MQFF Day Eight

Friday 10th March

Wednesday was my day off from the festival, with nothing showing that I wanted to see, and Thursday I missed the only film I'd planned to catch (US indie drama Hard Pill) as I overslept after taking a late afternoon nap...an impotant part of my Thursday routine these days, seeing as I'm usually up at 6.30am to put my radio show together, while DJ'ing each Thursday night means that its usually at least 4am Friday before I get to bed...

So anyway, that brings us to Friday, and the eighth day of the Melbourne Queer Film Festival. At 2pm I turned up to see Hilde's Reise (Hilde's Journey), a Swiss film by director Christof Vorster, who actually e-mailed me earlier in the week, having stumbled across my blog while looking for any press about his film that might have been generated locally. In his e-mail he said he hoped I would like his film. I'm sorry to say I did not. I was tired and hungover after DJ'ing the night before; consequently the film's subtle pace and dispassionate approach to its plot failed to engage me; and while performances were strong, the characters the actors played felt underdeveloped. On the other hand, Kim Linekan at Eye Weekly in the USA loved the film, describing it as "Beautifully shot and thoughtfully rendered...reminds us the price is rarely too high for those we love. A touching tale about friendship, personal integrity and death." Each to their own I guess!

At 6pm I attended Short and Burly, a package of boys' shorts from around the world. While the shorts packages at the MQFF are usually strong, this selection of films was uniformly disappointing. There were plenty of lowlights, such as:

• Casey Moulton's prison-break satire Donnie and Clyde, which would have actually been funny had it been edited down from 17 minutes to 5;
  
• the British film No Ordinary Joe, in which a gay teenager is advised by the ghost of playwright Joe Orton who's gone strangely posh - this was yet another gay short in search of a good ending and a strong narrative.
• Daniel Falcone's Night Swimming, which I really wanted to like - young punks driving to New York to see The Lunachicks are forced to spend the night together when their car breaks down, and consequently but not suprisingly their friendship crosses the line - but it also failed to find a strong narrative, and showed us nothing we haven't seen before.

There were only two films I liked in this package:

• The short and touching animation John and Michael, about two intellectually handicapped men who fall in love, was beautifully and simply rendered and an important reminder that the differently abled aren't really much different from you and I.
• The strange, silly but fun The Sadness of Johnson Joe Jangles, a gay western written and directed by Jeffrey St Jules, which featured its own skewed but consistent internal logic, exploding towns, and a pregnant man who gives birth to a donkey...

Overall though, a disappointing collection of films.

At 8pm I caught the German/Austrian co-production Fremde Haut ('Unveiled'), the third feature by German director Angelina Maccarone. While I'd placed this film on my maybe list, the high praise by friends Sasha and Lucy made me determined to see it, and I'm delighted that I did.

A complex portrait of life in the modern world of refugees and global migration, this film tells the story of Fariba Tabrizi (an extraordinary performance by Jasmin Tabatabai), an Iranian lesbian who has fled her home due to persecution, and who starts anew in Germany, where she is forced to masquerade as a man in order to avoid deportation. Here she begins to fall in love with a local woman, Anna (Anneke Kim Sarnau) whose cautious reciprocation of her feelings causes both joy and fear for Fariba, who risks blowing her cover by telling Anna the truth. Despite occasionally glossing over key plot points for the sake of speeding the narrative along, I found this film engaging, its characters memorable, and its bleached pallate and artful cinematography visually compelling.

My night ended on a low note, with the short French featurette Comme un Frere ('Like a Brother') a bland coming-of-age melodrama directed by Bernard Alapetite & Cyril Legann. This was was paired with a turgid Australian featurette, the melodramatic, badly acted What Grown Ups Know, directed by Jonathan Wald. I suffered through the entire 31 minutes of the latter, only to walk out of the cinema 15 minutes into the former, utterly bored.