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The 10 Best Queer Films of 2017

In 2017, queerness on screen is no synonym for homosexuality writ large, but a strategy of resisting and unsettling categories.

The 10 Best Queer Films of 2017
Photo: Samuel Goldwyn Films

The year’s best queer films are at times haunted by the dread of AIDS or paternal loss, of sons holding on to their fathers’ hands but not until the fathers are dying. Many of these films are also driven by the fear of shame over unpredictable bodily alliances. Sometimes that shame is overcome with the help of literature. Other times literature is all one has left, along with the testimonial properties of heartbreak. The sad link between these films is that the resilience of queer lives is only matched by the resilience of shame as an affect structuring bodies from Brooklyn to Yorkshire, and seemingly forever. No wonder some have learned to just keep on cruising, as if to take off before queer guilt turns up to remind us of queerness’s heavy price.

Most remarkably, however, may be how, in 2017, queerness on screen is no synonym for homosexuality writ large, but a strategy—unconscious, corporeal, literary—of resisting and unsettling categories. A way of daring the body to go elsewhere and the unsaid to be uttered at last, as silence has never not equaled death. A way of coming and going instead of having to choose one or the other. Queerness appears beyond its sexual meaning, as that ultimate form of derailing, popping up in the middle of Parisian orgies and auditoriums, in highbrow fantasies of the Italian countryside and in the numbing gloom of British wilderness: a little bit of love where there was only lust, control, or erudition. Diego Semerene.


The 10 Best Queer Films of 2017

10. Staying Vertical

On paper, Alain Guiraudie’s Staying Vertical sounds like a great many relationship dramas. Léo (Damien Bonnard) is a drifting screenwriter who alternatingly resides in hotel rooms and crashes with strangers, becoming involved with Marie (India Hair), a woman living somewhere in the French countryside. They have a child together, and Marie leaves Léo and the baby, which inspires the man to grapple with his selfishness as he struggles to raise his son and come up with a screenplay adequate enough to pay his mounting expenses. But little is ordinary about Staying Vertical, which has more in common with Guiraudie’s Stranger by the Lake than is initially apparent. Both exhibit a powerfully tactile understanding of sexual relationships as universes onto themselves, both overwhelmingly concern stifled male sexuality, and both pivot on heroes who are essentially and existentially displaced voyeurs. Guiraudie simulates true chaos by refusing to adhere to standardized notions of foreshadowing and payoff. This film can’t be called a thriller, domestic drama, or morality tale, as it’s a hybrid that captures various interior states of panic and detachment—as well as a longing for escape from these emotional realms. The climax restores some measure of orientation with poetic symbolism that contextualizes Staying Vertical as a coming-of-age story, but it scarcely reassures us, because Guiraudie has so confidently sent us scurrying out and about in the desperate farcical wilderness, where anything goes. Chuck Bowen


The 10 Best Queer Films of 2017

9. Strong Island

Strong Island is most compelling as an examination of director Yance Ford himself, a transgender man who struggled with his sexual identity throughout his time at Hamilton College, which overlapped with his brother’s death. Ford excavates this past as a simultaneous act of civic justice and personal understanding. The most powerful passages here invoke a contrast between two very different Yances: the stone-faced man we see in stark, close-up confessionals, a rigorously self-assured person who talks truth to power on racial injustice and the dehumanization of crime statistics, and the young person glimpsed in photographs who once identified as a woman and grappled with her estrangement from her family. Both Yances directly inform the way the filmmaker views his relationship with his brother’s death today. Sam C. Mac


The 10 Best Queer Films of 2017

8. The Ornithologist

No orgy is complete without the participation of at least one person for whom the word “prophylactic” means “pocket protector.” João Pedro Rodrigues isn’t the only filmmaker contributing to our current and unmistakably pink-sploitation renaissance. But with all due deference to this, the year of the peach, Rodrigues is arguably the only one who consistently makes films without a safe word. Such is his dogged pursuit of culturally hyperconscious pleasure that he even inverts what would be typically thought of as text and subtext in arty rough trade. Rugged naturalist Fernando’s (Paul Hamy) picaresque river trip bears surface comparisons to the life of St. Anthony of Padua, patron saint of missed connections. But, long before the director himself emerges to add meta to his money shot, The Ornithologist is cruising the nooks and crannies of its creator-protagonist’s amygdala, from the rope burns of bondage to covert, subterranean piss play. If Alain Guiraudie’s Stranger by the Lake transmogrified into Disneyland’s “It’s a Small World,” that would only begin to suggest the ways that The Ornithologist’s survivalism playfully distorts the earlier film’s death impulse. Eric Henderson

