United we’re bland Has the Boston Gay & Lesbian Film/Video Festival settled down? BY PETER KEOUGH

Equal opportunity, freedom from oppression, and now marriage: gays and lesbians just want the same rights as everyone else. But does that mean that they have to make the same movies as everyone else? Wedding bells may be ringing in the near Massachusetts future, but gay filmmaking, if the MFA’s 20th Boston Gay & Lesbian Film/Video Festival is any indication, has already settled down.

It’s only fair to point out that some of the films purported to be the best or the edgiest weren’t available for pre-screening. Those promising and unseen entries include Wild Side (2003; May 16 at 7 p.m.), from Sébastien Lifshitz, whose Come Undone was a standout in the 2001 festival, and first-time Irish director David Gleeson’s Cowboys and Angels (2003; May 20 at 8 p.m.). What remains. however, hardly sets the screen on fire. With a few notable exceptions, this year’s selections have been pleasantly domesticated.

Of course, any assimilation of gays into the mainstream is in itself subversive. In Abigail Honor’s Saints and Sinners (2004; May 15 at 3:45 p.m.), two persons initiate a process that thousands of Catholic couples undergo every year. They want to get married in a church with a priest. The problem is that Eddie and Vinnie are men. Big surprise: the New York archdiocese won’t cooperate, so in the end Eddie and Vinnie settle for an Episcopal church and an ex-priest. The suspense builds as they take their vows, meanwhile wondering whether the family and friends gathered, many of them traditional Catholics with reservations about the union, will rise and take Communion. And will the New York Times print an announcement of their wedding, the first same-sex Catholic nuptials? Saints and Sinners touches gently on familiar issues of hypocrisy, prejudice, and the power of love, but it seems less a documentary than a wedding video.

Richard Day’s Straight-Jacket (2004; May 23 at 7 p.m.), which he adapted from his own play, celebrates both a gay wedding and the candy-colored cinema of the ’50s. Guy Stone (Matt Letscher, more Bob Crane than Rock Hudson) melts the hearts of women and men with his hunky heroes on screen; off screen, he’s vapid, vain, and insatiably gay. When a tabloid photographs him being escorted by the police from a compromising establishment, his manager, Jerry (Veronica Cartwright, more Rose Marie than Thelma Ritter), concocts a scheme in which he reasserts his straight credentials by marrying ditzy superfan Sally (Carrie Preston, more Carol Burnett than Doris Day). The dialogue snaps occasionally, and a subplot involving the blacklist adds some depth, but the Frank Tashlin–like Technicolor cinematography and the winking anachronisms can’t overcome the film’s staginess.

Another screwball soufflé, with generous helpings of crude humor, falls flat in Q. Allan Brocka’s Eating Out (2004; May 22 at 8:15 p.m., with the director present). Straight Caleb (Scott Lunsford as Clint Eastwood under anæsthesia) is having trouble getting the babes. Gay roommate Kyle (Jim Verraros) claims that the chicks hit on him all the time and that if Caleb pretended to be gay, he’d score. So Caleb plays up to Marc (Ryan Carnes, who’s like Brad Pitt’s irritating kid brother), on whom Kyle has a crush, to get into the pants of Gwen (Emily Stiles, a cruder Cameron Diaz), Marc’s "fag-hag" roommate. Maybe if Oscar Wilde had written it, this hooey could have been fun, or if the characters had been less crass and superficial. There’s a phone-sex ménage-a-trois whose tenderness makes the sex genuinely erotic; still, you’d have more fun eating out than watching this movie.

It hardly needs saying that the mismatched couples in Brocka’s film get sorted out and headed to the happy ending of marriage (gay, straight, whatever). Less resolved are the lives of sons and daughters who realize from an early age that they are gay and wonder how they will break the news to the rest of the world, starting with their parents, or whether they even should. That might seem an appropriate subject for a documentary, but you wouldn’t know it from Swedish filmmaker Cecilia Neant-Falk’s Don’t You Worry, It Will Probably Pass (2003; May 22 at 5 p.m.), a pointless profile of three Swedish teenage girls who are blessed by unquestioning and supportive parents and more or less accepting peer groups. If they nonetheless dramatize their situation, that’s because they’re typical adolescents: moody, immature, self-pitying, hyper-romantic, and uncertain of their identity. Neant-Falk tarts up the self-important banalities with arty montages of archival footage, home videos taken by the kids themselves, and blurred images of lovemaking women reminiscent of softcore porn.

