Quintessentially Canadian queer moments at the Canadian Film Fest

21 Mar 2023 -

Aiming to make March go out with a roar, the Canadian Film Fest is presenting nine features, 25 shorts and a digital series over the last week of the month. As with any festival, the line up is overwhelmingly enticing, with considerable queer content, and I was able to preview a small sampling of what will be on offer.

Golden Delicious is a feature film chronicling the contemporary, and angsty, coming out process of Jake (Cardi Wong). Jake is an aspiring photographer in the age of selfies and Tik Tok. He is also the assistant to his high school's basketball team which would be prestigious except that his father (Ryan Mah) was the team's MVP during his high school days. Now Jake's parents run a struggling restaurant and their dreams are pinned on their children. That's a lot of metaphors already. Mix in a horny girlfriend (Parmiss Sehat), a homophobic but hot team captain who lusts after Jake's girlfriend (Jesse Hyde), a sister (Claudia Kai) trying to perfect the recipe for Gramma's noodles, and the hunky openly gay basketball whiz Aleks (Chris Carson) who moves in across the alley, and the plot(s) spin into motion. Will Jake make either team are the questions.

 
Many of the beats are predictable, but writer Gorman Lee and director Jason Karman add enough twists and humanity to give Golden Delicious momentum. The cathartic finale is foreordained predictable but surprisingly emotional, I teared up despite myself. There are missteps, the sex scenes are mawkish and poor Aleks's sensuality is paired with near sainthood (fortunately Carson's liquid eyes and sinuous physicality make it work), but the amiable tone and optimistic theming are charming. There is an intriguing undercurrent examining narcissism and social media as a life choice of projecting and not connecting. Nothing is real unless it is viewed through a lens, the unreal prism of peer judgement and a form of emotional distancing. What is real is two young men finding themselves through their sexuality and striving to be authentically happy. When Jake's SLR camera lens is broken as punishment for looking at his real desires, the metaphor is so blunt one winces, but it pays off in a gentle casual moment that resonates. Golden Delicious inspires one to put down one's phone and engage with those around us. If you can get them to put down their phone.

Sissy tries to do too much in its brief ten minutes. The ambiguous mood of the film is an accurate reflection of the ambiguity of the child at the center of the film. A class is assigned the project of creating a self-portrait and, for a child straddling genders that involves a lot of painstaking work and thought. While the child works on the portrait at the kitchen table, the single father and other son watch the hockey game. It is a quintessentially Canadian queer moment. The father does attempt to bridge the gap of understanding, to not let his grief supersede what his child is going through. Though he doesn't seem to understand, he is trying. Sissy's creators, Caleb Harwood and Simon Paluck, maintain a gentle sepia-infused atmosphere that does feel like the dawning of the end of grief and self-imposed isolation but don't shy from the horrors of the way androgyny is treated by others.

The Temple dives into flat out horror and is quite delicious. Not counting CGI, I'm not aware of any other animated adaptations of HP Lovecraft, but the unlikely fusion works. The sense of impending doom and dark dread in the confines of a claustrophobic submarine is vivid, especially paired with the sonorous narration that either quotes, or homages, Lovecraft lovingly. The animation is in a hyper-realistic style which makes the descent into madness creepier. The hint of an already unreal, but eerily familiar, men in peril tale takes on an intimate stark quality due to the quality of the design. The big reveal is wisely played elusively by writer/director Alain Fournier, allowing us to fill in the horrific details from a few glowing hints and glimpses of undulating tentacles. What we create in our heads is always scarier, and more magnificent, than pages of Lovecraft's overblown descriptive prose. Or an animator's artistry. The Temple was created in 3D but even on a screener on a standard television, it had a dynamic depth. On a big screen it would be breathtaking.

National treasure Eric Peterson (Orphans for the Czar, Uncle Vanya) riffs on his deservedly acclaimed performance in The Father in Junior's Giant. As a grandfather with dementia, Peterson interacts with a giant only he can see, eats imaginary ice cream, is comically confused and frighteningly forgetful, and misgenders his trans granddaughter (Kinley Mochrie). Writer Debra McGrath and director Paula Brancati gently explore that space between acceptance and being pushed too far. The grandfather is not being malicious or anti-trans, he is losing his mind. Peterson has great fun with the garrulous grandfather while letting occasional moments of realization and pathos surface. The pain that flits across Mochrie's stoic face is astonishingly vivid as is the empathetic response she evokes as she reins her emotional responses and pain in. Junior's Giant is a sweet if harrowing film that offers up a slice of life moment from what feels like a much larger story. The story of how we have to learn to accept and respect each other. However I admit to feeling queasy about the, hopefully unintentional, equating of trans and dementia as conditions.

My favourite of the films I saw is Call Me Daddy. A comic romp with multiple twists that would be spoilers, the short had us howling with laughter. A potential Grindr hook-up with a DILF (Rey Lopez who is a DILF) goes hilariously wrong all why remaining sex-positive and genuinely heartwarming. The promotional blurb gives away too much of the set-up, the joy is in a simple set-up evolving organically in several more complicated directions. A sex farce, especially a sexually fluid sex farce, has to maintain a delicate balance and Call Me Daddy zips along effervescently. Writer Brian Onatano and director Amanda de Souza have created, with the help of a cast that never mugs to undercut the premise, 12 minutes of high hilarity. While social media in Golden Delicious drives wedges between all who use it, Call Me Daddy's dick pics help bring a family together. Another quintessentially Canadian queer moment.