François Ozon’s first feature-length film, 1998’s “Sitcom,” has everything. Gay orgies, a bisexual Cameroonian gym teacher, wheelchair-bound sadomasochism, all sorts of incest, and that thing when your father brings home a little white rat and it turns your bourgeois family into a throbbing pile of “deviant” sexual activity. It’s brimming with transgressive lechery and gleeful camp, woven together by Ozon’s signature disregard for society’s rigid understanding of family, gender and sex. It was also unfairly and almost universally panned upon release.
Ozon’s fortunes have changed quite a bit since then. His new film, “In the House,” seems fairly tame in comparison, and he has become among France’s more internationally successful directors. Yet it seems an unlikely transition, even over the course of fifteen years. His other early features, “Criminal Lovers” and “Water Drops on Burning Rocks,” weren’t exactly adored by the critics. It wasn’t until 2000’s “Under the Sand” that he finally began to cross over to the mainstream of French auteur cinema. That film, perhaps more than incidentally, was also his first to deal exclusively with heterosexual characters.
I’m not going to try to argue that the international critical community, or even the French critical community, refused to take Ozon’s work seriously until it happened to be about straight people. Yet some of their language is suspect, one critic claiming that “Under the Sand” was the critical point at which the enfant terrible had “matured.” One wonders if Ozon knew this would happen.
Moreover, and this is especially true of the American context, it is not at all easy to get funding to make a queer film. Some filmmakers haven’t been able to make queer movies in years, finding a creative outlet on TV or online instead. Yet others compromise and tell straighter, less troublesome stories. On the one hand, they may get Oscar nominations and make a ton of money (“The Kids Are All Right” comes to mind, but so do entirely straight films by New Queer Cinema directors like “Good Will Hunting”). On the other, their more Hollywood work is often not as good as their earlier, more groundbreaking films.
The conundrum is this: as critics and audiences looking for LGBT cinema, how should we respond? Do these filmmakers “sell out,” or is it possible to find some middle ground between the NQC’s art house legacy and the demands of the (ever-increasingly gay friendly) wider audiences? Should we be upset by “The Kids Are All Right?” In the late 1990s, this was a real cause for concern. I’ve heard this complaint more recently, however, and today it’s off the mark.
First, it’s a good idea to get some ideas in order. As I explained last time, it’s impossible to pin down exactly what good queer cinema would even look like as a specific goal. Yet, now that I’m actually trying to make some sort of tangible argument, we need to come up with a way around that. Taking Ozon as a point of departure, I’d like to propose two thematic and stylistic tendencies of queer cinema coming out of the early 1990s.
I’ll start with camp. J. Bryan Lowder is now on Entry 9 of his expertly written and groundbreakingly theoretical Postcards from Camp over at Slate. The crucial distinction he makes in the beginning of his series is that of “camp” versus “campiness.” In his words:
“Campiness, as a style and sensibility, comprises a set of widely appreciated characteristics: frivolity, the celebration of the “so bad it’s good,” the overwrought, the histrionic, what Sontag calls “failed seriousness.” It’s standard midnight-screening fare. But these characteristics are not at all intrinsic to camp. In other words, camp is not the same thing as campy, and the latter, as a popular aesthetic, may well be fading into obscurity while the former, a “way of seeing the world,” soldiers on.”
Ozon has campiness in spades. The delightfully abrupt line dance in “Water Drops on BurningRocks,” the enormous sexually-coded cucumbers in Sitcom and the entirety of his all-female musical romp “8 Women” prove this. He has company in the work of Pedro Almodóvar, Todd Haynes and Jamie Babbitt, just to name a few. Yet “camp” permeates his work as well, as it does for New Queer Cinema in the US and much of the international queer cinema of the last two decades.
Lowder explains “camp” in the context of Roland Barthes, a compelling argument that I don’t have time for here but in which you should immerse yourself, in his third entry. The gist, for our purposes, is the nuance. It isn’t simply the comedy of campiness, which is only one way of getting at camp. For example: camp in comedy is the bread and butter of early Almodóvar films, like the amateur back-up singing nuns in “Dark Habits.” Yet it also exists in tragedy. Almost every little detail of Patricia Clarkson’s drug addicted German actress in Lisa Cholodenko’s “High Art” can be read as camp, not least of which the refrain of her former collaborations with the now-dead Rainer Werner Fassbinder.
Camp resists. For Lowder, it resists the stereotypical and the obvious of genre and form. I’ll extend this one rhetorical step further. Camp resists the obvious and bland in culture as a whole, making it rebellious. It speaks to the individual alone, and when it makes a point further to speak to the LGBT individual, it’s a form of resistance. Ozon uses it in his early works for certain, as do many of the directors associated with New Queer Cinema.
The second element is a lot simpler. To crunch it down: sex. Yet, like with camp, there are two degrees. There’s the queer sex acts themselves, which you can find in everything from a simplistic gay romcom to complex and controversial films like “Poison” and “Sitcom.” The added layer is when sexuality is used not simply to show gay sex to audiences, but to drive home the fluid gender and sexuality of queer cinema. “Sitcom,” “Bad Education,” “High Art,” and other films drive wedges between our basic and unrelenting definitions of heterosexuality, homosexuality, and bisexuality. The sex itself is only part of the point.
Now that I’ve made a whole bunch of ridiculous claims about the traits of queer cinema and its art, let’s go back to talk of “selling out.” Campiness and lots of explicit sex are the window dressing on the deeper, more interesting elements of queer cinema. Theoretically, it’s therefore possible to make a queer film about straight people. “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” certainly accomplished as much. This turns out to be much less of a complicated problem than anticipated, especially when one looks at the actual films.
Let’s take a look at the parallel careers of Haynes and Van Sant. Haynes continued to use queerness in interesting ways, applying it to the Glam Rock era with “Velvet Goldmine” and Sirk’s melodramas with “Far from Heaven.” Both of these are explicitly LGBT films. Yet “I’m Not There” is another creative remix along these lines, queering the life of Bob Dylan by reflecting it off of Arthur Rimbaud and by casting Cate Blanchett as one of his incarnations. The film succeeds.
In the end, however, I think the entire conversation may be completely irrelevant in a year or two. In the years since the arrival and then temporary wane of New Queer Cinema, we’ve seen a number of straight directors break open both Hollywood and the international art house in ways that allows for some middle ground. “Brokeback Mountain” and “Happy Together” complemented the growth of LGBT cinema, bringing us over the hill from fighting for representation to simply filming intriguing and artistic stories.
Ozon’s “In the House” manages to be camp in its writerly discourse and in its commentary on contemporary art, and sexually fluid in its re-appropriation of the domestic tensions that “Sitcom” borrowed from Pasolini’s “Teorema.” Cholodenko’s “The Kids Are All Right,” while problematic for a number of reasons, met Hollywood halfway and slipped in a few complex ideas that did stick.
The conclusion to B. Ruby Rich’s compendium on New Queer Cinema (which everyone should go read) points out a number of movies from 2011 and 2012 that twist both camp and gender fluidity in exciting new ways: “Codependent Lesbian Space Alien Seeks Same,” “Pariah,” “Tomboy,” “Keep the Lights On” and “Weekend” all push queer cinema forward. The notion of assimilation to a Hollywood norm is not yet obsolete, but a new renaissance in LGBT cinema (and trans cinema in particular, as Rich stresses), may help us move on from it.
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