10 LGBT-interest titles at 2014’s London Film Festival

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The BFI renewed its commitment to LGBT and queer film in March with the rebranding of the London Lesbian & Gay Film Festival as BFI Flare. But LGBT film fans won’t have to wait for Flare 2015 for another sizeable crop of cinematic fun under the BFI banner: next month’s London Film Festival is positively bulging with titles to turn the queer eye. So here, in alphabetical order, are 10 LFF titles of particular interest to LGBT film fans…

The Duke of Burgundy
Shades of Bergman’s Persona, Genet’s The Maids, Losey’s The Servant and the erotic work of Jess Franco in this chamber piece about a ménage à deux steeped in domestic role-play and power dynamics. Sidse Babett Knudsen plays ice queen Cynthia, Chiara D’Anna is self-effacing servant Evelyn. Their set-up seems to be mutually satisfying but when the cracks start to show, the old question of who really rules the roost, dom or sub, comes to the fore. This is the third feature by Peter Strickland, a British filmmaker with strong European ties who showed a talent for claustrophobic intensity with Berberian Sound Studio, in which Toby Jones was cooped up in a recording facility, and for the power of female storytelling in Katalin Varga, a Hardyesque tale of European hardship.

The Falling
More quasi-lesbionic homosociability in this intriguing title from Carol Morley, who directed the unsettling documentary Dreams of a Life, about a woman whose body remained undiscovered for several years. Introversion, domesticity and female identity are again present here – Maxine Peake plays an agoraphobic single mum – but the setting has changed to that of an English girls’ school in 1969. The focus is on two girls (Florence Pugh, Game of Thrones’ Maisie Williams) who more or less live in a world of their own, at least to start with… With photography by Agnès Godard (Beau Travail), music by Everything But the Girl’s Tracey Thorn and Morley’s distinctively stylised approach to narrative and visualisation, this should be intriguing.

Hockney: A Life in Pictures
David Hockney has always been one for traversing distances – not just geographic (Yorkshire to London to Los Angeles) but formal (Pop Art to iPad) and social as well. And as one recent exhibition made clear, his sexuality has been a key facet of his artistic life all along. He’s long overdue the documentary portrait treatment and now gets his close-up courtesy of director Randall Wright, who has also made films about Lucian Freud and Sister Wendy Beckett. It remains to be seen how much is made of Hockney’s sexuality but we’re promised lots of archive material, including the artist’s own home-movie footage, and attention to his determination (learned from his dad) not to care what the neighbours think.

I Don’t Know
This 20-minute short film from 1970 is tantalising for several reasons. It’s a kind of forward-looking time capsule, a documentary-fiction hybrid (a popular form now, rather daring in 1970) with open ideas about gender and sexuality: it focuses on a trans person who declines both male and female identification in ongoing conversation with a lesbian. And it’s an early directorial venture by Penelope Spheeris, whose attunement to the ethos of punk, post-punk and queer counterculture informed her Decline of Western Civilization documentaries as well as Suburbia and even, at a pinch, Wayne’s World. The film plays as part of an Experimenta package called Meditations from Our Lady of the Angels, a collection of works from the archives of the Los Angeles avant garde.

The Imitation Game
Few did as much for their country only for it to condemn them to misery as Alan Turing. As the subject of both a posthumous pardon and an opera by Pet Shop Boys, the wartime codebreaker turned victim of state homophobia is becoming something like the UK’s patron saint of unjustly persecuted queers – and now comes the ultimate accolade of being played by Benedict Cumberbatch. Programmed as the LFF’s opening night gala, this biopic promises not to shy away from Turing’s sexuality, shifting between a childhood romance, the heady days of Bletchley Park during WW2 and Turing’s post-war interrogation following his arrest for gross indecency. Keira Knightley, Matthew Goode, Mark Strong and Charles Dance also appear.

