Skip to main contentIf you attend one show at the 13th annual PLGFF, it needs to be the Hedwig and the Angry Inch sing-along (10 pm Saturday, Oct. 3), which promises to turn the entire city into a raucous musical. If you attend two shows, here are some options:
Pornography
[DIRECTOR ATTENDING] David Kittredge's refreshingly synopsis-proof debut feature is a strange one indeed. A loose braid of techno-thriller suspense, ghost-story spookiness, and pomo deconstruction, Pornography swings for the back row of the upper deck and shanks a single into right field instead. Heavily indebted to the down-the-rabbit-hole brand of phantasmagoria that David Lynch pretty much perfected with Mulholland Drive and Inland Empire, Kittredge fashions a disorienting mystery of infinite regression out of dreams within dreams, films within films, even characters within characters. The bewildering skein of narrative trickery spirals into and out from the disappearance of porn star Mark Anton, who, blue movie legend has it, gasped his last breaths as the reluctant star of a snuff film. A writer researching the history of gay porn is drawn into the mystery when he moves into a haunted New York loft, while modern-day porn star Matt Stevens experiences similarly creepy visitations in Los Angeles. The ambition on display here is heartening, but Kittredge isn't up to the Lynchian task of establishing the vital link between an audience's perceptions and the unraveling of cinematic fabrication. In the end, we are stuck outside a film that admires itself in a funhouse mirror. CHRIS STAMM. 7 pm Saturday, Oct. 3.
Greek Pete
With the main characters played by a handful of real London "rent boys," or gay escorts, and inspired in part by their experiences, Andrew Haigh's quiet docudrama is a curiously affecting mix of frank sex, traditional work ethic and boyish heartache—like an episode of MTV True Life with far better cinematography. All the escorts, including self-promoting go-getter Pete (Peter Pittaros) and his frail boyfriend and fellow rent boy Kai (Lewis Wallis), have on-the-job stories: Of fucking fat men with gout; men who bareback, men who liked to get punched, men who like to punch them. But mostly they lead simple lives. They get excited about fireworks, Christmas trees and stuffing drugs up their noses with their extended family of escorts. The film is graphic, with extended scenes of stark sex, but the repetition of movement is reminiscent of an office chore. Far more affecting are scenes from the rent boys' everyday routines—Pete washing Kai's hair or obsessing over getting nominated for the International Escort Awards. Greek Pete is filled with small moments of beauty and a wry recognition everybody wants to succeed at something. As Pete doggedly repeats to friends, to the camera and even to his clients: "It doesn't matter what you do as long as you try to be the best at it." He desperately needs to believe it—even if nobody else does. KELLY CLARKE. 8 pm Sunday, Oct. 4.
Patrik, Age 1.5
[OPENING NIGHT] Another good reason to legalize gay adoption: Until we do, PLGFF might keep commencing with terrible comedies about same-sex couples responsibly raising kids. Last year, it was Breakfast with Scot, set in Toronto and featuring an absurd dose of hockey; this time 'round, we travel to the Vänersborg Municipality of Sweden, where happily married Göran and Sven (Gustaf Skarsgård and Torkel Petersson) think they're getting an 18-month-old infant but, thanks to a perfectly understandable typo, are instead delivered a surly, queer-bashing 15-year-old delinquent (Thomas Ljungman). The resultant confusion—and the fact that Sven is an unacknowledged alcoholic—nearly wreck the partnership, and that potential for disarray is the best thing the flick has going for it, since it momentarily threatens to interrupt the inevitable learning and growing everybody's going to experience. Honestly, the picture is so resolutely boilerplate I don't know why director Ella Lemhagen bothered to film the whole thing (in the jolly colors of a packet of Swedish Fish, no less): Wouldn't it have been less painful to put up a title card reading, "Happily Ever After," and let everyone go home early? AARON MESH. 7:30 pm Friday, Oct. 2.
PLGFF runs Friday-Thursday, Oct. 2-8. All screenings at Cinema 21. See additional listings at plgff.org.
WWeek 2015