Can you tell that I didn't have a lot to do at work today...?This is obviously only a partial and unfinished list, and it's very US and UK-centric at present. I intend to expand on and update it in the coming days and weeks, and will also add links as time permits.
I should also add that these films are not presented in any special order, only as they came to me, as I trawled through my memory and a couple of handy websites.
I invite you all, oh my loyal bloggers/readers, to contribute your own films in the comments section, below. There's plenty that I've missed.
Happy viewing!
Updated: Monday 5th June
1. Brokeback
This film surely needs no introduction. A poignant, subtle and evocative film about two young farmhands in the American midwest, it explores their uneasy attraction towards one another; the ramifications that relationship has; and its impact on one another, and their families, as it plays out over the following decades.
There have already been a plethora of articles written about this film, including my own piece in The Age. My favourite was written by Daniel Mendelsohn and appeared in the New York Review of Books:
"The real achievement of Brokeback Mountain is not that it tells a universal love story that happens to have gay characters in it, but that it tells a distinctively gay story that happens to be so well told that any feeling person can be moved by it. If you insist, as so many have, that the story of Jack and Ennis is OK to watch and sympathize with because they're not really homosexual—that they're more like the heart of America than like "gay people"—you're pushing them back into the closet whose narrow and suffocating confines Ang Lee and his collaborators have so beautifully and harrowingly exposed."
2. The Celluloid Closet dir. Rob Epstein & Jeffrey Friedman, USA, 1995
If you see no other film on this list, see this one. It says so much about the depiction of queers in Hollywood throughout the 20th Century, and does so with wit and style.
Narrated by Lily Tomlin (who broke a promise to the film-makers to come out after the film was released), this acclaimed documentary takes its name from Vito Russo's groundbreaking book of the same name - which itself is also highly recommended. The filmmakers examine the subtext of more than 100 Hollywood movies -- including Spartacus, Rope and Thelma and Louise - and chart the cinematic journey of lesbian and gay characters. Film clips are paired with director, producer and actor interviews featuring, among others, Gore Vidal, Tom Hanks and Whoopi Goldberg.
3. Beautiful Thing dir.
A self-described 'urban fairytale', this charming, albeit slight film beautifully evokes adolescent love and the confusion of coming out, and does so within a working class milleu. It's adapted by author Jonathan Harvey (who appears in a cameo in a pivotal scene at a gay pub) from his original stage play, which the author has described as an antidote to those stories in which working class gay boys invariably end up either as prostitutes or dead.Steve (Scott Neal, who went on to play the young gay copper PC Luke Ashton on The Bill) is a knock-about lad from a London housing estate who is regularly knocked around by his alcoholic father and abusive brother. He lives next door to Jaimie (Glen Berry), more sensitive and far less sporty, who lives with his tough-minded yet compassionate mum, Sandra (a fantastic performance by Linda Henry), a pub manager. The other major characters are the boys' young black neighbour, the Mama Cass-obsessed Leah (Tameka Empson) and Sandra's hippyish, middle-class boyfriend Tony (Ben Daniels). As the two boys gradually find themselves drawn together despite their differences, other dramas play out around them among the supporting cast. All the characters are well-drawn, and the film provides humour as well as romance in equal measure.
Definitely a tear-jerker, Beautiful Thing is also an ideal date movie for young queers, or indeed for anyone wanting the recapture those heady days of first love.
4. The Rocky Horror Picture Show dir Jim Sharman, UK/USA, 1975
This notorious horror parody - a fast-paced potpourri of camp, sci-fi and rock 'n' roll, among other things -- tracks the exploits of naïve couple Brad (Barry Bostwick) and Janet (a young Susan Sarandon) after they stumble across the lair ("some kind of hunting lodge for rich weirdos") of transexual Transylvanian alien Dr. Frank-N-Furter (Tim Curry), and are each seduced by him. Transgressive, pan-sexual, playful and fantastic.
Janet: Well, I don't like a man with too many muscles.
Frank-N-Furter: I didn't make him for you!
5. Go Fish dir. Rose Troche,
One of my favourite lesbian films, and indeed, one of my favourite films from the 'New Queer Cinema' of the 90's. Low budget but made with passion, it's a witty, playful, adventurous exploration of life in Dykeworld in all its aspects, from tea-drinking to discovering what happens when a lesbian sleeps with a man.
