When Orlando met Appropriate Behavior

The co-editor of the Queer Film Classics series, Thomas Waugh, engages two authors of new books in the series about their sense of the state of queer cinema

by Thomas Waugh, Maria San Filippo and Russell Sheaffer

Two of the most recent titles in McGill-Queen’s University Press’s ongoing Queer Film Classics series are on the films Appropriate Behavior (by author Maria San Filippo) and Orlando (Russell Sheaffer). Orlando is Sally Potter’s 1992 genre-busting period adaptation of the Virginia Woolf novel; Appropriate Behavior is Desiree Akhavan’s 2014 contemporary bisexual romantic comedy, with clear nods to Annie Hall. While these may seem remarkably different films, QFC co-editor Thomas Waugh decided to engage with these two authors to see if there was any common ground.

San Filippo is associate professor of Visual and Media Arts at Emerson College. Sheaffer is a visual artist and producer whose latest film is Playland. Waugh spoke with them from India, where he was hiding from the Canadian winter.

Thomas Waugh: Is there a canon of 2SLGBTQ+ cinema that you see your book engaging with–strengthening? subverting? broadening? What is your current sense of the term “classic”?

Maria San Filippo: There is most certainly a 2SLGBTQ+ film canon, and like most canons it’s one that disproportionately includes privileged creators and production contexts, and ones that have been selected on the basis of critical approbation or the prestige that longevity confers. As a first feature independently produced on a shoestring budget and released less than a decade ago, Appropriate Behavior is the most recent film treated in the Queer Film Classics series, so I see the book queering the notion of “classic” by making it more inclusive both representationally and temporally.

Russell Sheaffer: You’re so right, Maria. It is always interesting to see what we canonize in scholarly contexts and how that does (or doesn’t) sync up with our community of wonderfully voracious queer film fans. Thinking about Orlando and Appropriate Behavior in tandem, they resonate with me as complementary outsider texts: one is celebrating its thirtieth anniversary and restoration and one is less than a decade old, one often thought of as somewhat high-brow and one that revels in its fart jokes (as you so beautifully describe in your book), but both have made vital waves in our communities and have pushed us to expand our notions of the what makes a “classic.”  When Orlando was released thirty years ago, interviews with Potter make it clear that she did not see her film as a part of the “great queer wave” or “new queer cinema.”  But now, after decades of audiences understanding it in continually queerer ways, I can’t imagine excluding it from the 2SLGBTQ+ film canon.

TW: Do you see your book as drawing attention to undervalued issues, works, or voices within 2SLGBTQ+ movie culture?

MSF: For sure! As the first volume in the Queer Film Classics series to spotlight a work by and about a bisexual woman of colour, Appropriate Behavior (the book) singles out a film that, in my view, encapsulates the most exciting and urgent transformations in queer cinema, in being inclusive, irreverent, and intersectionally-minded. For me, as a bisexually-identified woman, first encountering Appropriate Behavior felt like it was the film I’d always been looking/waiting for, so I wanted to celebrate that and to spread the word to other folks who might not have discovered it yet and/or would similarly appreciate it.

RS: As someone who also feels a bit outside of the G&L bits of our shared acronym, I really appreciate the way that your book points to a messier text for thinking about identity-category-driven queerness. I first encountered Potter’s Orlando in the first moments that I began understanding myself in “queer” terms – during grad school in New York in 2010-11 (ironically at Tisch at the same time as Akhavan, but in the Cinema Studies wing). I think that films like Orlando and Almodovar’s Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! were a really important part of that queer articulation for me. For that reason, I also find myself continually advocating for films that aren’t so cleanly “lesbian” or “gay” but that feel so deeply queer. And, for me, cinematic queerness is often about formal structure as much as it is about content.

TW: This blog brings together our two 2022 authors: did anything strike you in the other’s book?

MSF: So many things! Reading Russell’s volume revealed some fascinating throughlines between these films. For one, their inventive play with narrative temporality that “queers” time whether on Orlando’s epochal scale or on Appropriate Behavior’s personal scale of coming of age and coming out; as Russell puts it so well, both are films about queerness as a “constant process of becoming” and the importance of letting go of the past to begin life anew. Both are queer adaptations: of Woolf’s novel and of Annie Hall respectively–and are playfully self-conscious in their referencing of their own creative process with Orlando’s asides to the camera (decades ahead of Fleabag!) and Akhavan’s “art vs. farts” films-within-the-film. Both are love letters: Orlando is Woolf’s to Vita Sackville-West, Appropriate Behavior is Akhavan’s (as she says) “to all my romantic encounters.” Both films feature scenes that, however counterintuitively, are proven to make cis straight male students squirm: Swinton’s full-frontal nude scene and Appropriate Behavior’s threesome scene. Both protagonists are inbetweeners–passing between sexual and gender binaries in ways that uncouple those mandates to “choose a side.” I was especially delighted to see Russell referencing Alexander Doty’s chapter (from Flaming Classics: Queering the Film Canon)  on bisexuality and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, as that essay was the golden nugget for my first thinking and writing–as a NYU Cinema Studies grad student myself, under the tutelage of Professor Chris Straayer (though a decade earlier, and then I decamped for UCLA)–about bisexual representation and spectatorship, which I’m still immersed in thinking and writing about all these years later!

RS: Doty’s “Everyone’s Here for Love” is such a great first step into thinking queerly about films! And I felt similarly with your references to Elzabeth Freeman’s work on chrononormativity. While reading your book, Maria, I was also thinking a lot about the way that both of the films revel in and “queer” their genres. Your arguments about Appropriate Behavior’s simultaneous embrace of and revisions to the rom-com are compelling. Orlando does analogous work with the period drama, I think. Both films “fuck with the medium,” as you write about Appropriate Behavior, in ways that are queer because they treat their genres in ways that feel “innappropriate” to convention.

