Gay Festival Begins With Tugs and Twists of the Heart

The 12th annual Los Angeles International Gay & Lesbian Film & Video Festival, which will present more than 200 works July 7-17 at the Directors Guild, 7920 Sunset Blvd., gets off to a terrific start with the Thursday 8 p.m. premiere of “To Die For,” a sure-fire British heart-tugger written by Johnny Byrne and directed by Peter Mackenzie Litten, who’ve given a fresh spin to the popular Hollywood ghost lover genre.

Thomas Arklie’s Simon, who is into leather, and Ian Williams’ Mark, a drag performer, have been lovers for several years; Simon is HIV-negative, but Mark is approaching the final stages of AIDS. Just when we’re expecting a tale of devotion in the face of lingering illness, Mark dies swiftly only to return to confront Simon with his inability to love, which Simon painfully comes to realize is the result of a brutal rejection by his homophobic late father.

“To Die For” taps genuine emotion and expresses a real sense of what love is all about, thanks to a deeply felt, highly concentrated portrayal by Arklie.

Marlon Riggs recently lost his battle against AIDS but has left behind an important legacy of what it means to be gay and black in America. The festival takes note of the passing of this endlessly talented and courageous young man with a screening of his best-known and most controversial work, the beautiful and sensual “Tongues Untied” (Friday at 7 p.m.), a stunning and original celebration of love between black men that utilizes dance, poetry, tableaux and impassioned stream-of-consciousness narration.

Wiktor Grodecki’s riveting “Not Angels but Angels” (Saturday at 2 p.m.) is a matter-of-fact, low-key yet compassionate documentary on the lives of teen-age male prostitutes who work Prague’s magnificent but seedy beaux-arts railway station and various gay clubs. Sheer economic survival has driven these youths to hustle, some of whom are straight or bisexual as well as gay, and all of whom practice safe sex only intermittently. Most striking are a matter-of-fact pimp who steers customers, mainly Germans, to the boys, and a feisty 14-year-old born in New York.

It’s a mark of the festival’s maturity that it would land such a widely touted film as Stephan Elliot’s rambunctious, irresistible “The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert” (Saturday at 9 p.m.), which looks to have the crossover success of “La Cage aux Folles.” The vastly entertaining “Priscilla” takes its title from a gaudy van that three drag performers--played by Hugo Weaving, Terence Stamp (whose character is a transsexual) and Guy Pearce--are driving across the Australian desert. Stamp is a wonder as the middle-aged dignified but tough Bernadette, and his Australian co-stars are no less impressive.

Also from Australia is Ana Kokkinos’ powerful “Only the Brave” (Sunday at 7 p.m.), a coming-of-age odyssey in which a young Greek Australian lesbian’s rite of passage involves the starkness of the tragedies of her family’s ancestral homeland. Elena Mandalis is the rebellious Alex, and Dora Kaskanis is the look-alike object of her growing--and unsettling--affections. Set in a seedy, barren neighborhood outlying Melbourne, “Only the Brave” has been aptly compared to Jonathan Kaplan’s gritty, alienated youth saga “Over the Edge.”

“Closing Numbers” (Sunday at 9 p.m.), written by David Cook and directed by Stephen Whittaker, is the epitome of the literate, carefully crafted British drama of social consciousness yet manages to work up strong emotions as it confronts with admirable straightforwardness a crisis more common than most would admit: a wife who discovers that her husband, whom she always believed to be faithful, has a lover, who turns out to be male--and who has furthermore previously indulged in lots of unsafe sex.

Jane Asher is impressive as the wife who receives this stunning double whammy, but the film’s pivotal character is her husband’s lover (Patrick Pearson). Not only does he prove supportive to Asher, but he also is nursing a friend (Nigel Charnock), rejected emphatically by his father, in an advanced stage of Kaposi’s sarcoma.

Information: (213) 466-6972.