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Garçon Stupide
Written by Baier and Laurent Guido
Starring Pierre Chatagny
How to order Brothers of the Head
Directed by Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe
from Brian Aldiss's novel
Starring Howard Attfield, Tom Howe, Barry Howe
How to order Boy Culture
Written and directed by Q. Allan Brock
Starring Derek Magyar, Jonathon Trent, Darryl Stephens, Patrick Bauchau.
How to order

Hold thy holiday shopping and get thee to the cinema, 'cause it's rarer than a virgin birth to behold the gift of three wise gay films in a single month.

Boy Culture is a funny, smart, and insightful story of a hustler who's looking for sex (and money) in all the right places, but avoiding love even when it's sitting at home waiting for him. Written and directed by Q. Allan Brocka, the film is based on the popular 1995 Matthew Rettenmund novel by the same name. A popular, high-priced call-boy who goes by the moniker "X" (played by Derek Magyar) avoids intimacy as though it's an STI. He has a regular clientele that loves his attentions and two roommates-- Joey (Jonathon Trent), a 17-year-old dropout, and Andrew (Darryl Stephens), a nice professional man-- who love him in their own ways. Does X even notice?

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he story gets quirky. X takes on Gregory (Patrick Bauchau), a much older gay man, as a client even though Gregory doesn't want to have sex unless X desires him. Meanwhile, the normally staid and conservative Andrew is being quite the whore, and Joey-- usually sexually successful even on his off-days-- is finding new adventures, not all of them satisfying.

Boy Culture's script is literate, amusing, and genuinely funny. Thanks go to Rettenmund's novel, a Jane Austin-esque social comedy. Still, transplanting literary charms to the screen is never easy. As X, Derek Magyar is both cute and complicated-- the perfect sardonic foil to the romance swirling around him. But the real star of the film is Patrick Bauchau as the enigmatic, droll, and ultimately confounding 79-year-old Gregory. The film has nice symmetry and an elegant sense of style-- which often works well with its chatty, knowledgeable script: all uncommon attributes in the independent gay film scene.

Hip, and conjoined there

The sophistication of Boy Culture is complimented by the sheer brilliant weirdness of Brothers of the Head , which has played the indie circuit recently and will be out on DVD soon. Directed by Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe-- from Brian Aldiss's exquisitely creepy novel-- this is the story of siamese boy twins, who seem to be close in any number of ways. They become punk rock stars under the exploitative showmanship of Zak Bedderwick (Howard Attfield), a former vaudevillian turned producer. As played by real-life twins, Harry and Luke Treadaway (Tom and Barry Howe) are gorgeous, sexy, talented, frightening, and scandalously fabulous. The dramatic tension sizzles. Will one of the twins fall for Laura Ashworth (Diana Kent)-- the attractive, femme-fatale rock journalist? Is she the one who betrays them?

Set to a pretty terrific punk soundtrack, Brothers of the Head assumes the guise of a fake present-day documentary being filmed about events from the 1970s, all of which lead up to the twins' mysterious death at the height of their career. This Chinese-box-of-a-puzzle is intriguing, but the film's real emotional force comes in the directors' study of the freak-show exploitation of two vulnerable boys, and the visceral ramifications of putting human bodies on display. Put this all to loud, head-banging punk and you have quite a film. This isn't gay cinema per se, but you won't see a sexier film this year, though you may not want exactly to contemplate the sex (and who knows what else) that's going on off-screen.

Becoming clever

Finally, Lionel Baier's Garçon Stupide-- now out on DVD-- is a wonderful, moving look at a young man's evolution from a "stupid boy" (the English translation of the title) to a full person. Written by Baier and Laurent Guido, the film tells (in mildly out-of-sync narrative fashion) the story of Loic (Pierre Chatagny). Loic is a social misfit who works part-time as a hustler-- more for the attention than the money, but who just really wants to be someone who has ideas and a life. Not much happens-- Loic turns some tricks, makes a few friends, has an ongoing but complicated relationship with his friend Marie (Natacha Koutchoumov). But the emotional nuance and psychological explication makes this the sort of film that Francois Truffaut might have made were he alive today. Indeed, Garçon Stupide has hints of 400 Blows or even a homoerotic Jules and Jim.

All this complex content feels effortless. We're fully in Loic's head, feeling his pain as he tries to make sense of the world and make his mark on it. The film is quite sexy, but the sex scenes are all depressing-- Loic never gets the emotional attention he deserves, or can handle-- recalling much of real life.

Garçon Stupide is the sort of film that one hesitates to overpraise-- it's a little too smart and too emotionally precise. (It doesn't help that the cover art makes the film look more like a French porn flick than what it actually is-- a smart, emotionally engaging movie.) But Garçon Stupide-- as well as Boy Culture and Brothers of the Head-- are all worth your attention.

Author Profile:  Michael Bronski
	Michael Bronski is the author of Culture Clash: The Making of Gay Sensibility and The Pleasure Principle: Sex, Backlash, and the Struggle for Gay Freedom. He writes frequently on sex, books, movies, and culture, and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
	Email:	mabronski@aol.com