TW: What was the discovery that surprised you the most in your research?

RS: For Orlando, I was really interested in Potter’s moves away from Woolf’s iconic novel. At its moment of release, Potter’s film was taken to task by a few critics who saw it as–more of less– straightening out a classic lesbian feminist novel. Looking through Potter’s drafts of the screenplay, it is clear that she started the project with plans to adapt Woolf’s text in ways that mirrored the novel. Orlando had been in development for a couple of years before her interventions really began to take shape. In my read of the film, it’s those moves away from Woolf’s text that have created such a lasting work of queer cinema.

MSF: While it wasn’t so much a discovery, I feel similarly about Akhavan’s use of Annie Hall, by which she not only queers the (un)coupling at film’s center but updates their gender and ethnic divide and narrates from a woman’s perspective. It’s queer reappropriation at its radical best. The most surprising discovery came from Akhavan herself, who in our 2020 interview at book’s end expresses what I might term “queer shame” about Appropriate Behavior, which she seems to find lacks polish or profundity; or as she has repeatedly put it, “it’s like forty percent fart jokes.” I’m inclined to chalk it up to her characteristic self-deprecation and the cringe-worthiness of revising one’s early work, especially so emotionally raw and autofictional as Appropriate Behavior. In addition to hoping my book leads more folks to see the film, I also hope it will help convince Akhavan that the film is, on many levels, a highly significant achievement.

TW: What do you want readers to take away most from your book?

RS: I hope that my rumination on Orlando communicates the importance of experimentation in cinematic grammar. We are, in Virgina Woolf’s words, dependent on the “common sentences” that we draw from. It can be hard for us to imagine paths forward–in our own creative pursuits and also in our own lives–if we haven’t seen, heard, or read them before. We all benefit when an individual artist reaches to speak in new ways. I hope, too, that readers leave my book understanding how fluid our understanding of any given film is. Movies (from development through their thirtieth anniversary and onward) are living, breathing things. Stasis is not only impossible but undesirable. Authorial intent is only as important as the community that engages with and challenges it. I think Maria’s book also engages very well with this in regards to the critical response to Annie Hall over the course of Woody Allen’s career.

MSF: Well said, Russell, and on a related note I hope readers will take from my ode to Appropriate Behavior, and from my work more broadly, an enhanced sense of  bisexuality as similarly embracing the dynamism of life and desire. Also in our closing interview, Akhavan broaches her current concerns about bisexuality being regarded as trans-exclusive, which in my conception both of bisexual representation and identity is by no means the case. Despite its perchance misleading name, “the b word” as I conceive it–and I’m hardly alone–is precisely about liberating eros and embodiment from gender.

TW: What is your personal favorite title or guilty pleasure from the queer film so-called canon? Who is your personal favorite 2SLGBTQ+ director?

RS: What a question! I feel like my sense of being is bound up in the “queer film so-called canon.” Aside from Orlando, the three films that I tend to reference most in conversation are Gregg Araki’s Totally Fucked Up, John Greyson’s Uncut (which features the QFC series’ very own Tom Waugh!), and Barbara Hammer’s Sanctus. But I’d also watch Heartstopper all day long.

MSF: To invoke Alex Doty again, there are no guilty pleasures–only queer pleasures–for the “scholar-fan”. That said, because the question seems to invite controversial choices, I’ll comply by saying that I’ll always have a soft spot for Personal Best, and that I devote the prologue to my book Provocauteurs and Provocations to parsing my admiration for Blue Is the Warmest Color, despite its director’s indefensible production practices. As for my personal favorite queer filmmakers, Araki and Hammer were also hugely transformative for me, as were Chantal Akerman (especially Je Tu Il Elle), Su Friedrich (especially Rules of the Road), Lisa Cholodenko’s High Art and François Ozon’s Swimming Pool. Sadie Benning’s Jollies and Cheryl Dunye’s Janine are queer gems, and two of my favorite short films to teach. From the cult-ier side of the queer film canon, I’d be remiss not to call out the triumvirate of queer vampire films–Daughters of Darkness, Vampyres, and The Hunger–that are, in a word, beyond. Two other favorite filmmakers still actively creating are Tsai Ming-liang (though he keeps threatening to retire) and Céline Sciamma, who is thankfully being celebrated beyond only the queer so-called canon.

TW: The international queer film festival industry is plugged into the voracious cinephilia of sexual and gender minority communities around the globe. Anything we are doing right? Anything wrong?

RS: Our queer festival industry has done a vital job for decades: elevating stories of 2SLGBTQ+ individuals and helping make sure that they greet folx who so desperately deserve that representation. When nearly every independent film festival worth its salt now programs a slate of films with queer characters, though, I do wonder what the next steps are for our queer festival industry. Certainly, community building continues to be a central part of it. I firmly believe that moving images allow us to see and find ourselves: but what do we do when that mainstream packaging doesn’t feel right? I love a gay holiday movie as much as the next queer, but I’ll admit that I get fatigued by films that try to fit their narratives into familiar forms. At this point, I’m most excited by 2SLGBTQ+ film festivals that are thinking about and outside of the bounds of identity-politic-driven queerness. I want to see festivals embracing formally queer work alongside films with clear, queer narratives. Maybe that’s just my personal, coded way of saying: I want to see more experimental work at 2SLGBTQ+ festivals! I don’t think there’s anything queerer than–to steal from Maria’s book–“fuck[ing] with the medium.”