Vanilla

I wasn't fortunate enough to have had the French accompanying film and saw the American short "Vanilla" as a standalone. How I wish I hadn't. This could have been so good as a trip through delusions of madness and paranoia involving a serial killer alongside his victims and the lad who found the body of the perp.

Instead we got a disjointed mush of foolish dreams and bad acting. I'm sure we weren't meant to get a connected narrative as the director presumably wanted to be "thought provoking" and edgy. He utterly failed. I've mentioned before in reviews that I loathe artiness for its own sake. Artiness is fine if it is witty or puts over points and ideas in an original manner. This lamentable effort did no such thing.

Joseph Graham both wrote and directed the first of the two short films on this DVD. He has some interesting ideas both textually and visually and manages to condense into 47 minutes a film that packs a wallop.

'VANILLA' is anything but vanilla, if the term refers to the dichotomies between vanilla and kinky in the usual sense. A young lad Jeff (Ryan A. Allen) is a highschool photographer who happens upon the kneeling suicide victim body of a beefy serial killer in the Bay Area. Questioned by the police and his father, he becomes obsessed with the string of murders linked to sexual encounters with young men, and his curiosity contributes to an art project as well as his own drive to experience how the murders took place. Just how far his curiosity leads him is the fairly dramatic conclusion to this short film. The acting is pretty 'basic' cum weak, and the acting out of the trysts is heavy, but Graham does use his story as a romance with the camera: the film is appropriately shot in both black and white and color with the uses of each more important than they first appear.

'A LITTLE COMFORT' ('Just un pea de recon fort...') is a brief 36 minute French film by director Armand Lamellose that employs better actors and better cinematography, and actually a better story. Arnaud (Arthur Moncla) is a young teenager coping with his attraction to the popular hunk Guillaume (Remi Bresson) who has a steady girlfriend. Arnaud imitates his idol trying cigarettes, alcohol and sex, finds a girlfriend but when both girls leave their beaus, Guillaume (whose mother is dying and who has no family) seeks refuge with Arnaud, whose mother is more than happy to have Arnaud's 'best friend' stay with them rather than in a foster home. At last, in the comfort zone, away from the outside world, Arnaud and Guillaume bond, fall in love, and actually fit into the society that they feared would ostracize them. OR is this little tale merely the acting out of a dream for the tender little Arnaud....it is up to the audience to decide.

Films such as these, though each feel like works in progress, at least serve the intelligence of the film audience well. It has not been very long since such films would have never made it to the shelves of Amazon.com or the video stores. The success of 'Brokeback Mountain' has opened a lot of windows, and for that we should be grateful. Now let's see the polished films of similar content that languish in the darker interstices. Grady Harp, May 06

How to explain the pairing of these two completely opposite long-short films? The amateurishly overwrought American one and the cool, polished French one? Yes, Vanilla is best avoided, unless you're making a study of badness in movie-making. Just a Little Comfort isn't to be confused with the moving 2000 made-for-TV French gay coming out film Just a Question of Love (dir. Christian Faure, with Cyrille Thouvenin, Stéphan Guérin-Tillié, Eva Darlan). This short has a lazier quality. But that goes with the summer mood and the teenage boys' casual facade, though cute bi Guillaume and his passionate admirer Arnaud are both seething inside. Just a Little Comfort has a typical French elegance. Everybody looks good. Nothing is pushed too hard. For a gay film, it is provocative in beginning with straight sex, Guillaume making love with his girlfriend Van. Is there an element of gay movie-maker wish-fulfillment in the way the perfect, bee-sting-lipped Guillaume eventually consents to a brief sexual affair with the reedy, needy Arnaud? No, why? It could happen, and the film establishes that G. and A. are best buds to begin with, plus Guillaume's family life is non-existent, with his mom in a perpetual state of clinical meltdown and his dad dead. The adults are sketched in nicely, and the boys' P.O.V. justifies the sketchiness. The way Arnaud, then briefly Guillaume, softly sing along with a French song CD suggests Armand Lameloise has watched Christophe Honoré's Dans Paris and Chansons d'amour, except that this came before those films, and Lameloise's focus on a slowly blossoming gay boy's world is his own. Just a Little Comfort is just a pretty, wistful French postcard of a rueful crush, but it's the kind you might want to tack on your fridge and glance back at now and then. Why isn't there apparently anything else out since by Lamboise except an anti-discrimination piece, one 2008 episode in a TV series? As another viewer said: Vanilla, 2, Just a Little Comfort, 8. Watched on Netflix DVD that somehow got into my queue. The first short is as bad as any gay shorts anthology film (and there are lots of bad ones); the second is better than almost any.