Fridae

I am convinced that I have a rogue lesbian gene running around somewhere in my body. Proof of point: after playing Russian roulette with the multitude of shows on offer for the 16th Singapore International Film Festival, I ended up with tickets to three lesbian movies.

My gay partner was understandably aghast at my movie choices and began to eye my k d lang and Melissa Etheridge albums with great suspicion. Until today, I'm still unsure if he was really tied up at work (on advance notice) on the exact same days the three lesbian movies were screened.

Comforting myself with the thought that a date with yours truly and a free movie pass would be snapped up like Colin Farrell's nude butt shots, I was not unduly worried - which goes to prove that how gullible I can be. Apparently, to the gay community (or at least to the gay friends I know), an evening spent at a lesbian movie had as much appeal as sitting in a room filled with coughing and sneezing SARS patients.

Fortunately, I had my ever-reliable trolley-dolley pal of mine who graciously agreed to attend the screenings of all three movies with me (after I consented to chauffeur him to and from home).

Unfortunately, two out of the three movies merely reinforce my growing misgivings that a night out at a lesbian movie does not an evening of gay entertainment make.

The first movie on the list was Ho Yuk - Let's Love Hong Kong. Touted as the first movie made in Hong Kong by a woman with women in love with each other as the main theme, it won the First Prize for Fiction from the International Critics Jury at the Festival International de Cinema da Figueira da Foz 2002 in Portugal.

Directed by Yau Ching from Hong Kong, Ho Yuk is essentially one long trying-to-get-to-know-you cruising story stretched out for the entire movie. The movie focuses on the intersecting lives of three lesbians who are looking for love to fill up the voids in their empty urban lives.

The main protagonist, Chan, leads a double life - in real life, she lives with her parents in a cramped flat while in cyber life, she is one of the "sex workers" of a porn website named "Let's Love." Listless and looking as if she would collapse any moment, Chan spends her free time house-hunting aimlessly and wondering the streets dressed like a man.

Zero, an attractive tomboy who lives in a seat in an abandoned theatre, falls for the real Chan and plays serial stalker throughout the movie. Unable to respond to Zero's charming puppy love, Chan instead expends her sexual energies with a mainland prostitute old enough to be her aunty.

Rounding up the trio of female protagonists is the successful ball-busting lipstick lesbian, Nicole, who happens to be an insomniac and a nymphomaniac. Unable to sleep at night, she visits the "Let's Love" website and swoons over the cyber Chan who is shown doing a tasteless strip tease in a Chinese operatic outfit and sucking on a dildo with as much enthusiasm as if it were a hot iron brand.

Unfazed after wasting a couple of hours at a movie about three lesbians that meanders and ends up nowhere, my pal and I still turned up (ok, so I had to throw in a free meal for him) at the screening of Argentinean lesbian chick flick Suddenly (Tan de Repente).

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Directed by Diego Lerman, it was the winner of the FIPRESCI critics' prize at the Viennale. Shot in back and white, Suddenly features two super-scary punk lesbians, Mao and Lenin, who decided to kidnap a lingerie shop assistant, Marcia, after the latter, being straight, refuses to have homosexual sex (duh!) with them.

So the three ladies and a hijacked taxi then go off on a road trip a la Thelma & Louise for some female bonding. After arriving at the provincial town of Rosario, they spent a couple of days at the home of Lenin's old Aunt Grace and lo and behold, the three ladies have become fast friends!

Improbable storyline notwithstanding, the action (what action?) of Suddenly is ponderous and the stereotypical portrayal of lesbians as dysfunctional individuals unable to function in normal society is simply retrogressive and appalling in this day and age.

The type-casting of the two lesbian protagonists as aggressive knife-wielding kidnappers and their act of forcing themselves on the bewildered Marcia further propagates two outdated myths: firstly, no straight woman would be interested in a lesbian unless forced at knife-point and secondly, a straight woman would always be infinitely more attractive than a fellow lesbian any day - even though she looks as if she should seriously consider buying a stepmaster.

Thankfully, just when I was able to write off state of lesbian cinema as being completely hopeless, along came Barbara Wong's charming docu-movie Women's Private Parts. While not an ostensible lesbian movie per se, the Catergory III sounding movie was a refreshing break from the two previous "trying-hard-to-be-art" films.

Composed of frank and intimate interviews, Women's Private Parts adopts a fly-on-the-wall approach and draws the audience into the private lives of Chinese women from Hong Kong, Shenzhen, Beijing and even Singapore (represented by our resident porn queen Annabel Chong of World's Biggest Gang Bang fame).

With interviewees comprising housewives, mainland mistresses, teenage girls, working women, masseuses, 70s sleaze starlet Siu Yam Yam, Hong Kong director Ann Hui, a male gigolo, a S & M drag queen, teenage girls, a toddler, etc; Women's Private Parts covers an extensive range of topics including masturbation, sex, marriage, love and of course, lesbianism.

The segment on lesbians involving two butches and a lipstick lesbian were particularly insightful. While the butch lesbians began by discussing how they are not that different from men, their softer sides were revealed when one of them expressed her belief in the romantic notion of her loving only one girl for the rest of her whole life (and that one girl loving her back).

Likewise, the intimate scenes of lesbian couples showing concern for each other and sharing light kisses were realistic and well captured. The lipstick lesbian also spoke up for the pros of same-sex love-making by explaining why women are preferable to men because unlike the latter, women do not smell, have body hair, and suck lips like a vacuum cleaner.

Unlike Let's Love Hong Kong and Suddenly, Barbara Wong's movie was finally able to provide examples of positive screen dykes and femmes who are not type-cast as social misfits or engaged in American Pie II-like sapphic romps that pander to the heterosexual male's fantasy of lesbian love-making. So when the credits began to roll for Women's Private Parts, I am finally able to heave a deep sigh of relief in the knowledge that there's hope yet for lesbian cinema.