Gus Van Sant comes full circle as a Queer Auteur. Don't miss his stunning debut Tuesday night!
This year the LLGFF screens two films from opposite ends of Gus Van Sant’s expanding output. There are many fortuitous links between the works: both first feature Mala Noche and the recently released Paranoid Park share a formal resourcefulness rarely seen in the intervening years, with the latter seeing Van Sant return to his freewheeling roots. In Mala Noche we can see the beginnings of the psychological probings of the late adolescent male that would become an obsession in later work. Also striking, however, are the differences. Noche is very explicitly a gay-themed film, whilst Park – like the majority of the filmmaker’s work – forgoes gay content altogether. Or does it?
As a debut Mala Noche marked Van Sant out as an independently minded queer auteur – the vanguard of the New Queer Cinema movement – dealing with homosexual material in a frank and unapologetic manner. However in his succeeding works, the overt gay content has more often than not been sidelined in favour of more ‘mainstream’ relationships. Critics may look at this choice as one of cowardice or career opportunism, yet remarkably Van Sant has managed to retain his status as a queer filmmaker.
The reasons for this illustrate the vast intelligence the director has brought to his admirably varied career. A look back over his filmography reveals numerous instances of nudge-nudge subtextual subversions. Witness his limp protagonists in Drugstore Cowboy and Last Days, more interested in their next fix than accommodating their frustrated girlfriends; or his strange interpretation of cinemas most notorious ‘confused young man’ Norman Bates, in the uncanny 1998 remake of Psycho.
The director’s two most mainstream works, Good Will Hunting and Finding Forrester, both focused in on close male friendship, with Van Sant unashamedly owning up to certain ‘subliminal overtones’ in the latter, concerning the developing relationship between the reclusive elderly writer and the young black basketball player (much to Sean Connery’s annoyance, it is believed.) In Elephant the director chose to show the male killers sharing an awkward kiss before going on their rampage; a provocative acknowledgement of the rumour and innuendo that may have helped sparked the Colombine massacre.
Recently in Sight and Sound, Amy Taubin suggested that the subtext of Paranoid Park was one of ‘gay initiation’ with the suburban kids being led over to the ‘dark side’ of criminality, a point taken up by Manohla Dargis in her rave review over at the New York Times. And again here, Alex, the principle character, has confused and apathetic attitudes towards consummating the relationship with his girlfriend.
In the pipeline now is Milk, the long mooted biopic of Harvey Milk, the openly gay San Francisco politician and activist, assassinated back in 1978. This promises to be Van Sant’s return to overt gay subject matter after a beak of over 15 years. While we wait, be sure to catch Mala Noche and discover how it all began.
- RJ Dennis