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The 10 Best Queer Films of 2017

7. Thelma

The most beguiling aspects of Joachim Trier’s Thelma aren’t in the present-day relationship that the titular character (Eili Harboe) develops with her female college classmate, but in the queerness of the child she once was. Whether we believe Thelma’s child self to be a telekinetic killer or the projection of parental nightmares, here queerness appears in the surrendering to sexual curiosity but also in the general strangeness of our most primal feelings, such as making a little brother disappear. Although Thelma’s flashbacks aim to elucidate some of the mysteriousness of the narrative, they amount to a much creepier standalone tale of sibling rivalry and Scandinavian froideur with lethal consequences. The child is refreshingly allowed to take shape as the mound of incomprehension and cruel desires it so often is. Semerene


The 10 Best Queer Films of 2017

6. Princess Cyd

In the underrated Henry Gamble’s Birthday Party, Stephen Cone sketches out an unassumingly astute cinema that aims to expose the bread and butter of American sexuality—religion, hypocrisy, repression—without shaming it. Cone achieves this through a complete lack of interest in stylistic experimentation, and delectably so. In his new film, his images are once again much like his main characters: awfully conventional on the outside but boiling on the inside. In Princess Cyd, he continues to explore white people’s stowed-away desires through the deceiving aesthetics of a Lifetime movie—a courteous sadism of sorts that cloaks uncomfortable truths with the most familiar of aesthetics. Princess Cyd focuses on the awkward relationship between a successful (and successfully frigid) writer, Miranda Ruth (Rebecca Spence), and her literature-averse niece, Cyd (Jessie Pinnick), when the latter comes to visit her aunt in Chicago for a couple of weeks. They’re largely alien to each other in a home haunted by memories of Cyd’s deceased mother, Miranda’s sister. The erotic tension between the two is only faintly palpable, as Cone is no unabashed provocateur. Although Miranda’s literary passion and independence, her tacit queerness, awaken Cyd’s own queer feelings, they get quickly diverted toward another woman, local butch barista Katie (Malic White). By then the cat’s out of the bag, and both aunt and niece have learned to accept the risks—without the shame—that come with strange books and strangers’ bodies. Seremene


The 10 Best Queer Films of 2017

5. 4 Days in France

Finally a film about a classical music-listening, Rimbaud-reading, sweater-wearing gay man addicted to Grindr, though to be fair, writer-director Jérôme Reybaud’s 4 Days in France is about much more than just the digital sexual compulsions that afflict so many gays. This is a kind of ode to cruising writ large, to the intransitivity of cruising: looking for no object at all, but for its own sake. And there’s something endearing, if not uncanny, about the way the film evokes universal truths about erotic wandering through the extremely specific figure of the French gay man, and Parisian white and preppy gayness in particular. Queer mobility is here a luxury and a curse, enabled by an alfa Romeo, Parisian couture, and lots of free time, but beleaguered by isolation. There’s something liberating about such a steady creative hand that rejects justifying the twists and turns of a storyline, which becomes in 4 Days in France something akin to cruising itself. Pierre’s (Pascal Cervo) driving around, bearing a complete openness to strangeness and to the strangers he comes across, amount to an acclamation of not just this brand of fearlessness that gays tend to develop if they’re to survive at all, but of French joie de vivre. That is, a commitment to the present, to pleasure beyond productivity. Semerene


