Week of June 12, 2008, Issue #660
FILM
Queer Images 2008
Queer as Folk: Queer Images keeps its focus on humanity
BRIAN GIBSON / dvdetective@vueweekly.com
It’s appropriate that Red Without Blue (Wed, Jun 18, 7 pm; SSSSS) kicks off Queer Images, a Pride Week mini-film fest at Metro. Because like the other extraordinary films here, it reveals the fascinating complexity and depth of basic human intimacy. Novelistic in its languid twists and turns, this astounding film—directed by Brooke Sebold and Benita and Todd Sills—follows identical twins Mark and Alex Farley. Mark has renamed himself Oliver while in San Francisco, while Alex is now the transgendered Claire. A decade earlier, their fused identities and closeted sexuality only made them feel more alone in adolescence and they tried to crack their mirror images.
Their bond of “twinship” has been stretched, frayed, and nearly broken in soul-wrenching ways. And their mother, whose own post-divorce relationship with a woman is fascinatingly ambiguous, is also doing her best to forgive herself. This kaleidoscopic Capturing The Farleys offers superimposed images and photographs, or a panorama of the twins’ shimmering hometown lake, only to dive in between the layers, plunging into the murky depths of identity and self-reflection.
The other two features focus on the bigotry, fear and intolerance that’s still projected at pretty much anything non-hetero in our homogeneous culture. Parvez Sharma’s A Jihad for Love (Thu, 7 pm; SSS) takes us on a tour of same-sex love in Islam—it’s a tour smoothly made, deft edits taking us from South Africa to Egypt to Iran to India. This side of the Muslim world isn’t seen, and the many blurred-out faces here suggest why. Homosexuality isn’t just closeted in much of the Islamic world but masked, as many religious leaders try to erase or deny its existence.
One of Mazen’s bravest acts is to reveal his face to the camera, but he only feels he can now that he’s escaped to Paris and no longer covered with a white mask in an Egyptian jail, moments away from a three-year conviction on “debauchery” charges. The children of Muhsin Hendricks—a South African imam made to resign from his two madrassas after he publicly said he was gay—have their faces blotted out, presumably so they won’t be publicly implicated along with their father.
The Muslims here feel bound up in an internal battle (the primary meaning of jihad) as they try to make peace between their divine and earthly loves. Some feel God has made them this way, while others, like Maryam, feel they must be punished. But what’s lacking are deeper, more involved ruminations on such feelings, reconciliations and self-recriminations. There are too few moments like Hendricks’ incisive explanation of the historical context for an apparently homosexual-denouncing passage in the Qu’ran (countering an imam who earlier ignored the words’ time and place).
When the complexity of these men and women’s loves does appear—as with Mazen’s belly dancing, the Urs festival celebrating a Sufi mystic’s great love for another holy man or a community of kotis in India—that complexity mystifies any simplistic, dogmatic denunciation of what is, after all, one expression of the love at the heart of Mohammed’s words. It’s these glimmers of the rainbow diversity of multiple homosexualities—not one desire to dismiss—that make the film interesting. And the basic persecution and denigration that people like Maryam, Arsham and Qasim have suffered makes this a documentary worth seeing, but only as a first look behind a mask that needs to be removed.
While one Muslim scholar, advising Qasim on his dilemma, digresses from religion and talks of same-sex desire as a “disease” or “crime,” Freeheld (Thu, 7pm; SSSSS) is about legally enforcing the straight and narrow-minded, only well and unfairly after the facts of the matter. Those facts are that retired police officer Laurel Hester has a female partner and Laurel Hester is in stage three of lung cancer. County officials, or freeholders, ultimately decide who gets benefits and they won’t let Stacie, Laurel’s partner, have the dying woman’s pension.
Cynthia Wade’s doc does so much with so little. Handheld, digital video puts us in the county building, where the freeholders listen impassively to the public they presumably represent. Then we look in on the quiet of Stacey’s and Laurel’s home, the film painting an astonishingly restrained, intimate portrait: Laurel’s hair falling out, Stacie crying silently in bed, Laurel’s voice turning raspier as her body wears away.
The inherent tension of the title, Freeheld, is matched by the subtle blurring of easy oppositions in the film: as the everyday becomes heroic, the personal is obviously political (the freeholders refuse to see how their bottom-line economic rationale so ruthlessly affects people). This documentary is eloquent testimony that gay rights is simply about the blindingly obvious, absolute justice of seeing any human being as deserving of the same respect, peace, and dignity as any other. V
Wed, Jun 18 - Thu, Jun 19 (7 pm)
Queer Images 2008
Featuring Red Without Blue, Freeheld,
A Jihad for Love, DINX
Metro Cinema, $10
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