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Deputy Editor Bill Keith is at the 10th Annual Provincetown Film Festival this week. He promised me "regular reports" and instead so far has contributed one entry he says he wrote by hand in a notepad, "like a chapter from As I Lay Dying."
Here he is, getting his Faulkner on just for you:
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I hit the ground running Wednesday night when I jumped off the ferry and headed straight to the festival's opening film, Filth and Wisdom, Madonna's dramatic directorial debut. Most of the gays I talked to decided to not even see the movie, expecting the worst. All told, I don't really give a shit about Madonna -- sorry, I know, a very unpopular stance, but stick with me -- but I soldiered on for the sake of Out readers. This was, after all, the North American premiere of the movie (It bowed earlier at the Berlin Film Festival to mixed reviews) and I had a job to do.
So after picking up my bike from the nice fellas at P-Town bikes (where they name each of their bikes and mine was called Sophia, even if I've always seen myself as more of a Dorothy), I headed to Province Town High School -- which looks a great deal like the Town Hall from Back to the Future -- to catch the film. The gays are a fickle bunch, I tell you -- I felt like the crowd was mostly lesbians, though that's P-Town for you, I guess.
In any event, enough with the build-up. I liked the movie. That's right. I could find all sorts of things wrong with it the same way I do about second dates, but I'm going to go ahead and tell you why I liked what I saw.
First up -- the movie's star, Eugene Hütz (above) of the band Gogol Bordello, is hilarious, and, I'm surprised to say, I ended up having a crush on him. I didn't even hate that he regularly addresses the camera, which, outside of Ferris Bueller, I'm generally not a fan of. In the film Hutz plays a Ukranian musician living in London earning his keep as a male dominatrix. I'm sure there's a word for that, but it's not really my scene. [Ed. note: We took a poll, and the winner is "dominator."] Anyway, he flogs all sorts of men around London in an amusing variety of scenarios. And throughout the film, he performs with his actual band.
Richard E. Grant, he of Withnail and I fame, plays a blind gay poet who pays Hutz to be his errand boy. Great hair and wardrobe on this one. Hutz's two roommates are charming girls, oddly -- one is a pill-pilfering pharmacist, the other a ballet-dancer cum stripper. They're both wholly compelling characters.
In any event, the movie's premise, played out in a refreshingly compact hour and fifteen minutes, is the unoriginal idea that you have to go through a bunch of shit to get anything good. The film's conclusion is actually fairly saccharine, but it's tempered by a performance by Gogol Bordello, rather unlike a "This Used to Be My Playground" fade out. Solid call, Madge.
Like I said, I'm not a huge Madonna fan and went in with no expectations (or food in my stomach) and was fairly stunned that I enjoyed the movie as much as I did -- sweet fun with a lot of grit and some good laughs thrown in, mostly from the absurdity of Hutz's character. I sort of stumbled out of the screening trying to process the fact that I actually liked it and ambled aimlessly across Commercial Street, right into the path of Provincetown's unofficial mayor, John Waters, clipping along on his bike at a nice pace. Thank God he was wearing bright red pants that caught my eye. (Thank God also he wasn't driving his Buick. "I always drive a priest car," he said.)
Plenty of great films to see and great people in town, like Gael Garcia Bernal, Jane Lynch, Quentin Tarantino, and others. But more on that later...
-- BILL KEITH
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