The Singing Forest
Picture: C
Sound: C+ Extras: C+ Film: C+
One of the stranger Gay entries we have encountered is
writer/director Jorge Ameer’s The Singing Forest (2003), a post Gay new
Wave piece that involves reincarnation.
Christopher (Jon Sherrin) starts to have dreams that he had a male lover
during the Holocaust and was both betrayed and killed by the Nazis for it. That could be a case for persecution
complex, but he has a daughter and he believes her boyfriend (Craig Pinkston)
might be that lover from a previous life.
So, should we call Dr. Freud?
Well, even if he were around, would he be able to stop the
screenplay from dragging so much? No,
and the boyfriend getting suddenly interested in the father is totally
uncredible. The film is a short 75
minutes long and never develops any of the situations enough to work. Sherrin seems out of sync with the other
actors. The dialogue is muddled too
much, and I do not mean a sound design problem. The delivery is too stiff (no pun intended) and often
unbelievable, though the writing is not too bad.
The letterboxed 1.78 X 1 image is a disappointment, with
detail problems and needs an anamorphic retransfer badly, especially as Gary
Tachell’s cinematography is one of the things that save the project. I like the look, but this version is very
average. Oddly, pictures on the DVD
case are not scenes from the film. The
Dolby Digital 2.0 Stereo is a recent recording, but very limited and has
absolutely no Pro Logic surrounds.
Extras include a trailer, a videotaped biography short on Ameer that is
not as coherent as it ought to be, and four shorts he made. Uninhibited has a voyeuristic male
spying on a couple, then landing up with the male who knows he’s watching. No surprise there, since we see male nudity
and the director is doing Gay material.
Misguided [guess] is about two men in a restroom, with bad aim
bringing them together. Its about the
same length, is silly and has what it thinks is a witty use of Barry Manilow
music. My Straight Boyfriend is
taped and wants to show that a gay relationship has the title character still
supposedly thinking of women. These
first three runs about 4 minutes each and are from 2002. Popcorn & Coke (2003, 6 minutes)
has to do with two guys being attracted to each other in the theater,
especially over the women there. They
are more together and believable than the main feature, though and rarely have
any dialogue, though is that bad news for Ameer and company?
When I read the box cover quote about this film being “A
gay GHOST”, it took me a few days to realize that they meant the Patrick
Swayze/Demi Moore hit, which the two have little in common with. If anything, the extreme lack of creativity
and its substandard flashbacks are very insufficient in establishing any
credibility to this tale, or if the reincarnation happened. Not that I was expecting any special effects
and a film like The Reincarnation Of Peter Proud (1975) is superior to
both in this respect. It is trying to
make a point, but Ameer is over his head when he picks up a genre and does zero
with it. The Singing Forest is a
missed opportunity of some sort, with the unresolved sexual and family issues a
plain wreck.
- Nicholas Sheffo
