Entertainment

‘Caravaggio’ and Other Pleasures and Provocations for Pride Month

June is Pride Month — commemorating the gay rights movement that had its roots in the Stonewall uprising of June 1969. The streaming platforms FilmStruck and Fandor are offering special Pride Month programming. (Some titles in their programs are also available on the free-with-a-library-card streaming site, Kanopy, which, like Fandor, already maintains a commendable LGBT section year-round.)

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By
GLENN KENNY
, New York Times

June is Pride Month — commemorating the gay rights movement that had its roots in the Stonewall uprising of June 1969. The streaming platforms FilmStruck and Fandor are offering special Pride Month programming. (Some titles in their programs are also available on the free-with-a-library-card streaming site, Kanopy, which, like Fandor, already maintains a commendable LGBT section year-round.)

Fandor’s “Faces of Pride: 30 Films in 30 Days,” highlights an LGBT-themed film every day. On June 13 it’s showing a pair of documentaries, “Before Stonewall,” a 1984 film directed by Greta Schiller and Robert Rosenberg, and “After Stonewall” (1999), directed by John Scagliotti.

The “Pride” series kicked off with the 1996 film “The Watermelon Woman,” written, directed by and starring Cheryl Dunye. (It’s also available on Kanopy.) “Watermelon Woman” is arguably a landmark of intersectionality, treating themes of race, sexuality and representation within the narrative brackets of a romantic drama and a personal-growth story.

Dunye plays Cheryl, an aspiring filmmaker. She works at a video store with her best friend, Tamara, helping her shoot wedding videos while brewing another project: a cinematic study of race films and African-American actresses in old Hollywood. Cheryl becomes preoccupied with an actress playing a “beautiful black mammy” billed only as the Watermelon Woman.

Cheryl tracks the performer’s roots to Philadelphia, where she interviews several people, including her own mother, on the subject; she also solicits thoughts from the real-life cultural critic Camille Paglia, who, in her segment, contrasts black female consciousness with “white middle-class feminism,” which Paglia equates with “anorexia and bulimia.”

During her research Cheryl, who is black, gets romantically involved with a white customer at the video store, Diana (Guinevere Turner), and their exchanges, not to mention the disapproval of Cheryl’s friends, make for some challenging dialogue about identity politics.

“The Watermelon Woman” isn’t a long movie but it packs a lot of stimulating material into its nearly 90 minutes. Dunye’s loose, confident approach to characterizations makes the political issues play in a narratively organic way rather than as a series of contrived polemics.

This was Dunye’s first feature, and some of the filmmaking is not quite as assured as it might have been: The staging of a nightclub scene early in the film is notably stiff. But in its depiction of modern black lesbian life, its fictional secret history of an alternative black film culture and more, it’s an entertainment that’s also a challenge, one that subsequent American cinema, more than 20 years on, has yet to meet.

Fandor’s film highlight for June 17 is British filmmaker Derek Jarman’s “Caravaggio,” from 1986. His visually beautiful, sly and idiosyncratic biographical portrait of the great 17th-century Italian artist is an enduring delight, and particularly interesting relative to contemporary discourse concerning artists behaving badly.

Caravaggio is played as an adult by Nigel Terry, and as a teenager by Dexter Fletcher. This is a portrait of the artist as a street hustler. Caravaggio’s singular way of seeing, and of placing what he saw onto canvas, is somehow inextricable from his dissolution. Terry’s Caravaggio brawls, broods, has affairs with models and assistants of both sexes (most memorably those played by Tilda Swinton and Sean Bean), and even when working on profitable commissions, conducts himself as an outcast or an outlaw.

Jarman’s camera does not judge (even when the painter goes so far as to use the corpse of a former lover to model one of his tableaus, or when he finally becomes a killer himself). But he uses several strategies, including his purposeful anachronisms (we see Michael Gough’s Cardinal Del Monte using a pocket calculator in one droll scene), to draw a through line from Caravaggio to Jarman’s own time and situation. The movie depicts the painter celebrated and patronized by the straight world, but only to a certain extent.

“Caravaggio” is also one of the nine features by Jarman (he died in 1994) bundled in FilmStruck’s June 15 “Director of the Week” package. The other films are all remarkable, each one daring in a different way.

“Sebastiane” (1976), a homoerotic story of the martyrdom of St. Sebastian, has dialogue entirely in Latin. “Jubilee,” from 1978, rejects the punk movement’s more macho elements and offers a queer vision of its fast-and-loud ethos. “The Tempest” (1979) “Edward II” (1991) and “Wittgenstein” (1993) perform queer readings and remixes of Shakespeare, Marlowe and 20th-century philosophy. “The Last of England” (1987) and “War Requiem” (1989) are protest films in very different keys, the first a raw, loose cry against Thatcherism, the second a filmed adaptation of Benjamin Britten’s musical work of the same name. Finally, there’s “Blue,” from 1993, Jarman’s reckoning with his encroaching blindness at the end of his life. The program is rounded out with a documentary on the man and his work, simply titled “Derek.”

The “Classics of Lesbian Cinema” program on FilmStruck available on June 22 and introduced by actress Lea DeLaria (“Orange Is the New Black”), will include “The Watermelon Woman” and the groundbreaking 1985 film “Desert Hearts,” directed by Donna Deitch and starring Helen Shaver and Patricia Charbonneau. Also featured are “Aimee & Jaguar,” “Paris Was a Woman,” and John Sayles’ “Lianna.” Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s fevered, claustrophobic 1972 drama with an all-female cast, “The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant,” is both an authentically queer film and a gay male projection concerning lesbian love.

And the final film of the package, “Blue Is the Warmest Color” (2013), directed by Abdellatif Kechiche and starring Léa Seydoux and Adele Exarchopoulos, is the most recent and most controversial of the batch. The explicit (and simulated) sex scenes enacted by its youthful leads were, in the eyes of many viewers, a little too defined by the director’s inescapably male gaze. Prudently, I shall let you be the judge of that.

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