Out and About: Movies at Liverpool Pride

We preview the LGBT films screening as part of Liverpool Pride

Feature by Jamie Dunn | 30 Jul 2013

I Want Your Love (15 Aug) is the agent provocateur in Liverpool Pride’s programme of LGBT cinema, but reputations can be deceiving. You might go to Travis Mathews’ San Francisco-set film for the hardcore sex scenes but you’ll stay for its fine-grained depiction of a group of young gay men “trying to figure their shit out”. Look left to read our interview with Mathews.

Any Day Now (29 Aug) has fewer throbbing erections, but you still might want to take some tissues with you as this one's a weepy. It’s set in 1979, but its subject, a gay couple attempting to adopt a child, echoes loudly as similar battles happen in courts across the world today. Alan Cumming is dynamite – in that slightly showy, look-how-great-I-am-at-acting kind of way – as Rudy, a New York drag queen trying to make it on LA’s cabaret circuit, who takes an abandoned teenager with Down’s syndrome under his wing. Garret Dillahunt, as Rudy’s closeted lover and attorney, is the third corner of this misfit family unit. It can’t be a coincidence that director Travis Fine chose to set Any Day Now in the year in which Kramer vs Kramer, that great hetero-custody-battle melodrama, walked home with its bucket full of Oscars. Robert Benton’s movie did a lot of good work for fathers’ rights that year. Perhaps Any Day Now can be a similar catalyst for the rights of two-father families.

If Any Day Now is Liverpool Pride’s tear-jerker, then Les Invisibles (22 Aug) is its heart-warmer. Documentarian Sébastien Lifshitz turns his compassionate camera on the faces of 11 older gay people living in rural France and gives them space to tell their stories. Lifshitz has a knack for getting his subjects to open up – one randy bisexual goat herder is perhaps too open – and while they relay the struggles they had to face while growing up, the joy of the film is the way in which their happy, present-day lives are lovingly observed.

As seems to be the case for most LGBT festivals, stories about gay men dominate. By way of compensation, two lesbian-themed classics have been brought in as ringers. Desert Hearts (8 Aug), from 1998, is a period piece set in Reno in 1959. Helen Shaver plays a buttoned-up divorcee and Patricia Charbonneau is the younger woman she falls for. As a love story, it’s electric, but it doesn’t have much to say about homophobia in small towns. This is likely to be addressed, however, in the other revival film in the programme, The Journey (15 Aug; The Light, New Brighton), from 2004, which centres on two teen girls who cause outrage in their Indian village when their relationship becomes public knowledge.

If I were to make one complaint about the gay films screening at Pride, it would be that, in general, they’re all a bit, well, straight; their content may be queer, but the forms they take are pretty conventional. Thankfully, then, there's also Maja Borg’s bold, idiosyncratic Future My Love (31 Jul), in which the Swedish director muses over a past relationship and meets quixotic futurist Jacque Fresco to discuss the fate of humanity. Blending Super 8 film, archive footage and contemporary interviews with Fresco, Borg ingeniously juxtaposes her curdled relationship with our crumbling global economy to create a poetic and moving response to life’s biggest questions.

All screenings at FACT, Liverpool, unless otherwise stated