Coming out is old news. American and British gay cinema has, on the whole, largely moved past the coming out narrative. Over the last couple decades gay characters have not only become more prominent in the mainstream, but gay films have had quite the thematic evolution. Tragedies like “Brokeback Mountain” and “Boys Don’t Cry” and coming-out stories like “Get Real” and “Beautiful Thing” are still loved, but if they were to be made now the reaction might be less enthusiastic.
We no longer want to see idealized gay characters in stories that revolve around their being gay. Yet sometimes we forget that in many parts of the world, well beyond the gay-friendly movie metropolises of London, Los Angeles and New York, things are different.
Tomas Wasilewski’s crepuscular and deeply affecting “Floating Skyscrapers” comes to Tribeca from Poland, a deeply Catholic country where homophobia remains prevalent. Progress is being made, of course, and in 2011 the first gay MP was elected to parliament. Yet their cinema is only beginning to deal with homosexuality in a meaningful way, and Wasilewski’s new film is therefore a major contribution.
Of course, to view “Floating Skyscrapers” solely as a work of social politics would be a disservice. It’s artfully told and brutally honest, an almost ethereal tale of star-crossed lovers whose union is undercut by their recklessness and made impossible by a homophobic environment. Kuba (Mateusz Banasiuk) is a talented swimmer, training for national competition. He lives with his mother and his girlfriend, Sylwie (Marta Nieradkiewicz). She takes him along to an art gallery opening with some friends of hers, including Michal (Bartosz Gelner). The two young men hit it off, and the sexual tension begins to boil up under Kuba’s typically placid demeanor.
Sylwie begins to suspect something is wrong. Kuba spends more time with Michal. Kuba begins to lose interest in swimming, and Michal decides to come out to his family. There’s nothing groundbreaking here, only simple plot points that win us over with authenticity rather than ingenuity. All of the actors are performing to the best of their ability, fully entering into characters that require not only emotional veracity but also real physical presence. “Floating Skyscrapers” is about the human body, the way that Kuba stretches himself into a tryst with Michal or scrunches down in his continued dalliances with Sylwie.
Yet before the film becomes so corporeal, Wasilewski links sexuality and emptiness. The very opening shot features the stalls of the men’s locker room at Kuba’s swimming pool, accompanied by the sound of moaning. There is nothing but sex and anonymous space. Wasilewski uses this void throughout the film, eventually to express the isolated world that Michal and Kuba inhabit. The men are often framed by enormous urban monstrosities, highway and apartment complexes that throw their loneliness into relief against an unfeeling city.
The most striking metaphor for their passion is found in a couple of sequences in a parking garage, stealing moments of intimacy in Michal’s car. Wasilewski places the camera on the dash and drives through the empty concrete structure, accompanied by a throbbing pop song. This is their bliss, in the most hidden environment possible.
Its interruption is inevitable, though perhaps not quite in the way one might expect. Meanwhile, Wasilewski makes sure not to leave Sylwie in the lurch. Michal and Kuba may brush her off and treat her as irrelevant, but she is not portrayed as such. This empathy for the women in the situation, equally victimized by a society that forces men to remain in the closet, is the difference between a small-minded coming out narrative and a real work of art. Thankfully, it is an attribute shared by Tribeca’s other international gay narrative feature, “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?”
Other than that, these two films have absolutely nothing in common. Arvin Chen’s follow-up feature to 2010’s “Au Revoir Taipei” is a broad romantic comedy featuring three couples, only one of which is a same-sex pair. The central character is Weichung (Richie Ren), a 30-something optometrist with a wife and young son. He used to be gay, but once he reached a certain age the pressure to settle down was too much and he proposed to Feng (Mavis Fan), a childhood friend. Now his feelings have been re-awakened by a Cantonese flight attendant in need of a good pair of glasses.
Meanwhile, his sister Mandy is engaged to San-San, a somewhat useless romantic. They’re in love but she’s nervous about married life, so she panics and moves back to her old apartment to eat ice cream and watch soap operas. It’s pretty standard romcom fare, as is the final arrangement – the obvious pairing of Feng and her doting young boss. We know from the very beginning how things will turn out.
The subversive element here is its very blandness. The happy ending depends upon the break-up of a marriage, and a marriage that has already produced a child at that. While Chen reinforces the institution with Mandy and San-San, he chooses to undermine it as well by wiling the audience into rooting for Weichung and Feng’s divorce. The trouble this causes Feng does not evaporate under the weight of comedy. In fact, her pain at her husband’s infidelity becomes the stylistic centerpiece of the film in a campy karaoke sequence to the title song by The Shirelles. But that only furthers our desire to see her divorced, and Chen seems to suggest that it will be an outright joyful conclusion, rather than a bittersweet resolution of terrible mistakes.
This is hard to grasp from an American context, the ease with which the Taiwanese context accepts false marriages and the cheer with which it breaks them up. In the same way, the gloomy style of “Floating Skyscrapers” adds another dimension to a story we’ve already seen told by Anglophone films. Now more than ever, we should be looking to international LGBT cinema for new ways to look at genres we think we already know.
Categories: No CategoriesTags: 2013 Tribeca Film Festival, LGBT, TFF2013, Tribeca film festival, WIll You Still Love Me Tomorrow? Floating Skyscrapers