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Leo and Rey (Pépon Nieto and Carlos Fuentes), the heroes of ‘Boystown’, are an amiable pair of gay geeks who happen to live in an up-and-coming district of Madrid. Their discussions of superhero lore are credibly esoteric, though – whether through translatorly bafflement or fear of Marvel’s lawyers - the subtitles tend to render them slightly garbled. Though they role play as X-Men in the bedroom, the comic book heroes who the couple most resemble are Asterix and Obelix – affable, no-nonsense Mediterranean’s, dopey and prone to bickering but thoroughly good natured. Indeed, for all its ball-gags, stranglings and threesomes, 'Boystown' reveals itself to be decidedly Goscinny and Uderzo in vibe, a feel-good romp in which decent unpretentious folk triumph against mendacious calculation, personal vanity and matricidal psychosis. The villain of the piece is Victor (Pablo Puyol), a Patrick Batemanesque property developer prepared to stop at nothing – including homicide - in order to bring about his dream of turning the Chueca district into a haven of wealthy, voguish homosexuality. His programme of urban renewal turns out to involve killing off elderly residents who refuse to move out and driving a wedge between Rey and Leo, the latter of whom he attempts, via a regime of waxings, workouts and art openings, to transform from an unreconstructed slob of a driving instructor to a paragon of gay metropolitan sophistication. Needless to say his schemes are brought to naught by our heroes and a supporting cast of downright decent eccentrics, including a vulgar lesbian fruiterer, a mother and son detective team (she‘s slave to a catalogue of recherché phobias and neuroses, he’s realising he might be gay) and a cripplingly nervous student of Leo’s.
As should be pretty apparent by now, ‘Boystown’ aspires to little more than raising a few smiles. In this regard it amply succeeds; while hardly inspiring, it’s a fun film with a likeable cast, and boasts its fair share of sly and outrageous moments. But – and the same can be said of many comedies – for a film so little interested in intellectually or emotionally taxing its audience, 'Chuecatown' also manages to de-lid some pretty interesting cans of worms. Like Leo and Rey themselves, who blunder into a deadly serious situation proving oafs may venture where the po-faced fear to tread, Flahn’s movie wades blithely into a whole host of ticklish controversies regarding identity politics, gay rights and political correctness. Through Victor - an educated bourgeois as bigoted as any redneck homophobe – the movie mounts a critique of the recuperation of homosexuality as a lifestyle choice, a mode of being that entails couture literacy, assiduous personal grooming routines, mordant snobbery and the patronage of minimalist wine bars. The notion that homosexuality is only recognisable or tolerable in combination with cultural snobbery and body fascism is of course thoroughly deserving of mockery and scorn; what ‘Chuecatown’ proposes instead, however, is a neutered and weirdly contradictory liberal permissiveness. The candour with which Leo and Rey’s sexuality is presented is commendable, but there are several points where there ‘ordinary Joe’-ness seems overdone, the lack of interest or even distaste with which they approach less mainstream areas of cultural, political and sexual life (foregrounded in a scene where Rey’s trying to give the murderer the slip in a gay bathhouse; cue plenty of farcical stumbling-in-on in flagrante couples) a little troubling.
Comedy, of course, relies on inversions and reversals (Hahaha! The old woman is more foulmouthed and hornier than her hunky son! Ohoho! Straights are as rare in ‘Chuecatown’ as credible gay characters are in mainstream cinema!). It also, of course, works by lampooning the over-serious, the affected, the pompous and presumptuous. So I’m well aware that I risk (arguably legitimate) claims of taking dumb fun too seriously when I say that I find ‘Chuecatown’s’ lampooning of liberal muddle-headedness and advocacy of down-to-earth tolerance both fascinating and a little distressing. Tolerance comes naturally to our easy-going if somewhat slobby heroes. By contrast, Victor, the villain of ‘Chuecatown’, is a high maintenance kind of guy, who is as discriminating sartorially as he is discriminatory socio-politically. But are ‘discriminations’ in the sense of bigotry and ‘discrimination’ in the sense of connoisseurship, of the investment of time, taste and effort in order to decide what one should endorse and associate oneself with, necessarily the same? ‘Tolerance’ often amounts to little more than a disinterested shrug, but discrimination (as the clunky P.C. term ‘positive discrimination’ seeks to remind us) can refer to proactive and decisive measures taken in order to best allocate resources; it by no means always denotes exclusivity or prejudice. By poking fun at things which seem affected or unnatural, the product of calculating discrimination rather than ‘natural’ inclination (outlandish art world fashions, extravagance, po-facedness etc.); 'Chuecatown' actually adopts what has traditionally been a homophobic stance. Of course (and here I’m beginning to tie myself in liberalist knots in exactly the fashion that the film derides) you could construe it as delicious irony that it’s queers, here, who defer to ‘natural’ common sense and scorn affectation - and you could definitely mount a cogent argument for the ridiculousness of P.C. hypercorrectness and the prevalence of emperor’s new clothes syndrome in the art world. Even so, the film’s essential preference for life’s simple pleasures has some depressing implications.