As US critic Roger Ebert observes, "One of the differences between men and women, according to conventional wisdom, is that women socialize more; they like to talk and share and gossip, while men tend to be more result-oriented in their speech. That may explain why Go Fish, a movie about lesbians that is largely concerned with dating, sex and romance, has so much talk in it. The male equivalent, gay or straight, would probably have more sex scenes and less dialogue."
Wordy? Yes. Also endearing, wryly observed, and with a lo-fi charm and honesty that can't be beat.
6. Torch Song Trilogy dir. Paul Bogart,
Written by and starring the gravel-voiced Harvey Fernstein, and based on his play of the same name, this ground-breaking film was one of the first films of the late 80's to present an honest and direct queer voice. By turns hilarious and heartbreaking, it's an intimate and intense look at a gay man's search for love, at a time when gay = AIDS in most people's minds.
Fernstein beautifully embodies the character of Arnold, the drag queen who uses sarcasm as a defense mechanism; Brian Kerwin plays Ed, the bisexual who is unsure of his love for Arnold, with depth and warmth; Matthew Broderick is delightful as the young gay man whose love for Arnold is cruelly snatched away; and Anne Bancroft is suitable over the top as Arnold's larger than life Jewish mother. It's a tear-jerker, it's a side-splitter, and it's adorable.
7. Bound dir. Andy & Larry Wachowski,
Another fantastic lesbian film, this time a thriller, and directed by the Wachowski brothers before The Matrix made them a household name. The plot is elegantly simple: Corky (Gina Gershon), a tough female ex con and her lover Violet (Jennifer Tilly) concoct a scheme to steal millions of stashed mob money and pin the blame on Violet's crooked boyfriend, the unpleasant Caeser (Joe Pantoliano).
As US critic James Berardinelli says, "Bound is among the best film noir entries of the decade; from beginning to end, it's solidly entertaining ... From the opening moments, ripe with sexual tension, to the closing shot, Bound offers an edge-of-the-seat experience."
Trust me, you have to see this film.
8. Caravaggio dir. Derek Jarman,
One of my favourite queer artists of all time, the outspoken Derek Jarman is responsible for a number of films, not all of them - such as the homoerotic historial epic Sebastiane for example, whose dialogue is all in Latin - easy to watch. Caravaggio is perhaps his most accessible film. One of several biopics Jarman made, it deals with the life and loves of the acclaimed Renaissance painter, whose treatment of light and shade is still influential to this day.
The film has been described by UK newspaper The Guardian as possessing "a genuine, haunting power ... Jarman's finest movie, a compelling biography of the painter that remains thoroughly lucid while refusing to compromise Jarman's cinematic artfulness."
The film literally re-creates the painter's aesthetic, his use of chiaroscuro, through precise lighting and composition, as it tells the story of Caravaggio's attraction to the handsome, dangerous Ranuccio (Sean Bean, perhaps best known as the doomed Boromir in The Lord of the Rings). The artist (played by Nigel Terry, King Arthur in Excalibur) falls into a complex menage a'trois with Ranuccio, who soon models for him, as well as Ranuccio's girlfriend Lena (the luminous Tilda Swinton, one of Jarman's regular stars).
Told mostly in flashback, this is a richly-textured, highly aesthetic approach to film-making, and a lushly rewarding experience for viewers who appreciate Jarman's avant-guarde approach to narrative and cinema.
Derek Jarman: "The heterosexual world is always complaining that homosexuals were obsessed with sex and they can't understand it. But they would understand it if their sex lives were outlawed and unspeakable. If gay people aren't obsessed with sex, there's something wrong with them." (The Guardian, 1986)
9. When Night is Falling dir. Patricia Rozema,
A sensual, tender lesbian romance, about Camille (Pascale Bussieres) a repressed professor in a Protestant theological college in Toronto who slowly begins to fall in love with Petra (Rachael Crawford), a circus performer, after they accidentally take each other's washing home with them from the laundromat. Thinking about it, why hasn't this film been shown on a double bill with My Beautiful Laundrette?
The film "is a struggle -- not only between heterosexuality and homosexuality, but between obligation and fulfillment, convention and experiment," says The San Francisco Chronicle; "a romantic fairy tale, really: about confronting our fears, seen and unseen, and making that journey, over enormous barriers and unseen terrain, to our essential selves."
It makes me cry tears of joy every time I see it.
10. Querelle dir. Rainer Werner Fassbinder,
This is the final film made by the German auteur Rainer Werner Fassbinder before he died of a massive overdose. Fassbinder was a rebel whose life and art were studies in contradiction. Openly gay, he married twice; one of his wives acted in his films and the other served as his editor. His prodigious cinematic output (the majority of which can be characterized as highly intelligent social melodramas) was matched by a wild, self-destructive libertinism that earned him a reputation as the enfant terrible of the New German Cinema (as well as its central figure, to paraphrase the IMDB).