Far more entertaining and enlightening are the home movies of Darren Stein and Adam Shell in Put the Camera on Me (2003; screens May 23 at 5:30 p.m.), which is kind of like Capturing the Friedmans conceived as a Disney kids movie. Growing up in a sheltered community, Stein, who’s now a professional filmmaker, and his friend Shell and a number of children in the neighborhood collaborated to make some 50 movies ranging in genre from musical to noir. Filming a chorus line from The Rocky Horror Show with some of the little boys in drag might seem cute and precocious, but as the neophyte auteurs move on to such subjects as sex, violence, and gender preference, the little movies become more a case study than a coy memoir. Intercut with present-day interviews with the principals, some but not all of whom are, like Stein, as "Gay As a Whistle" (the title of one of the films), these earnest and perverse gems show not only the growth of a cinematic imagination but the subtle dynamics of peer manipulation and sado-masochism that is movie directing. How disappointing that Stein, in whom we see glimmers reminiscent of directors ranging from Kenneth Anger to Steven Spielberg to Rainer Werner Fassbinder, ended up making a piece of piffle like Jawbreaker (1999).

Maybe what I like about Turn the Camera on Me is that, unlike It Will Probably Pass, it’s engagingly self-centered without being self-pitying. But both films pale before Ruthie Shatz & Adi Barash’s Garden (2003; May 16 at 12:30 p.m., co-presented by the Boston Jewish Film Festival). Nino and Dudu, teenage Arabs who hustle for a living in the Tel Aviv pick-up district of the title, make the hard times of Midnight Cowboy look like a game show. The product of abusive or disintegrated families and a brutally divided society, the two have been on the street since childhood, dodging pedophiles, gangsters, and both the Palestinian Secret Police and the Israeli Secret Service. They survive on drugs, brute cunning, prostitution, and their own seemingly unbreakable, often contentious, and remarkably noble love.

Such a bond is also apparent among the lesbian punk-band members, all survivors of abuse, discrimination, addiction, and worse, who are profiled in Tracy Flannigan’s Rise Above: The Tribe 8 Documentary (2003; May 15 at 8 p.m., with the director and band members Lynn Breedlove and Leslie Mah present). That is, once you get past the shirtless, obscenity-laden, hilarious outrage of Tribe 8’s stage act. Liz Phair material they are not (though after shocking the Birkenstocked faithful at the 1992 Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival, they were invited back four times). They make Courtney Love seem like just another talk-show guest as they pound out three chords and bellow witty and assaultive lyrics about sadism, masochism, sexism, and rage. In between sets, lead singer Lynn Breedlove, an Iggy Pop with breasts, invites straight men to come up on stage and suck off a 12-inch strap-on. On the other hand, she might just pull out a Bowie knife and slice the thing off. The point, in part, is parody, though they don’t care whether they offend anyone and rather hope they do. Neither do they hate men. "We like penises," says Breedlove. "Especially the detachable kind. And all penises are detachable."

Talk about cutting-edge. But even these seeming reprobates show signs of slowing down. Some have dropped out of the band and turned to more conventional careers, even marriage (same-sex, of course). "You never have to grow up!" asserts the fortysomething Breedlove, rather unconvincingly, to fans half her age.

Perhaps an individual can be not only simultaneously male and female but also young and old, parent and child? That might be the theme of Aleksandr Sokurov’s Father and Son (2003; May 22 at 6:30 p.m.). It’s anyone’s guess. Forget Turgenev; Father and Son may be the festival’s most outré — and gayest — entry. Sokurov would vehemently deny both charges, especially the latter (the product of "sick European minds," he has said). But if anything is clear in this radiantly obscure parable, it’s that the opening embrace between dad, who looks like a candidate for Tom of Finland, and his willowy and wiry son, more the Bruce Weber type, is not just paternal and filial.

Turns out it’s only a bad dream. Or something (and you thought The Return was cryptic!). Set in an uncanny seaside city suffused in a golden, unearthly light, the film takes place mostly on a rooftop that looks sometimes like a set from Mary Poppins and sometimes like one from Querelle. The plot — the boy is in military school, his girlfriend is dumping him, dad’s an army vet with a troubling lung X-ray, a young man visits who is the son of dad’s war buddy — seems half-baked and distracting. Which may be the point, though I preferred the limpid simplicity of its predecessor, Mother and Son (there will be a third in this series). Unlike many of the other entries in this festival, Father and Son is not family fare.

The 20th Annual Gay & Lesbian Film/Video Festival

At the Museum of Fine Arts through May 23