Playland (Georden West, 2023) (Patreon)

It's incredibly rare for first-time filmmakers to make great work their first time out. So as a general rule, it's preferable to see a debut film with great ideas but shaky execution. Anyone (except maybe Kevin Smith) will get better at their craft over time, but it's much less likely that someone will become appreciably smarter or more sensitive as an artist. More mature, sure, but that's another thing entirely.

Playland is the debut feature from Georden West, and the worst thing I can say about it is that the filmmaker wears their influences on their sleeve. West combed through the holdings of The History Project, a LGBTQ archive in Boston, and explored the news clips, recordings, and testimonials related to Boston's most socially contested nightclub, the Playland Café. Playland was a gay bar with live entertainment, situated in Boston's red-light district, somewhat comically called the Combat Zone. As we hear over the course of the film, various politicians and media entities took it upon themselves to work with the Boston PD to try to close Playland down, mostly on vague charges of solicitation or pornography.

West's film is essentially a poetic reading from the archive, using fragments of original material not to offer a timeline or mount some kind of rhetorical argument. Instead, they reconstruct a theatrical facsimile of Playland, showing patrons drifting in and out over the years. There is very little direct speech, and almost nothing that could be considered acting in the usual sense. Playland is the evocation of a space in time, a dedicated queer sanctuary that withstood decades of attack from larger Boston, remaining open until the mid-90s. With its stylized drag performances, balletic movement, and intimate mood lighting, Playland is a nonfiction fantasia, a "queering" of the hard historical record.

It is obvious that West is working very consciously with the traditions and modalities of the New Queer Cinema, and although this can lead to a bit of spot-the-reference, it actually serves to ground the film in an archival discourse of a different sort. The clearest touchstone for Playland is Isaac Julien's Looking for Langston, another poetic act of historical reclamation. But an attentive viewer will also detect hints of Derek Jarman, Terence Davies, Kenneth Anger, and R.W. Fassbinder (especially Querelle, of course).

There are figures and throughlines in Playland, although they function more as refrains than characters per se. Two kitchen workers, Steff (José Lapaz-Rodríguez) and Rabbit (Miranda Quinn) frequently appear as a kind of silent Greek chorus, providing witness to the life of Playland across the ages. They are puckish and effervescent, and provide a significant contrast to the other main figure, Lady (Danielle Cooper). Lady always seems out of sync with the goings-on around them, almost as if they represent a socially thwarted form of desire, a control group by with to better appreciate the freedom of those around them.

At times, Playland gets away from West. There are sequences so dark they become illegible, and the sound mix is muddy at some points, shrill in others. But any flaws one can find in Playland are the result of West's bold choices. They are not interested in producing yet another expository documentary about gay history. This is a film about affect and ambiance, a persistent sense of belonging. West succeeds in evoking something like a trans-historical queer home, even though now Playland itself is just a memory.