Reports from the 2013 Hot Docs Film Festival
Paolo here. Because I tend to overreact to thing I proclaimed that last year's Hot Docs film festival here in Toronto was 'overtly sexual'! As it turns out, last year's crop had more diverse topics: death, culture, loss, legacy. And the same can be said about the documentaries this year but we won't abandon the docs about sex. Here's one now, James Franco's Interior. Leather Bar.
[NSFW Franco provocations after the jump]
One of the scenes in The Boys in the Band showed campy, pastel and short-short wearing, girly dancing characters. Seeing them, I determined that these people were a dated representation of queerness and therefore myself as a gay man. Strike one against the movie's director, William Friedkin. It didn't help that one of his other movies about gay men, Cruising, might have started the second (third?) wave of the "Faggots in Crime!" subgenre. The message was clear - Friedkin was bad.
James Franco shoots a sex scene in "Interiors. Leather Bar"
So it's stupid and/or brave for actor/multitasker/art-troll James Franco to follow Friedkin's foosteps with his new documentary, Interior. Leather Bar. He aims to recreate the 40 minutes that Friedkin had to cut from Cruising to avoid an X rating. This project might just be the ultimate documentary. One that shows the ultimate recesses of human experience and taboo - gay sex. Franco doesn't use Breillat-like prosthetics; all the dicks you see in this movie are real.
He enlists the help of Travis Mathews, who directed the pornographic indie drama I Want Your Love (interviewed right here). He also casts his actor friend Val Lauren, who bears a resemblace to both Al Pacino and one of Cruising's serial killer's victms. The doc's main tension is supposed to arrive by testing Val's (straight) limits within acting out the explicit (gay) subject matter.
Travis Matthews of "I Want Your Love" fame co-directs
Just like Franco's earlier forays into filmmaking, he's on both sides of the camera, a troublesome presence even when he's supposedly on the sidelines. Mathews and Lauren discuss his intentions in the work while he's just squinting his eyes and scratching his hair like the caricature that he's well aware of. He plays devil's advocate here, pushing for gay sex's mainstream recognition. He also puts Lauren and a mix of extras in a dark rat maze, asking them to anticipate the online reaction for or against this project, discuss the affect on the larger gay community, and find each other's sexual boundaries.
With Franco's avant-garde ambitions, we're meant to expect that this isn't a straightforward documentary. Interior. Leather Bar. has a script from which Lauren reads and reacts. Conversations are interrupted, rerecorded and directed. Val Lauren appears to be more of James' ally than his pawn and plays up his reluctance. Nevertheless, we the audence are resigned to the possibility that his silence during the footage reenactments do show the straight male gaze's ambivalence and fluidity. And his expressions during his encounters with the other extras might have just embodied deeper undercover than Pacino's character ever got into.
Franco's intentions might not be clear or present, but what I took from the doc is that this is what censorship does. It violently separates people into two schools of thinking. One is to accept that regulating art should be so deeply entrenched into our consciousness that it feels effortless, decent and traditional. The other, which is Franco's perspective, is to restart a revolution or recover an (imaginary?) utopic past where people accept that art should not be bound by rules. It frustrates Franco and Lauren and us because we have lost what was really inside that leather bar.