CINEMA: Andrew Worsdale
CINEMA audiences, it seems, have fallen in love with drag queens. Mike Nichols’s The Birdcage, a distinctly unfunky remake of La Cage aux Folles, grossed $18-million on its opening weekend in the US, and is still going strong at over $117-million; Patrick Swayze and Wesley Snipes in frocks drew over $40-million in To Wong Foo.
The latest foray into gender-bending is Nigel Finch’s colourful but low-budget Stonewall, a semi- fictionalised account of the legendary riots in the US in June 1969 that sparked the gay liberation movement.
International demand for films with gay and lesbian subject matter snowballed in the early 1990s with the emergence of New Queer Cinema: the wild, eccentric films of Gregg Araki (his HIV-positive road-movie The Living End cost $23 000 and made over $700 000 in the US alone); Todd Haynes’s Jean Genet- inspired triptych, Poison, which won the Sundance Festival’s grand prize; Tom Kalin’s Swoon, a controversial retelling of the Leopold/Loeb murder case; Buce La Bruce’s wry, sexually explicit comedy about the film-maker’s obsession with a skinhead, titled No Skin Off My Ass; and even Derek Jarman’s Edward II, a brilliant revisionist piece complete with Act-Up protesters and period wardrobe.
These low-budget movies paved the way for Hollywood’s success. Catering to the tastes of middle America, big-budget films like The Birdcage and To Wong Foo represented gay characters as non- sexual, retro and comic. But now, Oliver Stone is set to produce The Mayor of Castro Street (the tale of Harvey Milk, the subject of a landmark documentary which won an Oscar in 1984), and Annette Benning is starring in John Schlesinger’s version of Larry Kramer’s play The Normal Heart. It looks as if the movie execs on Sunset Boulevard have woken up and smelt the mascara.
As a result, Stonewall — which was produced and directed by Brits, supposedly because no Americans were brave enough to take on a period drag story — – was given a massive 20-print release in the US, practically unheard-of for a low-budget independent film.
Unfortunately, the movie itself is not a total success, and its talented director, Nigel Finch (who made the brilliant TV movie The Lost Language of Cranes, as well as the delightfully off-the-wall Vampyr: A Soap Opera), died of an Aids-related illness while it was still in post-production.
Based on Martin Duberman’s book, adapted by British actor and writer Ricki Beadle Blair, the film’s characters are composites of the real-life participants in the riots, caught up in a Midnight Cowboy-type story as a small-town hick descends on Manhattan in the summer of 1969, eager for action. He finds it at the Stonewall bar, owned by Mafia hood Skinny Vinnie (probably the most compelling character in the movie, beautifully played by Bruce McVittie), who is having a closet affair with imperious star barboy/girl Bostonia.
Our small-town hero falls in love with Puerto Rican drag queen La Miranda (a gorgeous performance by Guillermo Diaz), but complications ensue when he also becomes involved with conservative gay activist Ethan (Brendan Corbalis). Punctuated with girl-group songs that function like a Greek chorus, the film comes to a suitable (if underwhelming) climax on the sweltering summer’s night that Judy Garland died and the drag queens hurled Molotov cocktails at New York’s finest in protest against raids and harassment.
For once, the drag queens show real street sass and rough vulgarity, and despite budget limitations the movie looks and feels good. But the plotting and direction are all over the place. Despite the film’s unquestionable sincerity, its uneasy mix of stoic melodrama and campy abandon fails to hang together.
Maybe the film-makers played it too safe. As drag- queen activist Glennda Orgasm (aka Glenn Belverio) remarked in the British Gay Times: “The film is ruined by the anachronistic pall cast over it by projecting modern-day PC politics on to an emotionally turbulent past … I thought I’d landed on a strange planet called Stonewall: a planet in an alternative Sixties universe where marijuana, LSD, methedrine, Quaaludes et al had become extinct dinosaurs. The only explanation I could figure was that, prior to the audience’s landing, a triumphant War on Drugs had ravaged Planet Stonewall, making it a safety zone of positive, clean and sober gay role models.”
By straddling the ideological chasm between hardcore queer movies and the cosy liberalism of Hollywood’s efforts, the makers of Stonewall compromised what could have been one kicking picture — in high heels, of course.
@SPORT