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West German writer and director Monika Treut has devoted her film career to a study of sexuality, especially those sexualities viewed as taboo or deviant. Since she selected de Sade’s Juliette and Sacher-Masoch’s Venus In Furs as the primary texts for her Ph.D. thesis, Treut has forged bravely ahead with her investigation of the libidinal fringe, through her short subjects “Bondage” and “Annie” and her features Virgin Machine and Seduction: The Cruel Woman.
Throughout her work, though, Treut has retained a childlike innocence. For an underground filmmaker, her erotic philosophy is uncharacteristically wide-eyed, and she has staunchly refused to accept sex as a source of shame, instead viewing it as a gateway to love, and consequently to true peace.
In My Father Is Coming, her third feature, Treut bundles up with a close-knit cast and hammers down on the same inoffensive lovefest chord. Vicki (Shelly Kaestner) is a young German actress who is living the struggling-actress dream/nightmare in New York City. Although she keeps a stiff upper lip as she stumbles through auditions for bit parts and commercials, she’s fearful of failure. And her sexual universe is a mess. Her roommate, Ben (David Bronstein) is gay, and her two lovers – a lesbian chef (Mary Lou Granlau) and a smoldering transsexual beefcake boy (Michael Massee) – merely intensify the confusion. To make matters worse, her Old World father, Hans (Alfred Edel), has decided to visit his little girl in the big city.
Because this is a sweet and unassuming comedy that relies on formula setups as a means of exploring its characters’ identities, Vicki panics when she learns of her father’s impending arrival, and begins to patch together an outrageous scheme to conceal her lesbianism. Dad, of course, exposes his daughter’s ruse, at the same time finding the multifarious subcultures of New York to his liking. While Vicki sinks lower into her tar pit of angst – What does my father think of me now? What can I do to uncloud my mind? – Hans struts jauntily through the Big Apple, landing a chance job in a television commercial and earning a measure of local celebrity. As always Treut has written set pieces into her script that allow established performers to grab a few moments in the spotlight. Annie Sprinkle, the effervescent performance artist and ex-porn star who also had a featured role in Virgin Machine, punches in for a key scene, as does body-piercing guru Fakir Musafar.
Primitive in its production values and often handicapped by amateurish performances, My Father Is Coming imagines a world where sexual differences are absorbed with a bare minimum of tension, and couplings and uncouplings are friction-free. Offensively Utopian, perhaps, but Treut handles her principals with such cheery aplomb that the film is difficult to dislike. In a time when the gay and lesbian communities are being devastated by disease and intensifying prejudice, and the straight communities are paying a steep price for their intolerance, films as blithely ideal as this are welcome guests. As members of this society, whether male or female, straight or gay, we live in a time when we must look elsewhere for our fables, and Monika Treut is as good a place as any
to start.
MY FATHER IS COMING
Directed by Monika Treut; written by Monika Treut and Bruce Benderson; with Shelley Kaestner, Alfred Edel, Annie Sprinkle, Michael Massee, Mary Lou Granlau, and David Bronstein.
Unrated.
