What To See At Mardi Gras Film Festival

The standout film of the 22nd Mardi Gras Film Festival is, essentially, nothing resembling queer cinema. Lyle, Stewart Thorndike’s directorial debut, is pure Rosemary’s Baby homage, a spare, simple, 60-minute paranoia thriller in which young parents move into an eerie Brooklyn brownstone, its mounting madness derived from the loneliness, isolation, and sleep deprivation of new motherhood. The fact that the mother in question, Gaby Hoffmann (fresh off her heroic Crystal Fairy/Girls/Transparent run), is makin’ babies with The Slope’s Ingrid Jungermann is presented matter-of-factly, and never informs the psychological horror; Lyle, in its own way, is a quiet cinematic push towards the new normal.

For those seeking something more queer, there’s flicks like Do I Sound Gay?, a happily farcical, smirking documentary about the limits and stigmas of vocal affectation; and I Am Happiness On Earth, an “erotic odyssey” from Mexico that parades plentiful lithe flesh in its pretentious portrait of dancers, directors, and dames in ongoing congress. If all its screen sex sounds too simulated, try Peter De Rome: Grandfather Of Gay Porn, a sentimental portrait of the now geriatric, gentlemanly filmmaker and his cock-filled career. Couple that with a documentary chronicle of a far different photographer, Nan Goldin: I Remember Your Face.

MGFF’s documentaries deliver the fest’s most unvarnished profundity; especially Alex & Ali, in which a pair of lovers – one Iranian, one American – are brought together in Istanbul after 35 years apart, only for the cruelties of time, terror, and oppression to turn their romantic reunion tragic. Then there’s American Vagabond, which goes from a chronicle of homeless queer kids living in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park to being a tale of one subject’s struggles with family, society, and legality.

The fiction features cast a wider net; there’s some tired-feeling, bourgie American dramas – Last Weekend, one of those dreaded movies where a family gathers together over a long weekend and secrets come spilling out; Match, one of those also-dreaded one-room stage-plays in which an ‘interview’ (of Patrick Stewart! Bisexual ballet teacher and chewer of any and all scenery!) gets all Death And The Maiden-y – but there’s better stuff, too. Like Violette, Martin Provost’s companion piece to Séraphine, a doom-etched tone-poem to the life and times of self-loathing, self-destructive author Violette Leduc that landed in John Waters’ Art Forum list of his favourite 2014 films. Or Lilting, which is shot like a BBC soap but features a bitter turn from Ben ‘Pingu’ Whishaw as a secret boyfriend communing with both the ghost of his dead lover and his cantankerous Chinese quasi-mother-in-law. Or A Girl At My Door, an absurd Korean tragicomedy about small town oppression that’s both eerily minimalist and hysterically ridiculous.