The Seattle Lesbian and Gay Film Festival is slumming this year.
Perhaps its producers at Three Dollar Bill Cinema are nervous about the
specter of elitism after programming a run of high-minded ’50s
melodramas this spring (wasn’t Tea and Sympathy fantastic?).
Perhaps they actually think TV is interesting. Whatever the case, and
in the absence of a generally acknowledged cultural moment in gay TV,
this year’s Lesbian and Gay Film Festival is dedicated to
television.
Stay far away from the intro-to-gay-TV doc Further Off the
Straight and Narrow (I Want My Gay TV! at SIFF Cinema, Sun Oct 14
at 2 pm). It’s 61 minutes of media-studies boilerplate—a lot of
didactic blather about representation and stereotypes and the exact
proportion of reality or unreality contained in so-called reality TV.
The voiceover narration includes an unhealthy number of questions that
end in periods and mock curiosity about early representations of gay
characters that the clips entirely fail to address. If you want to draw
your own conclusions about the history of gay representation in
television, stick with Gay TV Dinners at Central Cinema, double
features of TV episodes from the ’70s with gay themes—from
honorable gay athletes to greedy lesbians who prey on loaded widows
(Mon Oct 15, Wed Oct 17, and Fri Oct 19 at 5:30 pm). Central Cinema
will really serve you dinner, too: It’s the best use of the DVD-only
venue I’ve seen in any festival to date.
SLGFF isn’t big on archival films—Three Dollar Bill saves the
obscure finds for its year-round programming—but Parting
Glances (SIFF Cinema, Thurs Oct 18 at 7 pm), from 1986, is
probably the best thing in the festival. Written, directed, and edited
by Bill Sherwood, who died of AIDS before completing another feature,
the film is one of the earliest and least sentimental features about
gay life in the AIDS era. Twentysomethings Michael and Robert lead
seemingly comfortable lives—they flirt with cute boys at the
record store, have dinner parties with a middle-aged couple in a sad
sham marriage, and attend bohemian soirees in a costume designer’s loft
where the beer flows freely but the cocaine is stashed in a curtained
chamber. Meanwhile, Michael tries to get his HIV-positive best friend
Nick (a bony young Steve Buscemi) to stick to a macrobiotic diet in a
pathos-stricken effort to ward off death, and Robert is about to move
to Kenya, for reasons Michael is unwilling to guess. The film was
recently restored by the brand-new Outfest Legacy Project, so the print
should be close to pristine.
Also falling into the evergreen AIDS-in-the-’80s category is
André Techiné’s The Witnesses (Cinerama, Mon Oct
15 at 7 pm), fresh from the international festival circuit. Though the
cast of characters looks a little stagey after Parting
Glances—baby-hating children’s book author Emmanuelle
Béart married to vice-squad flic and loving father Sami
Bouajila?—the who’s-sick-and-who’s-guilty drama works pretty
well, at least until an American character shows up and exhibits his
thickly French-accented English.
Speaking of terrible accents: Woody Harrelson in the crime noir
The Walker, SLGFF’s opening-night selection (Cinerama, Fri Oct
12 at 8 pm), sounds like no Virginian born after 1930 I’ve ever heard.
More like Robert E. Lee with his tongue strapped to a
metronome—but even then those Tennessee Williams bons mots don’t
fly. Paul Schrader (American Gigolo) writes and directs, but
his ear is all off, too: The idea of an unpaid shopping “escort” is
derived from a flaming friend of Nancy Reagan’s, but the character is
awkwardly transplanted into the present day, complete with Abu
Ghraib–inspired art and grumbly references to the Iraq war.
The rest of the schedule is littered with American docs (I’ve seen
only Lulu Gets a Facelift, which is precisely as dull and gory
as it sounds, and the worthy SIFF holdover Blood on the Flat Track:
The Rise of the Rat City Rollergirls), shorts programs (the
animated Functional Design, about a reassuring goose king, is
adorable, but I can’t vouch for any others), and international fare
(thumbs reservedly up for the gorgeously photographed Vivere,
a three-perspective triptych about rebellion and heartbreak in
small-town Germany and big-city Netherlands; thumbs regretfully down
for The King and the Clown, the indulgent story of a girlish
street performer in the 16th-century Korean court).
Like SIFF, our city’s original behemoth, SLGFF’s massive
ticket-selling power far outstrips the number of appropriately themed
films worth seeing in any given year. I hate to advise sticking to the
’80s—surely, decent gay movies are still being made—but
this year, the restored Parting Glances is the only must-see.
Of course, a strict ’80s regimen will also lead you to the
Xanadu sing-along (Cinerama, Sat Oct 13 at 9:30 pm). Sorry
about that. 
