LOOKING FOR CHEYENNE

LOOKING FOR CHEYENNE
Directed by Valerie Minetto
Played the Seattle Gay and Lesbian film Festival
NWFF Tuesday Octover 17

By Franz Bieberkopf

Not long ago, queer cinema was outsider cinema, revolutionary cinema. Pasolini, Fassbinder, Borden, and Jarman are a few of the directors that come to mind whose sexualilties were indigenous to their religious, political, and social visions. Now, when the template for gay comedy is Will and Grace, and dramas aspire to the neo-profundity of sentimentalized angst, most films for the gay and lesbian market are nothing but gaysploitation crap.

So thank heavens for the Seattle Gay and Lesbian Film Festival for bringing the underground back to the surface for a couple weeks, and proving that queer film-makers are not all career-mad compromisers. There is a lot of junk to wade through, but finding a jewel like “Looking for Cheyenne” makes it all worth while.

As (possibly) the only male in attendance, I may be of the minority opinion that Valerie Minetto’s film is, until the cop-out ending, the most ravishingly nihilistic look at the pointlessness of love in a world suicided by indifference since Bunuel’s “L’Age D’Or.” The film had many walk-outs, perhaps owning to the fact that the film’s most likable character was a heterosexual man who would not take a no from his lesbian one-night stand. But in refusing to pander to audience demographic, “Looking for Cheyenne” attains a purity almost unknown in contemporary cinema. Until, that is, the whole thing goes up in smoke in the final frames.

The story, in brief, follows school teacher Sonia through two erotic relationships (one with a man, the other with a woman) after leaving the woman she really loves, Cheyenne, whose drop-out lifestyle Sonia finds too extreme. Minetto is not so much interested in the rebound sex as the inner world of the person who has chosen materialism over love.
Throughout the film, characters speak to each other through dreams, and walk in and out of realities from which they are separated by both space and invitation. Minetto is not so much a surrealist as one who disregards the limitations of material reality. A character who was in a room at one point in time has the right to enter that room at any other given point, regardless of what is happening in that room. In this world, a person cannot compartmentalize conflicting experiences; neither can they deny any aspect of themselves that might agitate another dimension of personality.

French politics are not as simple as they were in 1968, and Minetto is no facile post-Godardian. Her characters are not popping Coke tabs while quoting Marx. They are having sex while contemplating suicide. And not just personal suicide of the self, but the collective suicide of a nation, a culture, a world. “Looking for Cheyenne” had a perfect ending before its mystical despair was compromised by a sentimental resolution designed to fulfill audience fantasies. But the film had already lost whatever audience might have found pleasure in such an ending, and I wonder how many of them were actually won back by the reassurances of the film’s final images.