The film is based on the novel Querelle of Brest by French writer Jean Genet, and stars Brad Davis as the titular, bisexual character, a navy sailor.
By no means easy to watch, Querelle is a dark, surreal and highly stylised film, featuring stunning cinematography and a beautiful production design. Some find the deliberate tone and pacing that Fassbinder employs in this film cold, over-ambitious and even alienating. For me, it's a fascinating film, difficult, but never less than striking.
Fassbinder deliberately keeps us distant from the dramas that unfold on the screen - savage lusts and brutal murders - as if daring us to hunger for the things society tells us we should neither want nor need. It's a complex, ambiguous film. Watch it if you dare.
11. My Beautiful Laundrette dir. Stephen Frears,
Far more accessible than Querelle, yet equally provocative in its own way, is Stephen Frears' My Beautiful Laundrette, a savage indictment of Thatcher's Britain and capitalism. Written by Hanif Kureishi, My Beautiful Laundrette is the story of Omar (Gordon Warnecke), a young Pakistani man caring for his intellectual, demanding, alcoholic father in Thatcherite London. Escape comes in two forms: his uncle Nasser's business interests (not all of them legal) ... and the handsome Johnny (Daniel Day Lewis), an old school friend turned National Front member.
Originally shot in six weeks, on a low budget for British television station Channel 4, My Beautiful Laundrette was so well received by critics at the Edinburgh Film Festival that it was internationally distributed for cinema on 35mm. It was heralded as one of Britain's most commercially and critically successful films of 1986, and earned Kureishi an Oscar nomination for best screenplay.
To quote the British Film Institute, "My Beautiful Laundrette was ground-breaking in its bold exploration of issues of sexuality, race, class and generational difference. It also sparked controversy, particularly within the Asian community, which was disgusted by its perceived degrading representation of Pakistanis. At a New York demonstration by the Pakistan Action Committee, banners called the film 'the product of a vile and perverted mind'.
Much of the outrage was targeted at the homosexual affair between Omar and Johnny, whch develops from a genuine mutual fondness through the buzz of sexual experimentation, before hinting, at the end, at something deeper. On the way, it survives several obstacles, including Johnny's racist connections and Omar's resentment."
The sexual tension between Omar and Johnny burns up the screen, the critique of Thatcher-era race/class divisions is superb, and the direction is crisp and striking.12. La Ley del Deseo (Law of Desire) dir. Pedro Almodovar,
Call me shallow, but how can any film in which a hot, young Antonio Banderas (pictured above) gets his gear off AND has sex with another man not be on a list of the best of queer cinema?Seriously though, Law of Desire is directed by the fabulous Pedro Almodovar, and while it may not have the emotional intensity of his recent, more mature works such as Talk to Her, All About My Mother, and Bad Education, it has humour, passion and intensity aplenty.
It also stars the never less than wonderful Carmen Maura, and has a plot that's part melodrama, part romance, part comedy and part murder mystery.
If you haven't seen any of Pedro Almodovar's earlier films, this is a great place to start. Then go on to check out Labyrinth of Passion and What Have I Done To Deserve This? by which time his latest film, Volver, the hit of this year's Cannes Film Festival, should have hit Australian shores!
13. Edward II dir. Derek Jarman,
Another Jarman film, this time based on the play by Shakespeare's contemporary, Christopher Marlowe, the man who once said "all they that love not tobacco and boys be fools." In Jarman's hands, this play about the relationship between England's King Edward II (Steven Waddington) and his lover Piers Gaveston (Andrew Tiernan) is given a distinctly modern spin. One of the best example of this is when Edward's troops are defending his throne from traitors led by the rebellious nobleman, Mortimer (Nigel Terry): Jarman portrays the loyal soldiers as AIDS activists under attack by riot police.
As Joe Brown wrote in The Washington Post, "It's a stylishly austere adaptation of Christopher Marlowe's rarely performed play about newly crowned King Edward, assassinated by a conspiracy of his spurned queen, court and clergy, who were all enraged by Edward's open devotion to his male lover Gaveston. Jarman keeps the Shakespearean-era speech and setting, but finds striking ways to make distinct 20th-century parallels about sex and power, homophobia and gay activism."
Jarman regular Tilda Swinton won the best actress award at the 1992 Venice Film Festival for her role as Edward's jealous wife, Queen Isabella of Spain, and deservedly so: she does a wonderful job of vamping up the screen, and competing with Gaveston for her husband's affections.
