Several of the movies on the J&B South African Gay and Lesbian Film Festival deserve distribution – art-house or otherwise – beyond the confines of that estimable festival. Two such are the brilliant French ensemble pieces The Treaty of Chance and Why Not Me?
The Treaty of Chance, written and directed by Patrick Mimouni, focuses on a group of gay male friends and acquaintances in Paris, tracing the fault-lines in their lives and relationships with a deft delicacy simply beyond the means of most storytellers in any medium or genre. Laced with bitter irony like a dark seam in the glitter of camp humour, Mimouni’s film explores how his characters are dealing with life, love and death – and wonders what is more bitter: to be an ageing queen, one’s glory days over, or to be young and sexy but facing an early death via Aids?
Lou Rockfeller III (Eliane Pine Carringhton) is a drag performer who is stridently confident in public and weepily insecure in private; Belladone (Nini Crépon) is his faithful, philosophical friend, tackling spiritual issues in his own unique way. Bruno (Bruno Anthony de Trigance) is a cyanide-tongued critic, tossed between self-loathing and his contempt for others; the gorgeous hunk Julien (Laurent Chemda) is the great beauty they all lust after even as he wrestles with his own personal tortures.
This is a talky film – be prepared, if you don’t understand French, to spend much of it reading subtitles. It’s worth every word. You’ll just have to see it again to catch all the images. These are conversations worth eavesdropping on, conversations about life and death and the meaning of it all, taking place between people one comes to care for deeply.
With its intriguing, novelistic characters, who emerge slowly through a storyline unhassled by the need to over-stimulate the audience, and its capacity to evoke the gamut of emotions, The Treaty of Chance makes most commercial Anglophone cinema look like the shallow trash it is. This is a subtitled French art movie to restore any faith you may have lost in subtitled French art movies.
Stephane Giusti’s Why Not Me?, by contrast, is an altogether lighter piece, though no less enjoyable for it. Set in Barcelona, it centres on four friends – three lesbians and a gay man – and the difficulties they face being honest with their parents.
Eve (Julie Gayet) is a wild womaniser who’d rather chase a new skirt than contemplate long-term intimacy (yes, there are lesbians like that); her best friend Nick (Bruno Putzulu) is a gay football official hiding his need for romance under a veneer of straight-acting cynicism. Camille (Amira Casar) is an upfront dyke given to meddling in other people’s affairs, while her lover Ariane (Alexandra London) is an eternal student who needs to start facing real life without the crutches of theory.
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Camille’s mother Josepha (Brigitte Roüan) is aware and supportive of her daughter’s sexual orientation, but the others all face the perennial gay problem of how to break it to mum and dad. When Josepha organises a fancy dinner party and invites the other parents, creating an opportunity for a group coming-out, things begin to go amusingly and poignantly awry.
Why Not Me? is a comedy with depth, one that expertly plays off its cast of differing characters against each other, and against their varied sets of parents – parents with secrets of their own. In the end, it is the common humanity of all that is important, the need to breach barriers of age, gender and sexuality in order to love one another. For, as WH Auden so memorably put it, we must love one another or die.
Now let’s hope these movies, and more like them, make it from the festival’s crowded screens to longer cinema runs and get more individual exposure. In this respect at least, Cinema Nouveau would appear to be perfectly named.
The J&B South African Gay and Lesbian Film Festival is running in Cape Town from January 27 to February 6, in Johannesburg from February 3 to 13, and Pretoria from February 6 to 13. Visit the official website for more details