Those Who Love Me Can Take the Train

Ceux Qui M'aiment Prendront le Train is a complex melodrama from Patrice Chéreau that's filled with queer characters. This is one of those gay films from the 1990s that I always intended to watch but for some reason never got around to. It's most notable, I think, for heartthrob Vincent Perez's role as a trans woman, and this role does turn out to be surprising and wonderful. But Those Who Love Me is more interesting for the other characters, I think. They're complex and beautiful and fascinating, especially the ones played by Pascal Greggory and Bruno Todeschini. In any case, this is a very confident ensemble picture from Patrice Chéreau (it also stars Valeria Bruni Tedeschi, Jean-Louis Trintignant, Charles Berling, Roschdy Zem, and Dominique Blanc), and I liked it very much.

I watched this on DVD, but I think it's streaming on VUDU at least.

In Too Deep (1999)

My reasons for watching In Too Deep were purely work related. I did not actually know that LL Cool J's character rapes a man in this movie, but he sure the hell does. In a book I'm working on, I have a chapter on '90s films with male-male rape in them, so I clearly needed to watch this. It was not terrible, but it felt completely unrelated to the real world. And, after all, I don't think this belongs in the chapter. The guy LL Cool J rapes is not really a large part of the film at all. It's a very weird sequence with a pool cue. And it's followed by one in which he orally rapes a woman with a gun. But the entirety of this material is designed to show the audience that LL Cool J really must be stopped. He's more than a violent man, he's really unhinged. (I am not sure, incidentally, that these events in the film accomplish the filmmakers' goals, but oh well. It's not exactly a great movie.)

Drylongso (1998)

Drylongso shares an aesthetic with other films of the 1990s, especially those of Gregg Araki and the New Queer Cinema. This story is about a young artist working in Oakland who is photographing black men because they're an endangered species, while a serial killer chases young black folks, alternating his victims between girls and boys. This is a great little movie about friendship, mourning, art-making, and community. I really liked it.

Show Me Love (1998)

Come through, Swedish lesbian coming-of-age romantic comedy! This is the gay high school movie I needed in gay high school! And it came out when I was just out of high school. This one even has a happy ending. Highly recommended.

In the U.S. Fucking Åmål was called Show Me Love when it was released in 1999. The original title is not about fucking anyone but is an expletive referring to the terrible town in which the young people in this film live. They hate it there and they're constantly saying "fucking Åmål". When my friends and I first heard it in the film we laughed our heads off. I chose this film as my selection one week for the unseen movie club just based on the fact that I knew it was a gay film I hadn't seen. It was a great choice. It's a really delightful movie.

You can find a copy of it here at the Cave of Forgotten Films website.

Two from Alain Resnais

I recently watched two very different films by Alain Resnais (who made the very, very serious films La Guerre Est Fine, Hiroshima Mon Amour, and Last Year at Marienbad in the late 1950s and early '60s). The 1980 film and the 1998 film were downright quirky, and they've cemented for me just how experimental and interesting a filmmaker Resnais actually is.

Last week the unseen movie club chose Same Old Song (On Connait la Chanson) as our film. It is odd and charming and actually sort of wonderful. This movie involves a bunch of characters who lipsync to older pop songs as a part of their dialogue, which (as it happens) is mostly about depression and love and loss. The characters look for love and fight with their spouses and then burst into song, but it isn't their voices we hear at all but those of Josephine Baker and Charles Aznavour and other older singers. It's pretty strange and totally fun.

On Connait la Chanson was released in 1998 in France (1999 in the U.S.), two years after Woody Allen made Everyone Says I Love You, in which the characters actually sing the older torch songs – and in Paris, no less. On Connait la Chanson is not a romanticized version of love, though, and doesn't have the Woody Allen fantasy veneer over it. Resnais's film is a film about depression, and it's interesting and weird.

And then a couple days ago I saw that Mon Oncle d'Amérique was on the Criterion Channel, so I decided to watch that film too. This film stars Nicole Garcia, Gerard Depardieu, and Roger-Pierre, and it is a very strange movie. It follows these three characters and then also a scientist who is telling us about human behavior and social psychology. It's an odd choice. There are a lot of mice who learn particular behaviors... and then there are humans in mouse costumes re-enacting their behaviors. It's super interesting and very strange.

Mon Oncle d'Amérique is, however, marred by an unfortunate casting situation: I suppose it is awful to say, but I found Roger-Pierre's character unlikable mostly because I didn't believe him to be attractive enough to inspire the absolute drama he inspires in this movie as Nicole Garcia and Nelly Borgeaud fight over him.

Overall, though, I found this movie troubling. I don't think I emotionally identified with any of the characters, but the movie is so strange that it really did get under my skin.