Edition: U.S. / Global

Opposite of Gloom: Time to Be Gaily Gay

Published: June 4, 1999

If asked to describe the mood of the 11th Annual New York Lesbian and Gay Film Festival based only on its opening and closing features, this year's events might be characterized as Giddy Gay Lite. Both Rose Troche's ''Bedrooms and Hallways,'' which opened the festival last night, and Jim Fall's ''Trick,'' which closes the series on June 13, partake of the same heady spirit that has characterized recent semi-mainstream films like ''The Opposite of Sex'' and ''Billy's Hollywood Screen Kiss.'' In the world of Giddy Gay Lite, gay liberation is almost a fait accompli, the AIDS epidemic barely exists and rampant homophobia is somewhere else.

Ms. Troche's film is a frothy post-Noel Coward romantic comedy, a millennial, pan-sexual ''Design for Living'' set in contemporary London. A single gay man in an otherwise heterosexual New Age men's group confesses his attraction to another member who has recently separated from his girlfriend of eight years. The two embark on an affair, and the gay man ends up sleeping with the ex-girlfriend. Is anybody jealous or upset? Not really. No dangerous emotions are allowed to undermine the cheery, sophisticated banter.

Mr. Fall's film, which will open commercially in the summer, is a comic ''After Hours''-flavored survey of gay male life in Manhattan. An aspiring musical-comedy composer with a straight male roommate picks up a buffed-up go-go boy on the subway and brings him home, but one interruption after another keeps preventing them from having sex. They then roam the city in search of a rendezvous. Tori Spelling gives a teeth-gnashing performance as a best friend from hell.

But between these bookends the festival has its share of serious and cerebral work. One of the most original features, Scott King's ''Treasure Island,'' is a mock 1940's spy drama in which two American code breakers construct a false identity and devise military misinformation to be planted on a dead soldier's body. The stylish black-and-white film turns into an eerie ghost story exploring oppressive racial and sexual stereotypes in wartime America with deadpan humor.

In a totally different vein is Joseph Lovett's personal documentary ''The Accident,'' in which the filmmaker re-enacts the freak accident that killed his mother and interviews his siblings to try to construct a psychological history of his troubled family. Mr. Lovett's own homosexuality is only one of the many threads woven together to create a subtle, ultimately enigmatic family portrait.

The Canadian director Anne Wheeler's serious comedy ''Better Than Chocolate'' is a cheery broadside for sexual diversity that follows the evolving relationships of several couples including a feminist lesbian and a woman who was once a man. Late in the film this utopian fantasy takes a sudden, dark turn.

Lucy Winer's upbeat documentary ''Golden Threads'' is a profile of Christine Burton, a 93-year-old woman who at the age of 80 founded an international network for lesbians over 50. And from Germany, Kutlug Ataman's melodrama ''Lola and Bildikid'' focuses on the identity crisis of a young gay Turk in Germany and his violent, aggressively straight older brother. While exploring Berlin's demimonde, the boy is befriended by Lola, a drag queen whose macho lover wants her to have a sex-change operation.

The festival is also reviving two influential underground films, James Bidgood's ''Pink Narcissus,'' a 1970 fantasia of gaudily costumed gay male erotica, and Gregory Markopoulos's ''Twice a Man,'' a 1963 re-telling of the Greek drama of Phaedra and Hippolytus set in New York. The nearly 200 films being shown in the festival include a tribute to the British independent filmmaker Pratibha Parmar, whose newest work, ''Righteous Babes,'' is a documentary exploring the convergence of feminism and rock in the music of women like Sinead O'Connor, Tori Amos and Ani DiFranco.

Festival screenings are at four locations: the New School, 66 West 12th Street, Greenwich Village; Cinema Village, 22 East 12th Street, Greenwich Village; Cantor Film Center, New York University, 36 East Eighth Street, Greenwich Village, and the Brooklyn Museum of Art, 200 Eastern Parkway, at Prospect Park. Tickets are sold from noon to 8 P.M. daily at TLA Video, 54 West Eighth Street, Greenwich Village. Information: (212) 979-5611.