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PARTISAN REVIEW
dwindling ranks of Godardian avant-garde, they are not uncompromis–
ing formalists obsessed with film as film, although they too are probing
the conditions of representation. They tackle serious subjects within
accessible narratives; they give us permission to suspend disbelief, to
identify with the characters . The closest parallel to the way they work
can be found in today's independent cinema and the studio movies that
spring from it. The triumph of Soderbergh's
sex, lies, and videotape
at
both Cannes and the Sundance Festival in 1989 signaled the beginning
of the end for the juvenile moviemaking of the 1980s. As the outlets for
film expanded in multiplexes, on video, and on cable channels, as well–
trained kids with outsized ambitions poured out of film schools and
new sources of funding proliferated beyond the studio system, film–
makers rediscovered a neglected audience for knotty, intelligent drama.
(Critic Emanuel Levy has just done an indispensable survey of this scene
in
The Cinema of Outsiders.)
There would always be plenty of adoles–
cent male fantasy, Tarantino-style, in indie cinema, plenty of rough–
hewn improvisation that makes us long for Hollywood production
values. But today's movies would be unimaginable without the offbeat
modes of personal storytelling reinvented by these films .
Take
Boys Don't Cry,
Kimberly Peirce's delicate film about a cross–
dressing young woman named Teena Brandon who insists, with her
innocent Midwestern charm, that she's not gay but, inwardly, a man
attracted to women, a man comfortable doing men's work, comfortable
in a bar with other men. She not only feels like a man but longs for the
freedom only men can exercise.
In
the classic American way, gawky but
unembarrassed, she takes on a new identity by reversing her names and
drifting to another town. When her secret is discovered, there are men
who feel threatened by her, and the movie quickly turns from an ado–
lescent lark into a violent tale straight out of the flat landscape of
The
Executioner's Song.
Ironically, her girlfriend remains loyal; confused as she is by her
lover's gender-bending, she still wants to run off with her. Based on a
documentary film about the same case,
Boys Don't Cry
is a one-of-a–
kind story, not the least bit lurid or exploitative despite its tabloid
potential.
It
is told with great emotional tact and kept afloat by two
pitch-perfect performances by Hilary Swank and Chloe Sevigny.
In
much the same way, Winona Ryder (as Susanna Kaysen) and Angelina
Jolie (as her demonic, truth-telling friend) steer clear of the cliches of
mental illness in Mangold's sensitive
Girl, Interrupted.
These are not
uplifting movies with facile resolutions for serious problems; they are
risk-taking projects, not for the faint of heart.
