Frameline 39 Offers Its Finales

Frameline, the San Francisco International LGBTQ Film Festival, is 39, and like the jokes of comedian Jack Benny, the festival's offerings, including its drag-friendly trailer, become more endearing with each viewing. The final four days, June 25-28 at the Castro, Roxie and Victoria Theatres in San Francisco, and the Elmwood and Piedmont in the East Bay, continue this year's themes of female and transgender empowerment, as well as the festival's traditionally strong gay male features, documentaries and shorts.

Note: The East Bay venues will offer their swan-song features tonight (Thurs., 6/25), with the Elmwood playing the transgender sports doc Game Face and the Canadian transgender pregnancy comedy Two 4 One, and the Piedmont reprising the Thai gender doc Visible Silence and French bad-boy director Francois Ozon's The New Girlfriend, a comedy about today's superabundance of LGBTQ parenting choices.

Margarita, with a Straw Indian director Shonali Bose tells the story of her cousin Malini, who struggles to overcome barriers to career goals presented by her cerebral palsy and the limitations to female careers imposed by sexism on the subcontinent. (Piedmont, 6/23; Roxie, 6/27)

Hidden Away In this absorbing, truly offbeat homo-buddy adventure, two very attractive teen boys, Rafa and Ibra, at first find a flirtatious bond through food fights, water polo and playful wrestling. Then (bam!) they're in love, an attachment that shocks friends and family. Spanish director Mikel Rueda makes the most of the sturdy talents of his adolescent leads. German Alcarazu was 15 when he played the increasingly lovesick Rafa, and Adil Koukouh gives a subtler turn as the enigmatic Moroccan lad who fears expulsion from Spain because of his illegal migrant status.

Filmmaker Rueda pushes the envelope artistically. The story arc is fractured, with key scenes from the first act repeated for emotional effect towards the story's finale. What could be irritating or confusing in a longer narrative, here is tolerable, even endearing. While the boys don't truly "get it on," their various forms of "foreplay" get the job done, so that we greedily anticipate more than we get, yet are not disappointed. Rafa and Ibra's lips hover near the point of frisson a couple of times, allowing our imaginations to fill in the blanks. The filmmakers also make the most of what will be, for many viewers, unfamiliar locales of Northern Spain in and around the ancient Basque city of Bilbao. (Victoria, 6/26)

54: The Director's Cut Like the young, bare-chested, blond-boy Adonis of this disco-fueled drama from one-time up-and-coming helmer Mark Christopher, I worked as an all-around schlepper at a late-70s/early-80s dance club where beautiful kids danced, drank and drugged til they dropped, sometimes enduring 96-hour non-stop marathons of party-down debauchery: all this before the onslaught of AIDS.

While it's not a great film, "54: The Director's Cut" allows us to view Christopher's original take on Gotham City's most glittering and notorious 70s dance palace. The director's cut contains 26 minutes of restored footage that reinforce the film's biggest claim to our attention, namely the two standout performances at the drama's core: Mike Meyers (false nose and all) as the famous club's slippery-smooth owner, and a breathtakingly young Ryan Philippe, who spends half the film naked to the waist, as the young "outer-borough kid" who comes to symbolize the sweaty dreams and drug-fueled ambitions of the era. (Castro, 6/26)

Bare For those for whom the rugged Nevada desert is just a slice of moonscape on the road to Vegas, director Natalia Leite may open some eyes, allowing this most inhospitable piece of the American West to become a character in a poignant coming-of-age tale. Sarah (Diane Agron from Fox-TV's hit nighttime soap Glee) is a lonely teen, untethered from family, friends and realizable dreams. Her main connection to her missing dad is his now-closed vintage clothes store. Sarah's adult life gets a sudden jumpstart after she cute-meets an experienced stranger camping out in dad's ruined business. The slightly older and vastly worldlier Pepper (Boardwalk Empire's Paz de la Huerta) not only baptizes Sarah into queer romance, but also leads her into the seductively dangerous environs of big-city casinos. (Castro, closing night, 6/28)

The Surface Director Michael J. Saul provides an offbeat coming-of-age tale involving a young orphan whose impulsive purchase of an 8mm film camera becomes a portal into a possible future family of his own. Saul achieves a marvelous visual synthesis between the tentative explorations of his achingly beautiful and lithe hero Evan (the soft-spoken and seductive 20something newcomer Harry Hains) and the film's leisurely framing of Evan's tale set in the decadent sunbathed SoCal landscape. Early on, Evan describes being without a family while he languidly slips through the waters of a backyard pool.

