Thankfully one of the producers was there at last night's Inside Out screening, so I got a chance to untangle some of the tendrils of this incredibly complicated movie built up around the unbelievable Craig Russell, whose performance and drag impersonations just stand on top of the thing. It is not told from the inside of the queer community. But in the white-guy-ends-apartheid role, they have mind-bogglingly put in a Crazy Woman. (this is firstly a function of Margaret Gibson's source story, which is told from the author's POV) At first you get squirmy and expect that the parallel this character articulates between her and drag queen Russell - "We're both crazy" - will be used as an excuse for the good old queer self-loathing, but in fact this is in a different tradition, that King-of-Hearts, madness-as-sentimental-symbol-for-nonconformity thing that was in vogue then. The problem is that Hollis McLaren plays this woman very theatrically - she actually STARES THROUGH HER FINGERS at one point - and in general she probably inspired Catherine O'Hara's turn in "We're Gonna Be All Right You Creep Leaving Home And All, Eh?" But even though wr/dir Richard Benner was apparently far more interested in this theme than in the gay scene, and even though Benner seriously does not know how to point a camera, this actually does end up giving a pretty good time capsule of Toronto's 70s gay scene - and not just the hairstyles! We're also presented with a scene that is tiny, remote and claustrophobic, with drag queens at the bottom of a rigid internal hierarchy, everyone's on the skids, and dykes are harpies from another planet. Financed with cash from friends, not Alliance or the CFDC, this movie has to take responsibility for its own neurosis, but it also must be credited with the brilliance of the impersonations, and nb: apparently Russell was Mae West's house boy, and the routines he does are all impersonations of MAE WEST'S impersonations! Like I said: complicated.