Previews - CROSSING BORDERS

18th annual Out on Film fest finds strength in international entries

The famous rallying cry goes, “We’re here! We’re queer! Get used to it!” The films of the 18th annual Out on Film festival chronicle the efforts of the world to “get used to” homosexual men and women as they move beyond ghettoization in “gay” professions and communities. Out on Film’s heroes range from strapping young German athletes to persecuted women from both sides of Middle Eastern religious extremism. Perhaps the only thing the protagonists have in common is that, by their very nature, they challenge social customs and traditions. The world struggles to adjust to them, and vice versa.

Three of Out on Film’s most prominent features share the paradox of relying on familiar film formulas and contrived plot points to introduce people who tear down conventions. The documentary Be Not Silent avoids clichés, but collides with the difficulties of exploring the secret lives of women who face public rejection from their own culture.

“Desperate Housewives’” Felicity Huffman provides an Oscar-worthy performance as a road-tripping, pre-op transsexual in the festival’s opening night feature, Transamerica (3 stars, Fri., Nov. 11, 8 p.m.). Bree Osborne (formerly Stanley) prepares for her final round of male-to-female surgery when she gets a phone call from teenage Toby (Kevin Zegers), the troubled son she never knew she had. With her therapist refusing to consent to the operation until Bree resolves the paternity issue, hormonal “father” and hustling son end up driving cross-country from New York to Los Angeles.

Writer/director Duncan Tucker resorts to grating stereotypes throughout Transamerica, from condescendingly “quaint” locations in Dixie and the Southwest to the strained jokiness of Bree’s encounter with her shrill, tacky parents. But from all the tired mawkishness, Toby and Bree emerge as a pair of credibly messy personalities, played well by Zegers and superbly by Huffman. Huffman’s a striking actress, but with her largish, deeply set facial features, she can look less than feminine with the wrong makeup. Huffman conveys Bree’s discomfort with identity in ways that go beyond gender, and her often funny self-consciousness and “lady-like” affectation make her initially seem like an inept drag queen. Huffman’s performance makes Bree’s personal growth seem like more than the dictates of a routine cinematic “journey of self-discovery.”

The International Lesbian Centerpiece film, Unveiled (3 stars, Sun., Nov. 13, 7 p.m.), presents a different kind of female-to-male impersonation. Iranian lesbian Fariba (Jasmin Tabatabai) flees persecution in Tehran after a scandalous affair with a married woman. She first attempts to illegally enter Germany and find asylum there, but when an Iranian man — conveniently — dies at the refugee halfway house, she assumes his identity to avoid deportation.

Waiting to receive a black market passport as a woman, Fariba maintains the masculine masquerade and takes a job at a lettuce-processing factory. When she begins falling in love with an unsuspecting single mother, Unveiled proves less reminiscent of Yentl than Boys Don’t Cry, sharing such common themes as gender impersonation, macho brutes and stifling, middle-of-nowhere communities. Though Unveiled only reveals Iranian oppression secondhand, Fariba’s secret identity provides a potent metaphor for the closet. The details and difficulties of refugee life provide some of the film’s strongest moments.

Another film from Germany, but one directly opposite in tone from Unveiled, Summerstorm (2 stars, Sun., Nov. 13, 9 p.m.) serves as the International Gay Centerpiece. High school rowing crewmates Tobi (Robert Stadlober) and Achim (Kostja Ullmann) are best friends, even though the former carries a torch for the latter. Tobi’s coming-out plot provides one of the few quirks in an otherwise by-the-book summer camp coming-of-age romp.

Tobi’s crew attends a summer rowing retreat that struggles to adjust to the Queerstrokes, an out-and-proud gay rowing team. Scenes with the gay rowers hint at tensions within the gay community, but as a group they prove strikingly self-confident compared to the usual hormone-addled teens struggling to define themselves. Despite an accessible soundtrack of English-language pop songs, Summerstorm suffers from drab visuals and seldom proves as clever as you’d hope.

Ilil Alexander’s award-winning Israeli documentary Keep Not Silent (3 stars, Sun., Nov. 13, 1:30 p.m.) profiles members of a secret Jerusalem support group nicknamed the “Ortho-Dykes,” but their light-hearted name belies their predicament. Orthodox Judaism views lesbianism as a sinful impulse comparable to kleptomania, and the film follows three women — including a mother of 10 children — who wrestle with their faith in the Torah and their own sexual orientation.

Keep Not Silent reveals some bizarre examples of religious hypocrisy. A rabbi gives one woman tacit permission to take a lesbian mistress while continuing to stay married to (and have sex with) her husband. Since two of the three protagonists refuse to be identified on film, Keep Not Silent resorts to long scenes with blurred faces or random street scenes in Jerusalem. For a while, the motif of “facelessness” provides a strong thematic image, but eventually the limitation proves impossible to ignore.

The 18th Out on Film festival also features such retrospectives as the now-campy 1975 lesbian romance Just the Two of Us, and a 15th anniversary screening of the drag queen/voguing documentary Paris Is Burning, introduced by Alonso Duralde, author of 101 Must-See Movies for Gay Men (and, in the interest of full disclosure, one of this writer’s oldest friends). On Wed., Nov. 16, Joseph Lovett’s acclaimed documentary Gay Sex in the ’70s offers a wistful look back at — you guessed it — gay sex in the 1970s. Out on Film’s nostalgic fare promises to make the knotty contemporary films seem that much more complex by comparison.