zumarrad

I saw this short film long, long ago. It's a comparatively straightforward tale of a drag queen, Jewel, her boyfriend and the things they experience during a day together. One scene involves Jewel dressing her boyfriend up in women's clothes and teaching him the tricks.

It's a sweet, slightly sad tale but most people today would want to see it because the actress who plays Jewel, Georgina Beyer, subsequently became the world's first transsexual mayor, and then the world's first transsexual member of Parliament, in her native New Zealand. Georgina was born male. In Jewel's Darl, she's absolutely gorgeous. I am unsure whether or not she'd undergone full gender reassignment at the time.

I actually enjoyed this film up to a point. Sure, it's not great cinema (it's a fun TV movie, I feel) and it does overly draw on stereotypes, but it had some very enjoyable moments.

I started to get fed up with the constant flow of stereotypes regarding gay men, but then took into consideration that the characters were two small-town Aussie blokes in their 50s, who try to find out about how to "act gay" from the local hairdresser - a flaming whoopsie who is, in fact, a straight man pretending to be gay so he can safely score other men's wives - and gay porn sites. In short, they don't have any real example of gay men to draw on. That's why their experiences in Sydney annoyed me, because nearly everyone they met in the Sydney gay club was a drag queen or other highly theatrical, femmy kind of gay person. I was hoping they would meet actual gay couples who were, you know, ordinary human beings. So that bit was disappointing. On the other hand a)if those guys were visiting during Mardi Gras then it might not have been an exaggeration and b) it was just an excuse to get Paul Hogan into skin tight foil bike shorts, and hell, he's still looking fairly reasonable! And c) the fact their new friends were so ragingly, stereotypically flamboyant ended up being necessary if the farcical events towards the end (when the Sydney gays arrive for their local do, further problematising their desire to stop pretending to be gay)were to work.

The scenes in which Caton and Hoges practice "being gay" were priceless. Ditto the bit where they pretend to be a gay couple for the (clearly perturbed) assessor, Pete Postlethwaite. Why? Because they're so terrible at it and so obviously uncomfortable.

Just as it was still looking a bit offensive, though, came the heartwarming cheese. The scam can't be exposed while Pete Postlethwaite is there, because they risk jail. They also don't want to upset their new gay friends, whose support of their "out" life in small-town Australia makes them feel so hypocritical. Caton's daughter has arrived with her new GIRLFRIEND in tow - cue the acceptance! And so Caton does a wonderful speech where, without stating explicitly whether they're a couple or not, he talks about acceptance and about how he loves Hoges. It's vastly better than what they did while being assessed, and it also has a classic response from the other men of their generation in the town. ("I knew they weren't gay. Mateship is a wonderful thing.") All in all, this is no classic but it made me laugh quite a few times.