Oh, Baby

QFest goes family-friendly with a slate of gay parenting movies.

by Shaun Brady

One thing you can say about LGBT families," says Doug Metcalfe, "is that they're well-planned."

As chairman of Philadelphia Family Pride, a local LGBT parenting education and advocacy organization — and as the father of two —Metcalfe witnessed that planning process firsthand. And you know what they say about the best-laid plans of mice and men — or, in this case, men and men, or women and women.

"There are many different ways that LGBT folks become parents," Metcalfe continues. "You could probably take the life story and the journey to create a family of any one of these families and make a movie out of it."

Several of the filmmakers in this year's QFest seem to agree, spawning a veritable baby boom in the current catalog. "There was a glut of films about coming-out stories, and everyone's so bored of that," says Alison Reid, director of The Baby Formula. "It used to be that we in the gay community didn't have characters of our own sexual orientation, but we could still relate to straight characters because there's so much more than your sexual orientation that goes into being a person. I think we're getting to the stage now where straight people are able to relate to gay people on screen."

Fest programmer Kelly Burkhardt has seen the parenting theme expand over the past few years, even as the rest of the country remains mired in debating same-sex marriage.

"I think it's because it's just everyday life," Burkhardt explains. "I believe that filmmakers are ahead of the curve a little bit. We've had a slow trickle and then a boom of gay marriage films, and it seems like now the rest of the country is catching up with that. But in other countries, they've moved on because they've granted the right for domestic partnership and/or gay marriage, so it's a natural progression."

The issue does still intrude on the one U.S. film of the litter, Misconceptions, which opens at an anti-gay-marriage rally in a small Georgia town. Seems the good Christian Bliss couple are facing a baby-making hurdle since the death of their son. While praying for a solution, Miranda (A.J. Cook) sees a late-night documentary on a gay couple hoping for a surrogate, one of whom is a doctor researching the very disease that killed the Blisses' boy. Miranda takes this sign from God and the requisite complications ensue.

Misconceptions director Ron Satlof is a 40-year TV vet, with credits stretching from Hawaii Five-O through The A-Team to Diagnosis Murder, and the film's small-screen parentage is constantly in evidence, from the flat visuals to the easy reconciliations. But it does spread its empathy around, refusing to caricature the gay couple or the evangelicals.

Men wanting babies is the major trend this year, and it's interesting to note that in each of the three male couples depicted, one of the pair is a doctor. In Misconceptions, it's Orlando Jones' choreographer who is the more determined would-be father rather than his white-coated partner, but in the other two films it's the doc who pines most for kids. For pediatrician Lambert Wilson in Baby Love, that desire actually ends his relationship. His failure to convince an adoption agency of his hetero bona fides leads him to seek a surrogate — and there is that young Argentinean immigrant whose car he rear-ended.

The relationship between the two plays out as a curious romantic comedy, where Wilson's sexuality almost seems like one of those movie obstacles on the path to true love. The major theme is the difficulty of divorcing emotion from biological necessity, but is ultimately such a lightweight soufflé that very little of it registers.

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The same might be said for the Swedish Patrik, Age 1.5, which still manages to coast on charm. This is the only film in which we actually see a gay couple being parents, rather than just struggling to become them. That happens on a technicality, as a misplaced decimal lands a 15-year-old delinquent in the new suburban home of a couple expecting an infant. One of the fathers (the doctor, natch), Göran, bonds with the boy, while his presence brings out the worst in his husband, Sven, who already has one estranged family and a drinking problem. Surprisingly little is made of the responsibilities of taking on a 15-year-old with Sven's angry 16-year-old daughter already pointing up parenting failures; it seems as if the film concentrates on the wrong father, but that fits into its favoring of sunny optimism over darker implications.

Alison Reid's The Baby Formula was incubated in her short film Succubus, which shares the same lackadaisical humor in its story of a lesbian couple, one a genetic researcher, who fail to become pregnant via scientific means and opt for a slapstick attempt to shanghai sperm from one's brother. But when Reid discovered that both of her actresses had become pregnant at roughly the same time, she pounced, turning the short into a feature and following the women over the next 10 months, quite a feat even for the veteran stunt coordinator-turned-director.

Taking the mock-doc approach, The Baby Formula begins as a fluffy comedy about pregnancy squared, but the film grows along with the babies. Taking as its inspiration real science, in which researchers have combined the genetics of two female mice and produced offspring, the scenario wrestles with bioethical issues as well as the dueling maternal instincts. And as the women make their announcements, it expands to confront the idea of family in general. While one was raised by a gay couple, the other hails from a strict Irish Catholic family with a domineering mother, calling into question exactly what constitutes a "normal" family.

(s_brady@citypaper.net)

Misconceptions: 7/18, 7:15 p.m., PMT; 7/19, 9:15 p.m., PMT | Baby Love: 7/14, 7:15 p.m., RE; 7/19, 2:15 p.m., RE | Patrik, Age 1.5: 7/11, 4:45 p.m., RE; 7/12, 7 p.m., PMT | The Baby Formula: 7/16, 5 p.m., RE; 7/18, 7 p.m., RE