciting, though, to be part of this next generation of creators and filmmakers entering this space and telling more human experiences.”

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Nick Kroll and Andrew Rannells want to adopt baby in ‘I Don’t Understand You’

Film premiered at SXSW in Austin

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(Courtesy photo)

Editor’s note: Jack Morningstar attended SXSW in Austin, Texas.

“I Don’t Understand You” focuses on a couple whose romantic Italian getaway devolves into bloody chaos while they prepare to adopt their first child. 

The film, while veering into hilariously gruesome hijinks, tells the story of a gay couple who is willing to kill for a chance at fatherhood. It sheds light on the hurdles that same-sex couples often go through in the adoption process: Financial burdens, time constraints, fraud, and in this case, a rural Italian family.

The film premiered last weekend at SXSW in Austin and stars Nick Kroll and Andrew Rannells along with Nunzia Schiano, Morgan Spector and Eleonora Romandini. It was written and directed by Brian Crano and David Craig, who are married. They sourced inspiration from their own adoption struggles and an Italian vacay gone wrong. 

“We were about to leave for Italy when we found out that we had matched with a birth mother and our son would be born in about six weeks,” said Crano. 

According to Craig, the trip was tense and it culminated in their car getting stuck in a ditch on their way to an anniversary dinner.

“We ended up at an old lady’s house after she rescued us in her Fiat. Her family cooked us a meal and we stayed up drinking with them until 3 a.m., not understanding a word they were saying,” he said.

Without spoiling anything, the couple in the movie go to absurd lengths to ensure that their adoption goes through. Craig explained that the theme of the movie was “what would you do for your kid.” 

“We were three years into our own journey at the time and realized we would literally do anything to make that dream a reality. It’s really a love letter to our son,” he said.

The film is hard to relegate to a single genre. 

“When conceiving the story, we saw it as different parts — romantic comedy, horror movie, murder play — but I think by bringing in Nick and Andrew that blend actually became much more of an organic mix where the comedy sustained throughout. They elevated it in a more elegant fashion,” said Craig. 

“I Don’t Understand You”was produced by Pinky Promise, a women-led production company with the mission to elevate diverse voices in their storytelling. Kara Durrett, Pinky Promise’s current president was a champion of this script from the beginning. Founder Jessamine Burgum recounts that when Durrett was onboarding, she said “If you don’t get [“I Don’t Understand You”] I don’t know if this is going to work.” 

It ultimately became one of the first projects Burgum and Durrett collaborated on. 

Kroll and Rannells’ chemistry carried the film. 

“There was a desire to work with each of them because they had both separately been in such amazing comedian teams — like Andrew with Josh Gad and Nick with John Mulaney. Nick and Andrew’s characters are in almost every scene of the movie together, so they needed to be adept to basically doing a shared performance. There was no one more well-positioned to do this as naturally as possible,” said Crano. 

Their characters are easy to root for, yet also deeply flawed. 

“A big thing we wanted to do with this movie, and with all of our work in telling stories, is avoid telling a cliched gay trauma film. We’ve never ascribed to the idea that there is a subcategory to film that is LGBTQ, rather — movies are for everyone. We want to make a movie where gay characters are flawed, not for being gay, but because of who they are. They can be villains, but they are our protagonists,” said Craig. 

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