Flicks you missed.

Four fascinating festival favorites that got little or no distribution in 2000--but keep your eyes peeled

Beau Travail 

The great homoerotic images are often not intended that way, as any gay dove. tee of the sports pages will tell you, This past year's ultimate male reverie was Claire Denis's Beau Travail, which does for the French Foreign Legion what Leni Riefenstahl's Olympia did for pole-vaulters, Denis's cryptic, gorgeously photographed movie retools the nautical antagonisms between Herman Melville's Billy Budd and John Claggart for the Foreign Legion in Africa, Stingy on the character motivation and minimalist on narrative to an exasperating degree, Beau Travail seems more content to fawn over the legionnaires' seasoned physiques as they barrel through combat exercises or loll in repose, The occasional presence of women only manages to fuel the fantasy of male-male intimacy, Technique is used to comment on, if not subvert entirely, the conventions of plot; What you end up with is the year's most ravishing film about men together.

--Jan Stuart

Desi's Looking for a New Girl

L.A. Weekly called it a "hip-hop telenovel," This scruffy Latina comedy is the first lesbian feature film since Go Fish to genuinely capture the Yuddie (Young Urban Dyke) milieu, Out lesbian actress Desi del Valle (Costa Brava, Mod Fuck Explosion) stars as the slightly butch Desi--a gun-shy girl on a dry spell being prodded into romance by her best pal, J.T. (Yesenia Aguirre), and her posse-chorus of homegirls. Writer-director-coproducer Mary Guzman and cinematographer Sophie Constantinou bring to the screen a snappy, colorful, and very funny portrait of San Francisco dyke life, Though a few key scenes suffer from technical difficulties (and will probably limit the film's chances for theatrical release), this feature is truly a diamond in the rough, Look for it at your local queer filmfest or coming soon to home video.

--Jenni Olson

Oi! Warning

A hapless slacker boy gets involved with a bad crowd, Sounds like the setup for a standard-issue potboiler, but instead it's the plot of the gripping debut feature by twin German filmmakers Dominik and Benjamin Reding, Featured at numerous gay-lesbian and international film festivals, Oi! Warning offers a bracing look at gay sexual desire tangled amid the barbed wire of machismo and violence in the German skinhead scene, The film follows young runaway Janosch (Sascha Backhaus), who idolizes and desires his skinhead friend Koma (Simon Goerts), Korea, happy to have an acolyte, is less pleased when Janosch's gaze shifts to a young punk artist, The outcome is hard to take but unforgettable, The film's magnificent black-and-white cinematography and undeniably erotic tone underscore the contradictory themes of sex and violence, Not a feet-good movie by any stretch, Oi! Warning is nonetheless exhilarating in its unabashed treatment of raw emotions set on a collision course.

--Shannon Kelley

Punks

Patrik-lan Polk's ensemble comedy breaks new ground in pad by its spirited refusal to seem "groundbreaking," It's much more concerned with being engaging and fun, Without ado or apology, Punks launches us into the lives of four fast friends in West Hollywood, Calif.: commitment-allergic, HIV-positive Hill (Dwight Ewell); near-celibate photographer Marcus (Seth Gilliam); tough 24-7 drag queen Chris (Jazzmun); and impulsive delinquent Dante (Renoly Santiago), There are rich subplots for each pal--punctuated with snappy dialogue and Priscilla-quality drag numbers--but writer, director Polk's focus is Marcus's budding crush on new neighbor Darby (Rockmond Dunbar), a sensitive, possibly bisexual superstud straight out of a James Earl Hardy novel, In whatever way Punks finally reaches audiences--on cable television, on video--one certainty is that the talented Polk will be heard from again.

--Bruce C. Steele