Congratulations to Reeling: The Chicago International Gay and Lesbian Film Festival on reaching the milestone of its 32nd year. You don't look a day over 31 and it's never too soon to start lying about your age.
The festival, which opens on Sept. 18 at the Music Box Theater on Southport, runs for a week through Sept. 25. The majority of the Reeling screenings take place at the Landmark Century Cinema in the Century Mall on Clark Street, with others being held at Chicago Filmmakers on Clark St. in Andersonville. Once again, the organizers deserve kudos for selecting a stellar array of shorts and full-length features, comedies, dramas and documentaries. This week's Reel Advice column is the second in a series of reviews of selected titles being screened at Reeling. (Advance tickets for Reeling are available at reelingfilmfestival.org.)
Sept. 19, 2014, 9:30 p.m., Landmark Century Cinema: At 25, with films such as Laurence Anyways, Heartbeats and I Killed My Mother, to his credit, gay Canadian filmmaker/actor Xavier Dolan, doesn't seem to be able to do anything wrong. His newest movie, Tom at the Farm, an old-fashioned, erotically charged psychological thriller, shows that Dolan is as adept at creating spine-tingling chills as he is at sensitively portraying the story of a transgender person's journey.
Taking the lead again (as he did in Heartbeats and I Killed My Mother), Dolan plays the titular character, an urban young man who works as an editor at an ad agency in Montreal, heading to the country for his closeted boyfriend Guillaume's funeral. He is welcomed to Guillaume's childhood home by Agathe (Lise Roy), Guillaume's mother. However, that night, while he is asleep, he gets a different kind of welcome from Francis (Pierre-Yves Cardinal), his boyfriend's hot, redneck, cokehead, homophobic, sociopath older brother. Francis basically threatens Tom's life if he tells Agathe that they were a couple.
Pretty soon, Francis is harassing Tom on a regular basis, beginning with in the men's room at the church where Guillaume's funeral is being held. When Tom threatens to tell Agathe the truth, Francis brutally assaults him. Before he realizes it, Tom is being drawn into the warped web of the Longchamp farm. The homoerotic tension between Tom and Francis increases exponentially. In fact, Tom and Francis' tango scene is not to be missed. The fact remains, however, that Tom is trapped and his descent into madness looks like it will be swift.
In what appears to be a moment of clarity, Tom calls Sarah (Evelyne Brochu), a co-worker of his and Guillaume's, who is the subject of a fabricated romance to keep Agathe in the dark about her son's homosexuality. But her arrival at the farm sours quickly and when Tom finally gets a glimpse into the Longchamp family legend courtesy of a bartender, he realizes there is only one thing left to do. Suspenseful and sexually simmering, unnerving and unforgettable, Tom at the Farm is another well-deserved feather in Dolan's cap. In French with subtitles.