Boys to Men

On the heels of the successful Boys Life series of gay short films comes this new collection from Jour De Fete films, a collection as mixed in quality as these things often are. Phillip Bartell's "Crush," which kicks things off, is a cute coming-of-age story in which a young girl develops a crush on an older boy, discovers he's gay, then tries to fix him up with another boy she thinks is also gay. It's nicely acted, though the overly sappy songs on the soundtrack can be overbearing. Duncan Tucker's "The Mountain King" depicts a gay hustler seducing a straight guy and turning him on to the joys of cocaine and anal penetration. It makes good use of its minimal locations and two-person cast, but it's not exactly convincing: Imagine the uproar if the tables were turned and a heterosexual character "converted" a gay man. Dan Castle's "...lost" is about...um...naked guys having sex. If there's a deeper point, it's lost amid the dangling body parts (note to heterosexual filmmakers: Luring audiences to the art house with a little gratuitous nudity is an effective tactic). But the festival's real treasure is its closing piece, Carl Pfirman's "The Confession," in which an elderly gay man in the throes of a terminal disease seeks a blessing from a Catholic priest, risking alienation from his life partner as such a blessing requires him to confess his homosexual "sins." Elderly gay men, if they show up on movie screens at all, are usually depicted as perverts, so this loving and snippy couple go a little way toward balancing the scales. Even if that weren't an issue, however, it's a touching love story that reverberates longer than the others in the set.