‘Gypsy 83’ Brings Middle America to Outfest 2001

Outfest 2001, the 19th annual Los Angeles Gay & Lesbian Film Festival, continues through Monday at various venues, including the John Anson Ford Theater, where “Gypsy 83” screens tonight at 8:30.

Todd Stephens, the writer-producer of the poignant, autobiographical “Edge of Seventeen,” again returns to his hometown, Sandusky, Ohio, to introduce us to a couple of irresistible outsiders, a pair of Goths in the midst of Middle America. The beautiful, zaftig Gypsy (Sara Rue), a struggling singer in her early 20s, and Clive (Kett Turton), a gay high school student, take off for New York, where Clive has encouraged Gypsy to enter the “Night of 1,000 Stevies” competition--Stevie Nicks being Gypsy’s idol.

This time Stephens directs and writes, and the result is a heart-tugger in which this vulnerable yet resilient duo have some life-changing experiences along the way to Manhattan. Karen Black is memorable as a small-town lounge singer sustained by delusions of past glory.

The festival’s final weekend brings two outstanding lesbian-themed films, Lauren Himmel’s “Treading Water” (Friday, Directors Guild of America at 9:45 p.m.) and “Kissing Jessica Stein” (Sunday, DGA at 4:45 p.m.), directed by Charles Herman-Wurmfeld and written by co-star Heather Juergensen.

In “Treading Water,” Angela Redman’s Casey, a New England boat restorer, is happy in her work and relationship with Nina (Alex Barrett-Rosenberg), a therapist working with troubled youth. Unfortunately, Casey’s conservative socialite mother (Annette Miller) has banned Nina from the elegant family home, leaving Casey torn between her love for Nina and her family. Even though Casey’s father (Richard Snee) sympathizes with her, Himmel reminds us that when it comes to families, rarely is anything easy or without pain.

“Kissing Jessica Stein” is the smart-serious New York romantic comedy at its sharpest and most sophisticated, charting the love affair between a newspaper copy editor (Jennifer Westfeldt) and a hip downtown type (Heather Juergensen). The film is consistently witty and aware as it explores fluidity in sexual orientation.

Outfest presents Barbet Schroeder’s “Our Lady of the Assassins” as a special event Saturday at the DGA at 7 p.m. A milestone in Schroeder’s long international career, it tells of Fernando (German Jaramillo), a middle-aged gay writer of some renown who’s world-weary and returns after many decades to his native Medellin, Colombia. His life is unexpectedly renewed through his relationship with a young hustler who is trying to stay alive on streets where drive-by killings are almost as common as the changing of traffic lights from red to green. “Our Lady of the Assassins” is a harrowing odyssey through a society in which drug-trafficking has rendered life so cheap as to be virtually worthless, and it’s destined to be among the year’s most powerful and important foreign-language films. (323) 960-0636.

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Among films screening in the fifth annual Latino International Film Festival, which runs Friday through July 29 at the Egyptian Theater, is “The Ruination of Men.” The droll fable is directed by Arturo Ripstein, Mexico’s top veteran filmmaker, and written by his wife and frequent collaborator, Paz Alicia Garciadiego. As is often the case with Ripstein’s work, this film deals with people on society’s lowest rung, clinging to a sense of dignity and propriety in the face of dark absurdities of life and human nature.

Two men (Rafael Inclan, Luis Felipe Tovar) hide and fatally ambush a man (Carlos Chavez) pushing a wheelbarrow laden with tools after a day clearing fields with his sons. The killers feel justified in committing murder, whatever their motivation, but as they drag their victim’s body back to his shack, they concern themselves with what’s proper in dealing with his remains.

Meanwhile, the victim’s ferocious common-law wife (Patricia Reyes Spindola) is determined to claim the corpse at the local police station over her younger rival. When it comes time to get the corpse back home, whom should she seek out for help but one of the killers? “The Ruination of Men” is a pitch-dark gem of a comedy.

Written by Jan Egleson and Natatcha Estebanez and directed by Egleson, “The Blue Diner” (Sunday at 7:30 p.m.) concerns a young woman, Elena (Lisa Vidal), thrown into such an intense cultural identity crisis that she forgets how to speak her first language, Spanish. Elena is a skilled saleswoman at a Boston casket factory, where she’s headed for marriage to the owner’s son (Jack Mulcahy), handsome but obtuse. Meanwhile, she’s persistently pursued by one of Mulcahy’s factory workers (Jose Yenque), a struggling artist and poet. This outrages Elena’s formidable mother (Miriam Colon), who back in Puerto Rico married a talented but unsuccessful singer. The mother is determined that history not repeat itself. (323) 469-9066.

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The American Cinematheque will screen tonight at 7:30 Hector Babenco’s 1985 film of Manuel Puig’s play, “Kiss of the Spider Woman,” starring William Hurt (in an Oscar-winning portrayal), the late Raul Julia and Sonia Braga, unavailable since its original run. A discussion will follow with producer David Weisman, screenwriter Leonard Schrader and other cast and crew members. (323) 466-FILM.

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The UCLA Film Archive’s “Amos Gitai 2001” concludes tonight at 7:30 in Melnitz Hall’s James Bridges Theater with “Kadosh” (1999) and “Kippur” (2000), a pair of films that place Gitai in the front ranks of Israeli filmmakers.

The elegiac “Kadosh,” which means sacred in Yiddish, takes us into the sequestered world of Mea Shearim, the Orthodox Jewish quarter of Jerusalem, where devout citizens are committed to preserving an ancient way of life. It is a profoundly patriarchal society, and “Kadosh” reveals the dire fate of a wife who does not present her husband with children. That Gitai treats the Orthodox way of life with reverence and respect makes his film all the more devastating as an implicit criticism.

“Kippur” is a classic war film, at once elegiac and immediate, that takes us into the chaos of combat yet is marked by a detached perspective. The film is drawn from Gitai’s experiences serving in the 1973 Yom Kippur War, in which Egypt and Syria launched attacks on Oct. 6 in the Sinai and the Golan Heights, respectively. The overwhelming sensation so eloquently evoked by Gitai and his formidable cameraman, Renato Berta, is of fatigue; indeed, Gitai has predicted that the Mideast conflict will resolve itself only when all sides are overcome by exhaustion. (310) 206-FILM.