There's an insightful essay here about Jarman's post-modern aesthetic in this film. If you'd like to learn more about the real Edward II, Wikipedia is always a good place to start (especially if you've always wondered if the king's murder, shown in the film as having a red-hot poker inserted "into his secret parts (ie his anus) so that it burned the inner portions beyond the intestines" to quote Sir Thomas More, is factual.)
Edward II: I here create thee Lord High Chamberlain, Chief Secretary to the State and me, Earl of Cornwall, King and Lord of Man.
Piers Gaveston: My Lord, these titles far exceed my worth.
Edward II: Thy worth sweet friend is far above my gifts. And therefore to equal it, receive my heart.
14. Les Sauvages Roseaux (Wild Reeds) dir.
15. Rebel Without A Cause, dir. Nicholas Ray,
16. Edge of Seventeen, dir. David Moreton,
17. Sunday Bloody Sunday, dir. John Schlesinger,
18. Totally F***ed Up, dir Gregg Araki,
19. Ma Vie En Rose (My Life In Pink) dir. Alain Berliner,
20. Swoon, dir. Tom Kalin,
21. Rope, dir Alfred Hitchcock,
22. Parting Glances, dir. Bill Sherwood,
23. The Hunger, dir. Tony Scott,
24. Fucking Amal (Show Me Love) dir. Lukas Moodysson, Sweden/Denmark, 1998
25. The Boys in the Band, dir William Friedken,
26. Victim, dir. Basil Dearden,
27. Maurice, dir James Ivory,
28. Wilde, dir. Brian Gilbert, UK/Germany/Japan, 1997
29. Priest, dir. Antonia Bird,
30. Different For Girls, dir. Richard Spence, UK/France, 1998
31. Presque rien (Come undone) dir. Sebastian Lifshitz, France/Belgium, 2000
32. Poison dir. Todd Haynes, USA, 1991
9 comments:
You know I won't let this one slide... Presque rien (Come undone).
And how about Head On? I bet John Howard is calling you Unaustralian as we speak for missing that one.
Oh, and Plata quemada (Burnt Money) was fantastic.
I'm going to shut up now.
I will say though that I am stunned by the absence of The Next Best Thing and Philadelphia. And where are Priscilla? And To Wong Foo?
Ok Mike, you win, I've added Presque rien. Not so sure about Head On though - if I'm going to add an Australian film I'd rather add Tony Ayres Walking On Water. We'll see though - this is a work in progress after all...
richardwatts, your posts are good for the brain. this one got me thinking about the movies i've watched this week:
cabaret
the club
animal house
basquiat
and i realised they all have a kind of queerness to them. we watched the club and animal house in a double feature at my place, and by the end of the evening had witnessed many rousing speeches of man-loves-only-man. maybe animal house is more homosocial desire than homoeroticism, but the club is fairly bursting with the man-love.
cabaret obviously needs no qualification [but i actually cried when the hitler youth was singing - the false hope and genuine love in that scene terrifies and enthrals me] and i'd never seen basquiat before. i was pretty impressed.
your post also reminded me of something i learned recently about ken loach's 'land and freedom' - it was based on a short story in which the protagonist falls in love with a spanish man, not a woman as depicted in the film. i've always wondered why loach didn't go for it...
Nice list richard, although I was surprised at the omission of My Own Private Idaho, and anything by Todd Haynes, particuarly Poison. But apart from that, a fine list.
mskp - I didn't know that about Land and Freedom so thanks for enlightening me. You wouldn't happen to know where I can get my hands on the original story, would you?
Dave - it's a work in progress, but you're right, Poison should be in there. I'll add that in my next update... Idaho I'm still unsure of - while groundbreaking for its time, I just don't think it's that good a film... I'm open to convincing though!
I think you mean Christopher rather than Philip Marlowe - the latter being a creation of Raymond Chandler and not very gay (well, not last time I looked).
Oops - thanks Anon - well-spotted!
Glad you agree on Poison, I remember seeing it at the Edinburgh Film Fest and just feeling absolutely gobsmacked. I think your analysis of My Own Private Idaho is probably correct, but it is an important film. Other ones for your consideration, Another Country ( Rupert Everett in not camp typecast mould shock), Before Night Falls, Kiss of the Spiderwoman and I know it's not strictly a film, Angels In America. Thought?
Still a mighty fine list however.
Here's one I've always pondered: what about Withnail & I?
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