Reeling Film Festival 2021 Preview: Boulevard! A Hollywood Story, North by Current and Three More Highlights

“It was all very queer, but queerer things were yet to come.”—Joe Gillis (William Holden) in Billy Wilder’s “Sunset Blvd.”

Windy City cinephiles are sure to rejoice over numerous selections set to screen during the 39th installment of Reeling: The Chicago LGBTQ+ International Film Festival. Thirty-three features and nine short film programs will both screen in-person and stream virtually, with only a few exceptions, at different times during the festival’s two-week run from Thursday, September 23rd, through Thursday, October 7th (you can find the full lineup here). I was able to screen five of Reeling’s chosen titles for this preview piece, and none were as purely enjoyable as Jeffrey Schwarz’s “Boulevard! A Hollywood Story,” a documentary comprised of so many plot twists and jaw-dropping instances of life imitating art that it practically warrants the Ryan Murphy treatment on a second season of “Feud.” With the perceptive eye of a detective, director/editor Schwarz uncovers a treasure trove of archives at the University of Texas that detail the long-forgotten original musical adaptation of Wilder’s 1950 classic, “Sunset Boulevard,” which preceded Andrew Lloyd Webber’s own version by several decades and was dreamed up by none other than the film’s star, Gloria Swanson. If you, like me, consider Wilder’s movie to be one of the greatest and most deliciously meta achievements in cinema history, you simply cannot afford to miss this picture, which chronicles how two closeted songwriters, Dickson Hughes and Richard Stapley, came to aid Swanson in making her dream project a near-reality. 

The fact they initially met the actress at her mansion on Mulholland Drive feels entirely fitting, since David Lynch famously took that street name as the title of his own 2001 masterpiece, a surrealistic spin on Wilder’s nightmare perched in the city of dreams (echoing Swanson’s own belief that the silver screen should be a “dream world”). The deeper that Hughes and Stapley get into their collaboration with Swanson, the more she appears to drift into her character of Norma Desmond, the silent film icon whose career—like Swanson’s—was cut short by the emergence of talkies. She insists on burying a chicken she accidentally crushed with her stiletto (a vignette Schwartz links via amusing illustrations with Desmond’s funeral for her pet monkey), while developing an infatuation with Stapley, which he felt was not unlike Desmond’s obsession with Joe Gillis. All that ended up reaching a wide audience was Swanson’s performance of the song “Wonderful People” during her 1957 appearance on “The Steve Allen Show.” Though it lacks the sophistication of the film’s subsequent stage adaptation, and Swanson lacks the pipes of the opera star she aspired to be, it is a poignant spiritual precursor to “As If We Never Said Goodbye,” the number that routinely brings down the house when belted out by Glenn Close in Webber’s musical. My sister was fortunate enough to catch the musical’s 2017 Broadway revival, directed by Lonny Price, whose own excellent documentary examining the parallels between art and life—Netflix’s “Best Worst Thing That Ever Could Have Happened”—would make a fitting double bill with “Boulevard!”

“Boulevard! A Hollywood Story” screens at 2:30pm on Sunday, September 26th, at the Landmark Century Centre Cinema, 2828 N. Clark St., and is available to stream from Wednesday, September 29th, through Tuesday, October 5th.

As soon as young private Sergey (Tom Prior) reveals to his forbidden lover, Roman (Oleg Zagorodnii), that he loves music but has never seen a ballet in Peeter Rebane’s ravishing Cold War romance, “Firebird,” we are certain that at some point—likely in the final reel—Sergey will be watching the titular Stravinsky ballet Roman had introduced to him in a tearful close-up. If this heart-tugging payoff sounds awfully familiar, that’s because it appears to have been borrowed from Céline Sciamma’s vastly superior “Portrait of a Lady on Fire.” In fact, there are shades of multiple well-known pictures centering on suppressed sexuality throughout Rebane’s film, most notably “Call Me By Your Name” and “Brokeback Mountain,” yet what makes it distinctive is the heightened theatricality of its mise-en-scène. When Roman has an illicit meeting with Sergey, red light pierces through the slats of windows resembling a jail cell. There’s also a pronounced crack in the wall that materializes between the couple when their bond appears to have been irrevocably ruptured. Even Sergey’s first steamy orgasm administered by Roman is accompanied by phallic planes roaring overhead. The sheer number of ominous fists knocking on doors signaling imminent doom verges on self-parody, but the film is ultimately grounded in an emotional reality by its performances, particularly that of Prior, who co-wrote the script with Rebane. When he reads Hamlet’s immortal line, “To be or not to be,” while ruminating over its meaning, it stands as a testament to how great art can forever be redefined by one’s own life experiences.

“Firebird” screens at 7pm on Thursday, September 23rd, at the Music Box Theatre, 3733 N. Southport Ave., and is available to stream from Monday, September 27th, through Sunday, October 3rd.

Like her equally beloved “Mary Tyler Moore” show co-star Ed Asner, Cloris Leachman kept on working until her very last days, never shying away from projects that were unflinching in both their subject matter and vital representation. The fact Phil Connell’s “Jump, Darling” features one of Leachman’s last screen roles is enough to make this film an essential watch, yet it is also worth a look for its unsentimental portrayal of the devotion between Russell (Thomas Duplessie) and his grandmother, Margaret (Leachman), both of whom refuse to be placed in a traditional box. Margaret wants to remain in her house rather than be sent to a nursing home, while Russell seeks work as a drag queen, much to the disapproval of his longtime partner. Though Leachman is visibly frail, she is more than up to the task of delivering raw emotion as well as the occasional biting one-liner. I savored the scene she shares with fellow screen veteran Jayne Eastwood in a supermarket, which Leachman punctuates with a well-timed expletive. Though the premise of Russell and Margaret making unlikely housemates suggests a comedy on the order of “Mother,” the film is a much more somber affair, most enlivened by the drag acts where Russell gets to express his inner exuberance, especially when he gives a lap dance to his new closeted lover, right in front of the man’s oblivious girlfriend. Margaret’s love of skating parallels Leachman’s passion for acting, leading to a beautiful final moment where we see the woman lying in bed on the verge of death—and with her skates on.