Out at the Movies
Equinox Knocks
Fri., Aug. 27, 1999
Filmed last summer primarily in Weimar, Texas, with a largely Austin-based cast and crew, Equinox Knocks is a "screwball comedy with a very smart edge," according to its director and co-screenwriter, Fran Rzeznick. That description is fairly apt. The movie comments with comic equanimity upon gender role-playing, teenage social protocols, and the importance of a winning football team in this state.
Referring to the overnight change in the movie's central character, from the tomboyish Allie to the girlish Caleb, Rzeznick explains that the filmmakers "always wanted to make a female Big." She also notes that the movie's take on pigskin fever played a significant role in the decision to film here. "It's a Texas story," observes Rzeznick. "It was natural to shoot it in Texas."
The rather lighthearted Equinox Knocks radically departs from Rzeznick's last film, the provocative documentary, One Nation Under God. The 1994 film, which played the international film festival circuit (including aGLIFF) and aired on the prestigious PBS series, P.O.V., generated both acclaim and controversy. The documentary examined the religious right's conversion therapies that purport to change gay men and lesbians into heterosexuals. The film's highlight is an interview with Gary and Michael, who fell in love while members of Exodus International, a ministry of persons "cured" of their homosexuality, and who subsequently denounced the organization.
"Initially, the premise was fictional," Rzeznick says in regard to One Nation Under God. But she says that the story of Gary and Michael was so outrageous and unbelievable that "to fictionalize it would really have diminished its importance."
Currently living in Los Angeles, the Bronx-born Rzeznick attended graduate film school in the late 1980s at New York University. There, she met Zinca Benton, with whom she has had both a personal and business partnership for the last 12 years. Benton, a Houston native, co-directed One Nation Under God. She also co-wrote the script for Equinox Knocks with Rzeznick, as well as serving as one of the film's producers.
As for her experience in filming Equinox Knocks, Rzeznick has nothing but praise for the local acting talent onscreen and gratitude for the small-town kindness she encountered during the three-and-a-half week shoot. "We got the total and complete support from Weimar," Rzeznick says. The little town with a population of approximately 2,000, located roughly between Houston and San Antonio, welcomed the production with open arms. The townspeople baked cookies for the crew, assisted in making the set decorations, and acted as extras in the movie. In fact, players on the local high school football team appear as -- fittingly enough -- members of the film's turnaround team, the Wildcats.
How's that for Lone Star hospitality? As Rzeznick observes, "That says a lot for filming in Texas." --Steve Davis
Dobie: Mon 9/6, 7:30pm
Bedrooms & Hallways
I was certain that my admiration for Bedrooms & Hallways, the new film by director Rose Troche (Go Fish), would get in the way of an interview I was to conduct with her about it. I envisioned Chris Farley-sized dimensions of reportial ineptitude and foolish gushing on my part:
Me: "Remember that part where one of the gay guys, Darren, pretends he's in a men's group and starts talking about wolf pelts and antler horns and when he says that he kind of, like, almost gives a big secret away?"
Troche: (pause) "Yeah?"
Me: "That was funny, huh?"
But Bedrooms & Hallways seems so strikingly different from Go Fish that it was obvious I should ask Troche a question I'm sure she's fielded quite often from reporters who have seen the film: How do you explain the stark aesthetic difference between the two? Bedrooms & Hallways is vibrant and lighthearted (and British) where Go Fish was at points dour and polemic (and thoroughly New York). The film follows not just one but several mismatched couples; the sexual politics are more complex. "I think things are taken at face value and it's seen as very opposite," Troche said about the perceived thematic differences between the two films. "In fact, when I was making the film, I thought to myself, 'Gosh, it's a lot like -- is this too much like? -- Go Fish.' Obviously the sexual politics are a little bit different. And that, for me, would be the departure. Not so much that it's about men but, you know, there are some obvious differences."
