Film

The Peabody Film Festival plays June 11 through 13 at the State Theatre. Tickets are $10 for each showing, or $30 for all six. Check our film listings or call Bobby Roger Productions at 761-7236 for show times.

The first annual Peabody Film Festival — possibly establishing itself as Maine’s premiere Gay and Lesbian film festival later this week — is named after the venerable Frannie Peabody, a 98-year-old whirling dervish who helped found Maine’s AIDS Hotline, The AIDS Project, and The Peabody House after her one of her grandsons died of complications due to AIDS. “Frannie Peabody commands an incredible amount of respect and honor,” PFF organizer Bob Poirier says. “I feel a lot of pressure to make sure it’s a great event, to live up to her name.”

That pressure mounted when, four weeks before the opening of the festival, Poirier learned that the Keystone Theater, which had agreed to host the event, was closing immediately due to financial problems. “It was two days before the first major ad was going out,” Poirier remembers. “We knew [the owners of the Keystone] were having problems, but we all thought they’d last through the festival.”

Poirier spent the next two weeks searching for a venue for the Peabody Film Festival. By a strange stroke of luck, the State Theatre had June 11, 12, and 13 open, and since there was little likelihood of anyone else booking the space on such short notice, owner Grant Wilson was open to the idea — with one condition.

“He told us we had to revive the theater’s two old projection machines,” Poirier explains, “and I had no idea how much that would cost.”

A few hours before the deadline for putting in the ads for the PFF, two weeks before the opening, Poirier received word that one of the projectors was working, and the other could be fixed by someone donating his services. For the first time in a long time, the State Theatre will show movies, and the old organ will warm up the crowd — assuming Poirier can find an organist.

Opening the PFF on June 11 is the Sundance film Lost and Delirious, the story of Mary, nicknamed “Mouse,” who is dropped off by her father and stepmother at a chi-chi, all-girls boarding school, only to discover that her roommates are involved in a lesbian affair. The film revels in the emotions of adolescence as Mary befriends her roomies — the rebellious, masculine Paulie and the feminine, popular Tory. To its credit, the film treats Paulie and Tory’s relationship with more depth than the best of Hollywood’s adolescent heterosexual relationships.

The two girls’ relationship falls apart when Tory’s straight-laced little sister sees them in bed together. Paulie (Piper Perabo) shows her fragility as Tory chooses between the girl she loves and the wishes of her parents. All three actresses are compelling, but Perabo, in particular, shows an impressive emotional range — from a smile of Julia-Roberts wattage to utter devastation and loss. The one misstep of the film is its ending. Without ruining it, the director made a decision to make uplifting an event that is not at all uplifting. Nevertheless, it is an emotional, worthy film that need not be relegated solely to the category of “gay and lesbian” film; it is a coming-of-age story, a story about adolescent relationships and pressures.

Similarly, Psycho Beach Party, which shows Tuesday June 12 for the first time in Maine, defies categories. It is a ’50s psychological thriller, a ’60s beach movie, and a ’70s slasher film. It is a film about repressed sex (of all kinds) and repressed violence. It is a movie that tars Charles Busch (from HBO’s Oz) playing a female detective, Monica Stark, and treats Stark seriously as a character and a woman.

The story centers around Chicklet, played by Lauren Ambrose (Can’t Hardly Wait), a tomboy with a split personality who wants to be part of a group of Malibu surfer dudes. Her personalities include a dominatrix named Ann Bowman and a hip-hop checkout girl who calls herself Tylene. As local teenagers with strange defects (only one testicle, facial scar, rampant psoriasis) begin to wind up hacked to pieces, Chicklet and several others fall under the suspicion of Captain Stark. On their own, the plot twists and humor just under the surface are equal to any B-grade slasher flick worth the film it’s printed on.

The other movies chosen for The Peabody Film Festival include Punks, a Sundance selection described as “an urban Priscilla, Queen of the Desert with a twist of Waiting to Exhale; a collection of “Sexy Shorts”; S., the tale of a beautiful woman struggling to understand herself and her relationship with a fellow stripper; and The Big Eden, which tells the story of Henry, who returns home to care for his grandfather and has to face an unrequited love from high school.

At this point, the big question for Bob Poirier and the members of the Pride Committee, who asked Poirier to organize the event, is how many people will descend on the State Theatre for food, drink, and the six films? Poirier hopes for at least 500 and dreams that it could be as many as a 1000. In any case, he says, “We just want to plant the seed.”

What’s in a name?

The Peabody Film Festival plays at the State