Love is Strange
Alfred Molina and John Lithgow star in this portrait of a New York couple approaching their fifth decade together. After sharing so much of their lives, they have much to be grateful for – close friends, the advent of gay marriage – but also severe challenges, both mutual and individual, not least around threats to their livelihood and home. Director Ira Sachs is a unique voice in NY queer cinema culture: a distinctive filmmaker, whose past titles including the spiky relationship drama Keep the Lights On and the subtle Aids-eulogy short Last Address, and an active programmer, overseeing the Queer/Art/Film screening series with Adam Baran. His star-cast treatment of LGBT life in later years is of sure to be of interest, both in its own right and a sign of how mainstream winds are blowing.

Mommy
Wondrous thing: Xavier Dolan will not stop. With the wounds barely healed from his bruising Hitchcockian thriller Tom at the Farm, the Québécois Wunderkind (who also made Heartbeats and Laurence Anyways) is back with his fifth feature in five years. This promises to be a kind of companion piece to Dolan’s debut, I Killed My Mother: like that film, it’s about the intense and fraught relationship between an unhappy teen and his mother; this time, the boy (Antoine-Olivier Pilon) is a juvenile-hall reject and the mum (Anne Dorval) a fun-loving type. Dolan regular Suzanne Clément also appears. Dolan’s formal verve is always a treat and this time he’s experimenting with a deliberately restrictive 1:1 shooting ratio.

Pasolini
Well, you can’t say he doesn’t have the cheekbones for it. Willem Dafoe stars as revolutionary Italian director and activist Pier Paolo Pasolini in Abel Ferrara’s latest. It’s a multilayered take on the much-disputed final day of Pasolini’s life, culminating in his murder after picking up a bit of rough trade. The film makes use of the fact that Pasolini’s shocking epic Salò was awaiting release, recreates his last TV interview, and draws on material from the unproduced Pasolini script Porno-Teo-Kolossai, in which a quest for Jesus’s birthplace is set against a queer procreative orgy. Not that a bit of controversy or iconoclasm has ever deterred Dafoe (The Last Temptation of Christ) or Ferrara (everything he’s made).

Something Must Break
Questions of love, identity and jeopardy seem to be at the heart of this, Ester Martin Bergsmark’s entry in the LFF’s debut-feature competition. Bergsmark’s short film She Male Snails attracted plenty of attention on the festival circuit for its woozily thoughtful blurring of lines, destabilising notions of gender, genre, even genus. The distinctive sensibility and appreciation of the natural world look to have been retained for the move to feature length, albeit with a bit more attention to conventional plotting: the story revolves around trans teenager Sebastian, whose growing relationship with newcomer Andreas – initially beguiled by Sebastian, then developing more complex mixed feelings – could be a source of intimacy or danger or both.

White Bird in a Blizzard
One of the pioneering voices of New Queer Cinema, Gregg Araki (The Living End, Totally F***ed Up, Doom Generation) made his name with tongue-in-cheek absurdist-apocalyptic takes on 90210-type material. His latest feature looks to be more in the slightly different territory of his 2004 triumph Mysterious Skin: an adaptation of a contemporary novel about adolescence, family, secrets and passion, realised in a more impressionistic vein with flashes of fancy. This feature is based on Laura Kasischke’s book about 17-year-old Kat (Shailene Woodley), whose domestic-goddess mother (Eva Green) disappears one day, leaving her with her shellshocked father, the hot boy next door and a bunch of unanswered questions.

Not enough for you? Here’s another handful of titles worth checking out:
Appropriate Behaviour, in which a bi Brooklyn woman veers from bed to bed, is being hailed as an Iranian-American version of Girls;
Butter on the Latch follows the intense utopian friendship between two women who meet at a California music festival;
Metamorphosis finds Christophe Honoré reworking the polymorphous perversity of Greek mythology for today;
The New Girlfriend sees François Ozon evoke Douglas Sirk in a queer key as a woman pledges to look in on her late best friend’s widower and baby;
and The Way He Looks sees a blind Brazilian teenager developing feelings for the new boy in class.

The BFI London Film Festival runs at various venues from October 8 to 19.