Like Leo (Kevin McKidd). And Brendan (James Purefoy). And Keith (Simon Callow), the ever-so-earnest leader of the New Men's Group, whose five members are searching for ways to cope, one suspects, with their masculinity. Leo is reluctantly brought to a meeting of the New Men's Group by a friend with whom he works. At his first meeting he's asked to give a "history of yourself as a man." "How do you feel about your maleness?" Keith asks. At that point, Leo is rather revved up about his maleness because of Brendan's presence in the group. Recently estranged from his girlfriend of seven years, Brendan is a handsome and mysterious Irishman who seems to want, and then not want, something more than friendship to occur with Leo. That "something" does happen (on a camping trip in the woods, no less!), and it's just the spark of consternation and surprise that causes most every relationship in near proximity of Leo and Brendan's to erupt into fire.
"At the very core of Go Fish, there's a rather kind of lighthearted romantic story and I feel like ... there's a more complicated story in Bedrooms & Hallways," Troche says. That would only be fitting: Troche worked with screenwriter Robert Farra for a year and a half on 12 versions of the script, and that process is amply reflected in the film's thorough -- and thoroughly hilarious -- crisscross of romantic attachments. --Clay Smith
Dobie: Sun 8/29, 9:45pm
Dobie: Sun 9/5, 5pm
Blind Faith
Unlike many of the festival offerings, Blind Faith is less about being homosexual than it is about the devastating effects of a living in a society unwilling to accept what is different. Set in 1957, the film explores a time in America after the McCarthy hearings when, as director Ernest Dickerson puts it, "anything that was out of the mainstream was evil, the American ideal was Life magazine." And Dickerson, along with screenwriter Frank Military, uses this climate to examine what lengths people will go to fit in -- racially, sexually, economically -- to a straight, white world. Blind Faith zeroes in on the life of a middle-class black family, whose tranquil existence unravels when their eldest son, 18-year-old Charlie (Garland Whitt), confesses to the murder of a white boy. From here, the film moves inside the courtroom, where Charlie's lawyer uncle John (Courtney B. Vance) struggles valiantly against time to save his nephew's life. Within this classic dramatic structure, however, swarm secrets and lies that keep the story at an intriguing clip. It was, in fact, this tightly constructed script that attracted Dickerson -- best known as a director for 1992's Juice, an edgy tale of street life that starred Tupac Shakur -- to this sophisticated period piece. "Most scripts you read, you know where it's going after 10 pages." But Blind Faith keeps us guessing as it rolls along, beautifully shot by cinematographer Rodney Charters. Along with Dickerson, who famously lensed Spike Lee's best films, Malcolm X and Do the Right Thing, Charters constructs shots with a slick finish, creating compositions that are both brimming with light -- through the blinds, the closed drapes, spilling across the gray concrete of a cell block -- and shrouded in shadow. But Blind Faith is a character-driven story. In a memorable and moving performance by Vance, the protagonist John becomes, in Dickerson's words, "a fighter without ever wanting to be one." And in that reluctant battle, he finds a certain kind of inner peace in an unsympathetic world. Less so for the elder Charles (Charles Dutton), a police officer who sacrifices all in order to become the first black sergeant on the NYPD. He is a man "who worked his life trying to attain the American ideal." He is so busy, as the director explains, "trying to create a black version of a white world, chasing the white dreams," that this morally upright man ends up selling his soul. What he reaps is a legacy of terrible sadness, a tragedy reminiscent of Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller's All My Sons. Although the film is sympathetic to his plight, Dickerson finds heroes in the men unafraid to face opposition, to stand up against whatever a small-minded society might dole out -- prejudice, humiliation, poverty, or even violence. And though set in the Fifties, Dickerson knows the stifling air of bigotry and hatred still thrives. "Even today, there are still a lot of people who need to feel comforted and won't acknowledge the validity of another belief system," Dickerson explains. Whether the sufferings are related to race, class, sex, or gender -- Dickerson champions the men and women who step up against formidable powers and manage to "be who they are in a world that won't let them be." --Sarah Hepola
Dobie: Wed 9/8, 9:15pm
aGLIFF takes place August 26-September 9. Advance tickets can be purchased by calling 302-9889 or at the aGLIFF Box Office in Dobie Mall (2025 Guadalupe, 2nd level east entrance). Tickets for same-day shows will be available at the venues during their business hours. Regular tickets are $7/$5 for matinees, with discounts for aGLIFF members. Special rates apply for the Evening With John Waters and the opening night film and party. For more info call the Festival Info Line at 302-9889, or see http://www.agliff.org.
