Category: Culture

Sassy, brassy, all-around retro-flavoured fun! This story of two unlikely friends—the school’s “popular” girl and the withdrawn gay guy—is a celebration of life, love, and 80’s music. Though it does have some dramatic moments, Dirty Girl is mostly a comedy that made me want to laugh and dance, a fantastic conclusion to the 24^th VQFF.

The year is 1987. The place is a small-town high school in Oklahoma. After mouthing off to her teacher one too many times, “dirty girl” Danielle is placed in the “Challengers” program for difficult or special-needs students. Here she meets Clarke, hoodied and alone, content to be as invisible as possible and let school pass him by. Paired up to raise a bag of flour as their child, they gradually bond. When Danielle gets a lead on the location of her birth father (until then a mystery), and Clarke’s parents find male centerfolds under his mattress, the two decide to hit the road.

Danielle and Clarke bond and bicker some more, and have your typical road trip adventures, with a gay twist; he picks up a handsome cowboy stripper at a rest stop who gives them a free show and shows Clarke a good time. Then after running out of money, Danielle decides to enter a stripping contest at a local bar. Her moves are good, but the crowd is totally unresponsive. Finally, Clarke puts 2 and 2 together: this is a gay bar! But how will they win that $50 prize now? No problem! Clarke can perform! Though reluctant, he remembers some of the stripper’s lessons and successfully channels his inner diva to win the prize!

Unfortunately, that’s when Clarke’s father catches up with them, and drags Clarke off to military school. Danielle goes on to California to see her birth father. It doesn’t go as well as she’d hoped. He’s a nice enough guy, but already has a family, and isn’t interested in a new teenage daughter. Danielle is devastated at first, but accepts that she gave it her all, and when that’s not enough, you just have to roll with the punches.

We catch up with the teens a few months later. Danielle seems to have given up or at least toned down her “dirty girl” ways, branching out into dance and song. During a heartbreaking rendition of “Don’t Cry Out Loud” for a talent show, who should appear to help her with the chorus? It’s Clarke, looking damn fine in his spiffy uniform! Military school hasn’t broken his spirit, it seems. So the two reconnect, and everybody lives happily ever after.

That’s Dirty Girl, a fantastic ride through 1980’s America as seen through a queer lens. The funny bits were very, very funny—I haven’t even mentioned Clarke and Danielle’s “child” (ie: the bag of flour) which accompanied them on their travels, or all the creepy-funny interactions with Danielle’s mom’s Mormon boyfriend and his children—and the dramatic bits were well done and gripping. As lighthearted as the overall story is, all the main characters have fully fleshed-out personalities, with realistic conflicts and drives.

PS: this movie had some serious star power! Mila Jovovich, Dwight Yoakam, Gary Grubbs, Mary Steenburgen and Tim McGraw? Yes, they were all in this movie. Amazing.

PPS: this is a bit out of left field, but I wonder if protagonists’ mothers will eventually end up together? Clarke’s mother doesn’t seem to like her husband much, and he moves out by the end; Danielle’s mother was only dating that Mormon guy because she feels she needs to get married to someone decent. And in the very last scene, during Danielle’s performance, they were holding hands. I’m just saying…

Meet Pim, the only child of a single mother living in a small town in Belgium. As a young boy, he spent much of his time dressing up in his mother’s clothes and performing for an imaginary audience. At fifteen Pim continues to be very withdrawn, loves to draw and collect mementos of his mother and Gino, the cool and confident neighbour’s boy with whom he has a secret relationship. But all good things must come to an end, and over the next couple of years Pim must give up his fantasies and start dealing with the real world.

North Sea, Texas is quiet and reflective, slow-paced and equally full of gorgeous North Sea scenery and bittersweet moments. Interestingly for a queer coming-of-age movie, it does not involve coming out and finding your first love. Pim already had that, and is forced to grow up when the older Gino decides their relationship was just a childish phase and takes up with a girl. He has to grow up still further when his mother decides to run off with a suave gypsy carny who Pim also seemed to have a thing for.

Pim is left only with Sabrina, Gino’s younger sister; she had a crush on Pim but remained friends after learning about his relationship with her brother. In the end Gino does comes back, but for how long? Will he and Pim restart their relationship?

I’m actually conflicted over whether to label this film “bittersweet” or “depressing”, because there’s a lot more bitter than sweet. Is this what growing up means, that either you leave or people leave you—dying, dumping you for a French girl, or running off with the gypsy with the creepy moustache? Can you ever forge a permanent connection?