The 10 Best Queer Films of 2017

4. God’s Own Country

God’s Own Country is so moving because Lee manages to paint a multi-dimensional portrait of Johnny (Josh O’Connor) and his family dynamics—one that feels at once incredibly British and uncannily familiar. This is a film about masculinity as an impossible and necessarily toxic project. Writer-director Francis Lee captures not only what masculinity does and how it comes undone, but the complex apparatus that keeps it into place: the family’s surveillance, the silence, the shame. Johnny’s contentious relationship with his ailing father (Ian Hart) adds profundity and credibility to the young man’s excursion into queerness, or into pleasure writ large. Lee suggests that to be a man is to play a miserable game of replacement and reenactment, with the son picking up where the father leaves off. Masculinity in God’s Own Country is, despite popular belief, the most frail of human endeavors. It’s tenderness that’s ultimately aligned with life-giving strength, as in the way Gheorghe (Alec Secareanu) resuscitates an almost dead newborn lamb by rubbing it like a mother would a child, or when Johnny musters enough courage to touch his father’s hand, as if for the first time. Semerene

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The 10 Best Queer Films of 2017

3. Paris 05:59: Théo & Hugo

Besides being a film about desire and the potential solidarity to arise from erotic scenarios, Paris 05:59: Théo & Hugo is also about Paris. The city is perfectly set up for the most electrifying orgies to take place but also for dealing with whatever consequences come out of them in the most rational manner. Here, two gay men head to the hospital for post-exposure prophylaxis following an orgy with the same straight face one presents when going in for, say, a broken arm. Paris appears as an anti-Vegas of sorts, where instead of leaving the indignity of sex behind once it’s over, its delights are in fact never over because a commitment to pleasure is bound to produce it even, or especially, in the most unlikely places. The Paris of the film isn’t just the one “we will always have” in some kind of fantastic future, but what we have right now—despite the dread of AIDS or the perverse fleetingness of human relationships. This is Paris as a place for those who aren’t just shame-less about pleasure, but responsible for the pleasures that they give and the ones that they receive. Semerene


The 10 Best Queer Films of 2017

2. Call Me by Your Name

The love/lust story between Elio (Timothée Chalamet) and Oliver (Armie Hammer) has gotten a lot of critical attention, but their relationship, in many respects, merely supports a larger cinematic accomplishment by director Luca Guadagnino. Namely, the film’s house. In Call Me by Your Name, Guadagnino is able to architect a fully fleshed fantasy world, one we may refer to as literarily pornographic in the best sense of the term, akin to the most masterful word-making feats in cinema such as the mansion of unspeakable perversions in Pasolini’s Saló: 120 Days of Sodom, James Bidgood’s gay utopia in Pink Narcissus, Manuel de Oliveira’s anthropomorphic home in Visit or Memories and Confessions, and even Maya Deren’s surreal abode in Meshes of the Afternoon. Elio and Oliver’s relationship would have risked falling flat were it not underpinned by the raw credibility of the most literal structures that house it. The house in Call Me by Your Name is a dream world where swimming pool water seems to render bodies permeable, effacing their borders while sparing the crisp integrity of book pages, and where living room couches pull parent and child together for either an orgasmic daily dose of German poetry, or the finest father-to-son speech in the history of cinema. Semerene


The 10 Best Queer Films of 2017

1. BPM (Beats Per Minute)

The queer art of survival through debauchery and improbable alliances meets the French gift for conversational sparring in BPM (Beats Per Minute), which dramatizes the frantic lives of ACT UP activists in Paris in the early 1990s. The result is one gut-wrenching ode to joie de vivre—a political orgy of sorts where queer kinship is the only buffer zone keeping dying and desiring from becoming the exact same thing. An army of lovers debates without end, like cruising, as if trying to speak their way out of death, or into it, ultimately exacerbating human condition’s most basic tenet: brevity. The average heart rate indeed. BPM avoids archival, pedagogical, and sentimental approaches to its material by placing a believable love story at the very core of its militant bacchanalia, provoking precisely the type of identification, or recognition, that ACT UP’s theatrical activism aimed to forge. Derek Jarman took ACT UP’s slogan, “Stop looking at us, start listening to us,” to its most radical cinematic conclusion in Blue, stripping the frame from everything but a single color. Writer-director Robin Campillo has more graphic demands in mind: the ruby redness of fake blood staining corporate carpet, the melancholy lilac of Kaposi’s sarcoma dotting the bodies of lovers-cum-makeshift-immunologists, the gut-wrenching darkness of the wake in the final sequence where friends and lovers show up to smooth over the edges of departure—and the deceased boy’s mother lets out, matter of factly, “Already?” Semerene

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