The Best Picks From Melbourne Queer Film Festival

The Chambermaid Lynn has been called “Germany’s answer to Fifty Shades Of Grey”, but the comparison barely gets you in the ballpark. Ingo Haeb’s picture is a dark, formalist character study of its titular loner (a great Vicky Krieps), a maid who spies on hotel guests, rifling through their stuff. When her path crosses that of Lena Lauzemis’ freelance dominatrix, they soon enter into an S&M relationship with obsessive, destructive tendencies. It’s a highlight of the 25th Melbourne Queer Film Festival.

Another standout film, Lyle, isn’t your piece of standard queer fest programming. 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 deriving from the loneliness, isolation and sleep deprivation of new motherhood. The fact that the mother in question, Gaby Hoffmann (fresh from her 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.

Girls fans can also get their fill with The Foxy Merkins, a ridiculous, ultra-lo-fi lesbian hustler comedy whose titular lines are uttered by Alex Karpovsky, and Appropriate Behaviour, the charming, close-to-home debut from writer/director/starlet Desirée Akhavan, crowned ‘the next Lena Dunham’ on the film’s Sundance premiere.

Lilting may be shot like a BBC soap, but it has a dark heart, Ben Whishaw delivering a bitter lead turn as a once-secret boyfriend communing with both his dead lover’s ghost and his cantankerous Chinese quasi-mother-in-law. Violette, Martin Provost’s companion piece to his great Séraphine, mounts a doom-etched tone poem to the life and times of self-destructive author Violette Leduc (with Emmanuelle Devos in the titular role and Sandrine Kiberlain as Simone de Beauvoir).

Xenia shows the wondrous influence of the Greek weird wave, even its generic Albanian immigrant drama happily descending into a psychedelic reverie featuring an animated toy rabbit, and a symbolist drama full of the wreckage of Greek society. The Circle attempts to mix talking heads documentary with dramatised tales from the post-WWII Swiss gay underground.

The documentaries at MQFF feature portraits of everyone from Star Trek hero turned marriage equality activist George Takei, To Be Takei, to Peter De Rome: Grandfather Of Gay Porn, a portrait of the now geriatric, gentlemanly filmmaker and his cock-filled career. And then there’s Alex & Ali, in which a pair of lovers – one Iranian, one American – are brought together in Istanbul after 35 years apart, only for their romantic reunion to turn tragic.