"Most people know where they come from. They have ancestors, they have family in another town or another country, or down the street. They have family reunions, swap treasured family recipes, draw complicated genealogical histories, but not me. My family could be living next door to me, and I'd never know it. We might as well be strangers in the street."

It doesn't hurt that the pool sequence segues seamlessly into some hot sex with Evan's equally humpy if slightly bitchy, bad-tempered boyfriend. This film offers a profound take on the role family plays throughout our lives, even if we are not in touch with our biological clan. (Castro, 6/27)

Eisenstein in Guanajuato Remember when the British avant-garde film artiste Peter Greenaway wowed the Bay Area intelligentsia with Castro Theatre screenings of films with artfully ambiguous titles ("The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover," "The Draughtsman's Contract")? Well, he's back! This time, Greenaway crafts a witty and quite watchable political comedy, at least loosely based on a true-life incident. It's 1931, and the acclaimed Russian silent-film master Sergei Eisenstein ("Ten Days that Shook the World," "Battleship Potemkin") has retreated south of the border after failing to get a film off the ground for his Hollywood backers, including the muckraking novelist Upton Sinclair, whose novel Oil became the basis for Paul Thomas Anderson's sublime 2007 satire "There Will Be Blood."

Greenaway makes the most of his stars' (Finland's Elmer Back and Mexico's Luis Alberti) willingness to play full-frontal nude scenes to the camera. Greenaway gives us his own playful take on the long exile of the queer Russian cinema genius, here hoisted on his own creative petard, having shot 200 miles of film footage he would never be permitted to edit. Greenaway makes good use of actual Eisenstein footage as a kind of subliminal decoration for his lovely male-on-male romantic idyll. (Castro, 6/25)

Love Island Director Jasmila Zbanic's tempestuous romantic-triangle feature is set against the backdrop of an Adriatic sea resort. (Castro, 6/25)

Welcome to This House, a film about Elizabeth Bishop Famed director Barbara Hammer gives us a multifaceted view of this world-famous poet, whose life was also the subject of Reaching for the Moon (Frameline 37). (Roxie, 6/25)

Packed in a Trunk: The Lost Art of Edith Lake Wilkinson Michelle Boyaner explores the life of the 1920s-era Post-Impressionist lesbian painter. Wilkinson, who was committed to an insane asylum at the height of her artistic powers, provides a poignant reminder of how far non-conformist women have come in the last century. (Victoria, 6/27)

Finding Phong Directors Tran Phoung Thao & Swann Dubus explore the year of transition for a 20somethingVietnamese transwoman. The film is an intimate video diary, with Phong at times expressing her extreme discomfort and emotional distress during this painful transition year, along with the views of Phong's elderly and tradition-bound parents. (Roxie, 6/27)

Mind/Game: The Unquiet Journey of Chamique Holdsclaw Rick Goldsmith helms this true-life tale of championship female basketball interrupted by bouts of bipolar depression. (Roxie, 6/26)

Fun in Girls Shorts & Fun in Boys Shorts For those who don't love a parade, the festival offers a reprise of its signature female and male short-film showcases. These programs frequently offer guest cameos from individual directors. (Girl Shorts, Castro, 6/28, 11 a.m.; Boys Shorts, Castro, 6/28, 1:30 p.m.)

Plus, for those who missed this visual delight at its first screening:

In the Grayscale Chilean director Claudio Marcone draws us into the early mid-life crisis of a Santiago architect when he leaves his hetero marriage for a fling with a male tour guide. (Castro, 6/28)

Info: Frameline.org

Non-festival Attraction

Rebels of the Neon God (opening June 26 at Landmark Theaters) Taiwanese auteur Tsai Ming-liang's 1992 debut feature includes a handful of trademark elements: A deceptively spare style often branded minimalist; actor Lee Kang-sheng as the director's alter ego, Hsiao-kang; and copious amounts of water. This early work comes with the director's patented bows to his cinema god, French New Wave pioneer Francois Truffaut. "Neon God" is a slyly funny minor classic, a great introduction to modern Chinese film comedy.