Pim shows great strength and maturity, and manages to get on with his life, but it seems to me life should be more than just enduring grief and pain. Pim outgrew his dressing-up dreams but still needs to find new ones. I hope he does, soon.

Ale is a sweet-natured homeless trans woman, living in a shantytown in Buenos Aires. To make ends meet she sews clothes and gathers garbage and recyclables. One day she finds the suicide note of a woman named Mia, a long diary addressed to her daughter Julia but which her now-widowed husband has thrown out. At first Ale only intends to return it but is soon captivated by Mia’s tragic story, so tries to connect with Julia and share what she learns.

This is a story the struggle to connect, and bridge the gaps between our different worlds: poor and rich, maricón and straight, queer and normal. And, conversely, how those gaps are huge and sometimes insurmountable obstacles. Our very first look at Ale sets the scene: she’s standing on the sidewalk, looking through the window of a fancy restaurant at a rich family having a lavish birthday dinner. People are laughing, there are gifts and cake. Ale is looking a little envious, maybe, but also a little sad, resigned to her place.

She seemed lonely to me, an outsider looking in… but then she returns to her cart, decorated with pretty balloons and butterflies, and her own name. She pulls it along with a surprisingly serene look on her face, meets with friends on the street, and eventually returns to her home. I was wrong: Ale isn’t alone, she has friends, family (chosen, but no less real), as well as a lover. And here’s the second theme of the film: family is where you find it. Most of the inhabitants of her shantytown are orphans, abandoned by their parents or rejected by mainstream society, who have found each other and built a community built on mutual trust and respect.

Not to say her life is all sweetness and light. The shantytown has no running water except the nearby river, no electricity or gas; they need mutual trust because all they have is each other; and they live in constant fear of harassment by the police for illegal squatting. Though they are in tentative negotiations with the city for a deal whereby they would all be relocated to a hotel and given a small stipend to live on, the town elders are opposed to this deal. Others, including Ale, support it, because it’s a chance for a normal life.

As Ale gets more and more into Mia’s sad tale of alienation and self-hatred, and more involved in Julia’s and Carlos’ lives, I wondered what what she was trying to do. Helping Julia deal with her grief, sure, but there was more to it than that. It looks like she was identifying far too closely with Mia; at one point she called herself “Mia” to one of her johns and later identifying Julia as her daughter. Mind you, that was to a homophobic asshole in a fancy restaurant and she had a knife to his throat; clarifying the nuances of the family dynamic swould probably have taken too long.

Still, as much as Ale wants to take Mia’s place in the story of Julia’s life, she eventually realises that could never happen. The incident in the restaurant makes it clear that she doesn’t belong in “normal” society; Julia is not her daughter, and needs to deal with her loss in her own way. Whether or not moving down south with her grandmother is the right thing to do, that’s not Ale’s call, and in the end she is powerless to stop it. The most she can do is add her own farewell to Mia’s suicide diary, then go back to her own life.

Her life, though, is her shantytown being demolished by the city authorities and its people arrested or chased back to the streets. There’s no happy ending here on this side of the fence either, though we close with Ale greeting the sunrise with the same quiet serenity she has always shown. Whatever additional hardships she now faces, she will have the strength to cope.

I hope I’m right. It’s possible I’m misinterpreting that shot.

A few more thoughts:

I know the circumstances are different, but the hotel deal that was floated for the shantytown residents sounds very much like a First Nations reservation. The elders were right to mistrust it: it was meant only to contain them, remove them from the homes they built themselves, and exert a more subtle form of control than naked fear of the police. Since they were probably unemployable for any normal job, the stipend would simply make them dependent on the government.

About the direction: as seems typical of South American cinema (from my limited experience), the film’s pace is very slow compared to the films I’m used to. I didn’t mind—it made the film an exercise in patience—and the slow pace was broken up with a few montages and such.

The entire movie feels like a subtle deconstruction of an old trope: the wise and magical homeless person, full of earthy wisdom and useful skills, who swoops in to help an innocent rich kid in her moment of need, then unexpectedly disappears. (I can’t name any examples off the top of my head, but the setup feels very familiar.) Here, we see it from the opposite direction: Ale has her own life and her own needs, and does not exist solely for Julia. Her many skills—cooking, sewing, housekeeping—were learned out of necessity or simply from a lifetime of devouring fashion magazines.