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June has been the customary month of gay film festivals, which means that queer-themed films often find theatrical release soon after, filling independent theaters with gay summer fare. With changing distribution patterns, it's now more common for these gay films to open in your neighborhood independent cinemas in later summer or the fall. Indeed, this August will see the release of three popular festival favorites: Olivier Ducastel and Jacques Martineau's Cote d'Azur, (the insinuating French title of which is Crustacés et Coquillages-- "shellfish and shells"), a funny French comedy of the sexual mishaps of a family vacation. Then there's Marco Kreuzpaintner's Summer Storm (Summerstrum), a sweet coming-out story of German boys at a crew meet. And also Tennyson Bardwell's Dorian Blues, an American indie about a gay youth dealing with his parents and first love.

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But what about the summer à la Hollywood? Well, there's Batman Begins (and Batman is always of the lavender hue) and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (with the invariably queer Johnny Depp), but not much else.

There are, however, two great films newly available on DVD that are quite-- in each their own way-- queer, smart, and very intriguing.

The first is The Promise (La Promesa), a psychological thriller written and directed by Héctor Carré, and starring the ever-fabulous Carmen Maura. Most US audiences will know Maura from the many films she made with Pedro Almodovar, in particular their great 1988 Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown. Here Maura is also having a breakdown, but she's way beyond the "verge" part. She plays Gregoria, an abused wife of deeply religious devotions who lives on the outskirts of complete psychosis and who wishes that her name was Celia. After a violent departure from home, she ends up in a small Galician village where she becomes the nanny for Daniel (Santiago Barón), an eight-year-old-boy who's trapped between Dorita (Ana Fernández)-- his doting, if ineffectual, mother-- and Leandro (Evaristo Calvo), his brutish, domineering father. The family is very wealthy and Celia-- Georgia took a new name for her new life-- becomes as doggedly devoted to her young charge as she is to her obsessive dedication to her saints and religious beliefs. Unfortunately, for everyone in the house with her, she believes that Daniel is in constant danger and it is up to her to protect him. Oh no!

The jacket copy on the case for The Promise describes it as a cross between Women on the Verge and Henry James's novella The Turn of the Screw. And this is true, but the film also has hints of Bette Davis's wonderfully scary gothic 1965 The Nanny as well as Otto Preminger's 1965 Bunny Lake is Missing. What makes all these stories so compelling-- and, at heart so queer, is-- their adult character's obsession with the innocence of children and how children become the displaced site of all adult anxieties about sex and danger, fear and hope. While The Innocence and The Nanny have a clear sexual subtext-- the former throbs with it, the latter only hints at it-- The Promise satisfies merely by gently and eloquently suggesting it. Daniel is, for Celia, the sexual innocence that she had lost and been so wounded by. Her desire to "save" him-- and nothing stops her in her pursuit of this-- is, at heart, a desire to save herself and her sexual purity. No doubt this is a tension that resonates with Spanish audiences-- who are still grappling with distresses and palpable nervousness between secularism and state religion even three decades after the death of General Franco. The Promise is a great, unnerving film and available in local video stores, gay book stores, or on line at www.tlareleasing.com.

Birth, is also new to DVD and certainly not, in the economic sense, an alternative film. Directed by Jonathan Glazer (who made the 2002 Sexy Beast ) and staring Nicole Kidman, it was released in later October 2004, and has just appeared in video stores. Written by Jean-Claude Carrière and Milo Addica Birth is a profoundly creepy, moving and ultimately chilling examination of how love, grief, and sex can be inextricably intertwined as to become indistinguishable, or at least totally confusing.

Ghost buster

The plot is deceptively simple: Anna (Kidman) is a widow of ten years who is just now remarrying. Her fiancee Joseph (Danny Huston) has spent years waiting for her to overcome her grief at losing Sean, her husband. Suddenly, during a family dinner, a ten-year-old Sean (Cameron Bright) shows up at her door announcing that he is Sean. Not only is his name Sean, but that he is the reincarnation of her late husband. This absurd idea is brushed away by everyone, except that Sean is so determined and persistent and Anna is so unnerved and still grief-stricken that she begins to believe him and ultimately even considers running off with him to marry him when he is older. Clearly her fiancee and her family think this is a poor idea.

What might have been a not very interesting psychological or horror thriller-- depending on whether or not you believe in reincarnation-- becomes instead a moody meditation on how grief can change our lives and how loves (and the prospect of sex) can heal that. But what is most striking about Birth-- and unsettling to many views, some of whom complained bitterly about the sexual implications of the film-- is that Anna and the young Sean obviously have a sexual attraction to one another. At one point they bathe together and at another Anna kisses Sean in a manner more conjugal than parental. While this hint at child-love-- well, they may really be husband and wife-- flipped out some critics and viewers it is the logical extension of what has been implied in films such as The Promise, The Innocence, and The Nanny. If the sexual gothic-- a genre with deep roots in western culture and psyche-- is about anything it is the crossing, the violation, of sexual taboos. What could be more taboo, or make more sense, than a grown woman wanting to have a physical relationship with her husband: even if he is now reincarnated as a boy? Birth, although marketed as an upscale Hollywood thriller, is really closer to a European art film-- think of Max Orphals's The Earrings of Madam D or Francois Ozon's Under the Sand-- and deserving of that attention and respect.

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