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High Art
directed by Lisa Cholodenko
with Rhada Mitchell, Ally Sheedy
How to order Head On
directed by Ana Kokkinos
with Alex Dimitriades
How to order Criminal Lovers
directed by François Ozon
with Natacha Regnier, Jeremie Renier, Mike Manojlovic
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Could there be anything more boring than another coming-out movie? Sure, they're popular. And it's true, people do keep on coming-out, so there's always fresh audience for this important experience to be validated by yet another second-rate, simplistic, self-congratulatory movie. Yet since the 1980s, coming-out films have been a staple of annual queer film festivals and what we call gay-and-lesbian cinema.

It's interesting that in the days well years after the Stonewall Riots, when gay films were first surfacing in both underground and independent circles, there were no "coming-out" movies. Films such as Rosa von Praunheim's It is Not the Homosexual Who is Perverse, But the Society in Which He Lives, Wolfgang Petersen's The Consequence, or Christopher Larkin's A Very Natural Thing were more concerned with the problems of living your life, building a community, and dealing with the material world than with coming-out.

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Sometime in the 1980s, the coming-out genre became codified. Films such as Lianna, Love Story, and Desert Hearts all detailed the coming-out process and placed it in a context that both validated and narrowed it. In each of these movies and many that followed coming-out was the resting place of the plot-line, not its first steps. Note that in mainstream queer culture, the phase "coming-out" implies "coming-out of the closet." Yet for African-Americans and Southern debutantes alike, the phrase is contextualized quite differently as "coming-out into the life." Coming-out films typically detail leaving the closet and have no vision of, or interest in, the glories and horrors that follow. In gay cinema's early days, coming-out was something to celebrate and then move onward from: it was as it should be a beginning, not an end-in-itself. The message now is "come out, and everything will be great."

Consider such recent films as Get Real, Beautiful Thing, and But I'm a Cheerleader. The first two are not unintelligent, but limited in their emotional and political range. The latter film with its Disneyfication of "reparative therapy" is actually a gross distortion of coming-out.

But there are some recent films that contest the smiley-face attitude that we've come to expect in the coming-out genre.

Lisa Cholodenko's High Art presents us with the story of Syd (Rhada Mitchell), a young woman and an assistant editor at a high-profile art magazine, who gets involved with Lucy Berliner (Ally Sheedy), a Nan Goldin-like lesbian photographer. The editor is ambitions, the photographer is confused, but there is a spark between them. The editor has a boyfriend, the photographer a girlfriend. The photographer also has a serious heroin addiction, as does her lover. As the affair blooms between them, all signals for disaster are blinking. This is the sort of coming-out film where we root for the young women to at least for now stay in the closet. Coming-out is great; becoming lovers with a mentally unstable junkie is, well, complicated.

A similar situation exists with Ana Kokknios's Head On. Set in the Greek exile community of Melbourne, Australia, it charts 24 hours in the life of Ari (Alex Dimitriades), a 21-year-old struggling with coming-out not so much to himself, but to the rest of the world. His parents ex-lefties who fought against Greece's military junta want him to marry; the Melbourne Greek community is relentlessly heterosexual; and he is so conflicted that his sexcapades are thwarted by his avoidance of all pleasure or feeling. Here is a coming-out movie to chew on, making clear that understanding and acting upon same-sex desires is actually the least of it.

Perhaps the most alarming and perverse recent coming-out movie is François Ozon's Criminal Lovers, which has opened in a few major cities, and is soon due out on video. Ozon whose short films See the Sea and A Summer's Dress were on the queer festival circuit a few years back has created an extraordinarily film that is a twisted cross between Hansel and Gretel, Bonnie and Clyde, and The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover. Alice (Natacha Regnier) and Luc (Jeremie Renier) are French students who have an intense, not quite sexual, relationship that is predicated on her tormenting him and his responding in anger. After Alice convinces Luc to murder another young man, whom she claim raped her, they decide to bury his body in the forest, only to lose their way. They are trapped by an ogre (Mike Manojlovic), who proceeds to assault Luc. But this isn't even the perverse part. At the heart of this Freudian nightmare is the sweet coming-out story of Luc, who finally realizes where his true feelings lie.

Ozon has a dreamy fairy-tale-like approach to his material that charms and horrifies. The expression of Luc's love for another man is both uncomplicated and moving yet the movie's labyrinthine moral context is a match for life's realities, and the film never reduces to formula or cliche.

Ozon, Kokknios, and Cholodenko show that the genre still has life in it. But maybe American-born filmmakers should leave the coming-out movie alone for a while.

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