/ 1 April 2011

The cook and the rentboy

The Cook And The Rentboy

Traditionally, at the Out in Africa (OIA) gay and lesbian film festival, there isn’t much crossover between the lesbian movies and the flicks for gay men.

That is to say, the audiences split along gender lines, almost like the return of some repressed difference. Hence the problems of choosing the right movie for opening night; hence, also, a review that attempts to pick one of each to represent the first tranche of this year’s festival.

At which point you have to be told that OIA has rearranged itself: instead of one big blast per annum, it will spread itself out in a threesome of mini-fests over the year. This format, festival director Nodi Murphy says, will enable moviegoers to see more of the overall selection. The first mini-fest for 2011, showing eight feature films and two shorts, runs at Nu Metro cinemas in Jo’burg and Cape Town from April 1 to 10. The second and third instalments are scheduled for mid-August and late October respectively, with sidebar fests in places such as Ermelo and Mafikeng on the way.

On the advice of a colleague who did some pre-screening for me, I watched Recipe for a Killing (for the girls) and Strapped (boys). In retrospect, I have to say that perhaps the former was not quite the most, er, inclusive choice. It’s something of a hardcore dyke movie, and one that deliberately solicits the charge laid at the door of Basic Instinct, which was accused of pathologising lesbians as murderous men-haters. But Recipe for a Killing is written and directed by a woman (Emmanuelle Bercot), based on a book by a woman (Chantal Pelletier), and takes an interesting stance on the matter — and it’s very good. Just don’t ask for positive role models.

Niels Arestrup, who has a magnificently curmudgeonly face, plays Gérard, an old winemaker living somewhere semi-rural; he’s particular about his food, as we see when he disposes of his wife, a cack-handed cook, in the opening minutes of the film. Then Gérard needs a new cook, and almost on the off chance he propositions a down-and-out young woman (Julie-Marie Parmentier) he sees on a park bench. With her ginger dreadlocks, she looks a bit like a pixie dragged backwards through an episode of Mad Max, but she will become Gérard’s cook — And, given the movie’s opening, you know it’s all going to go avocado-shaped.

Elegant structure
The characters are utterly convincing (with a bravura turn from Arestrup), despite the slight air of unreality that hangs over the story. Each moment counts, never more so than as the tension mounts, but at the same time Recipe for a Killing has an elegant two-part structure that reminds you once more that Quentin Tarantino wasn’t the originator of the Pulp Fiction refracted narrative.

Recipe for a Killing is darkly enjoyable — and surprising enough that one wishes for a third and final act to tangle it all up again. It is only 61 minutes long (being made for a French TV-movie series), so there’s space.

The selected boys’ movie, Strapped, seems not in fact to have any straps in it. Unless I’m missing something, the title is probably there to give it a vaguely erotic air and to mislead the leather queens. Or it’s just that rentboys are permanently “strapped for cash”, and Strapped falls into the genre that seems ever more beloved of gay or queer filmmakers: the rentboy movie. Recent festivals have included Boy Culture and 25¢, to name just two, and two of the better ones.

(This mini-fest has another rentboy movie, too — The Cost of Love.) I wonder if their ancestry isn’t the Andy Warhol trilogy with über-rentboy Joe Dallesandro, the “Little Joe” who “never once gave it away”? Whatever the genre or sub-genre’s origins, writer-director Joseph Graham makes it new with Strapped, which achieves a lovely blend of gritty realism and the lightly magical.

At its centre is the archetypal (or fantasy?) hustler, both a kind of Everyman and a sort of blank: he’s the guy who can be a range of guys for other guys — and for money. His name may be Eddie or it may be Mike, or it may be something else altogether; the credits name him only as Hustler. As played by the prettily named Ben Bonenfant, his youthful looks and air of innocence make him appealing to many, and he encounters several men who are indeed very interested in him in the course of this day-in-the-life of a whore — or is it a night?

The story’s structure has an appealing simplicity, and the camera work often echoes it in its watchful stillness. It calmly observes even the most jumped-up and jumpy of cokeheads, for instance, and there are certainly episodes of what may seem fairly outré behaviour in Strapped. But ultimately it has heart-warming qualities alongside its other excellent filmic and storytelling capacities. It declines to subside into any of the usual narrative clichés, which is also very refreshing. Oh, and the boys are cute.

Go to oia.co.za for more information about venues and screening times