There’s been a lot of talk on the blogs of certain cultural critics recently about the importance of recovering discrimination - in the sense of an arduously acquired faculty of taste and expertise which entails the elevation of some things over others. As consumers, we are more and more encouraged to be - and rewarded for being - dilettantes, up for trying anything once. This catholicity of taste is presumed to go hand in hand with a more general broad-mindedness that entails tolerance for those of other faiths, cultures, races, sexualities etc. With a few exceptions (like tribal loyalty to a football team - though even that is increasingly an advertising pitch rather than a reality) single-minded loyalties and strong preferences are seen as sad, illogical or even perverse. If we can expect to have to change our profession however many times why should we not be equally flexible taste wise?
What gets lost in this attempt to lose out on nothing is depth of engagement, and, with it, those areas of culture and society less amenable to being packaged into unintimidating bite size servings. ‘Chuecatown’, even when it’s being crude or outrageous or slightly subversive (the ball-breaking matriarch who watches torture porn while ironing and doles out hair-raisingly vivid homophobic slurs to her son’s boyfriend, the homophobic female politician who turns out to be a drag queen, the whole idea of anti-straight hate crime), remains pretty tame. It’s pointless to criticise a film on the basis of what it doesn’t do, but the movie’s attempts to satirise the promotion of a saleable, PR-friendly model of homosexuality fall flat because it is itself so complicit, so eminently consumable. While it is, as I’ve said, both a likeable and a funny movie, and while seeing a gay spin on well-worn rom-com conventions is still kind of novel and interesting, one wishes ‘Chuecatown’ was a little more daring, a little more inventive - maybe a little less likeable.
For though it’s to be applauded for insisting that, homosexuality by no means inevitably entails drag, style-consciousness, witty urbanity, sexual promiscuity, SandM or, indeed, any other mode of behaviour or self-expression, by doing so ‘Chuecatown’ suggests it was never homosexuality that was the ‘problem’ in the first place - just gays’ pesky habit of behaving flamboyant and contentious and their hyper-stylised ways. Writing in the late 1980s, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick noticed that although psychoanalysts seemed to have taken steps to counter their discipline’s traditional homophobia and were ‘prepared to like some gay men,’ the sort of gay man they tended to favour ‘a) is already grown up, and (b) acts masculine.’ Even among politically progressive queers, she argued, the perceived need to counter stereotypes about ‘effeminate’ gays and ‘mannish’ lesbians had led to the allocation of a ‘marginal or stigmatised position’ to such members of the homosexual community (Sedgwick, Tendencies, 156-7). ‘Chuecatown’ - in which groomed, style-conscious or sub culturally affiliated gays (drag queens, leathered-up bears) tend to be presented as villains or clowns - risks the same thing. Its refreshingly blokeish heroes are a departure from gay cliché, but their sheer normalcy, their suspicion or unconcern with erudition, politics and leftfield tastes brings with it its own problems.
Gays can make enjoyable Euro comedies about mothers in law just as well as straights; but this is no reason not to prefer the risky, risqué, occasionally pretentious and/or obnoxious output of queer auteurs like Kenneth Anger, Jack Smith or John Waters. Watching ‘Chuecatown’, I found myself wishing the villain of the piece had been better developed. Conniving, ruthless and driven, he could have been made much more of, especially had we been made to see things more from his point of view. Turning off ‘Chuecatown’, pretty well entertained but also kind of saddened, I was put in mind of two recent attempts at presenting a history of queer culture: the National Portrait Gallery’s Gay Icons exhibition and Electronica duo Matmos 2006 album The Rose has Teeth in the Mouth of the Beast. The former - which saw various queer cultural luminaries selecting images of ‘icons’ gay and straight in order to commemorate the Stonewall riots - was, for the most part cosy, safe and generally well-intentioned - if sometimes queasily popularist. The latter, by contrast, presented aural portraits of figures (Valerie Solanas, William Burroughs, Patricia Highsmith) who were often tragic, divisive or downright unlikeable, but whose legacies were incontestably rich and vital, still capable of evoking debate and response rather than cosy consensus. Both approaches have their merits and drawbacks - if the National Portrait Gallery show was too ‘nice’ then the Matmos LP’s focus on mercurial fuck-ups might be said to suggest some kind of essential correlation between homosexuality and the overwrought, tragic and abrasive. While its villain has some of the subversive criminal allure of the figures Matmos were drawn to, ‘Chuecatown’ ultimately belongs falls firmly in the ‘Gay Icons’ bracket. It’s a fun enough film in its own way, but if it only cared more about caring more, I suspect I might have cared a little more about it.
Country: Spain
Budget: £
Length: 93mins
Bibliography
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Tendencies. Rouledge 1994
Pub/2009
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