A curious hybrid of documentary and performance art, writer/director Georden West’s Playland, now at Tribeca, takes on queer history in depicting the “ghosts” of Boston’s most notorious gay bar, Playland Café. Told with a combination of archival interviews and footage, contemporary vignettes of musical and drag performances, and extended takes with little to no dialogue or movement, Playland strives to be a semi-surreal meditation on the haunted past of a now-demolished space for, in the words of the film’s own press release, “generations of drag queens, disco DJs, leatherdykes, and sissies.”
In part, it succeeds. There are stretches of hypnotic, repetitive images in near silence, followed by the voices of those long since departed, all played out across the interior of the rundown café over the course of different time periods. The haunted aspect of the film makes for an intriguing but often unsatisfying documentary, as the ghostly figures repeat their narratives and movements with a veneration for the past, but without much apparently underlying them.
There’s a Lynchian element to the images that sometimes works, but often feels without clear direction. The basic thesis—that the historied Playland Café is the repository of queer history and itself a victim of gentrification and sanitization—doesn’t have much more to it than its most basic tenets. So while some vignettes prove deep, others feel weightless. For a film of this ambition, there’s a stronger vision needed, a more cohesive technique that transcends technique. Playland never reaches the heights to which it aspires because the filmmakers seem to believe that strange images and long takes are equivalent to cinematic depth.
Playland is at its best when allowing former patrons and performers to speak for themselves, as archival interviews and footage plays over the scenes of the desolate, haunted café. Here are the true voices of the displaced, recalling the different permutations of gay rights, Civil Rights, and changes in culture and place over the course of decades. But the voices often become lost in the images, overlapping and melding together into a less than cohesive vision.
In many ways, Playland is a dirge, not a celebration. And that’s understandable—the Playland Café was one of Boston’s oldest surviving gay bars until its demolition in 1998, and the film opens with audio of its owners losing their liquor license as a result of undercover cops claiming the bar was used by drug dealers and attracted extreme noise and prostitution. The loss of the bar is central to the structure of the film, as both the location itself and the people who inhabit it are transformed into “ghosts” as a result of attempted homogenization.
But Playland is without any sense of joy of the past—many of the vignettes with the various ghosts are rather dour, depicting a somewhat sad and seedy world of closeted sailors, bored dishwashers, and marginalized drag queens. If there was joy in Playland—and of that there seems little doubt—this film does not have it. Despite a game, undoubtedly honest attempt to depict a history that might otherwise be lost, full of people embracing their space on the outskirts of society, Playland just never finds the clear center that it needs to be more than an imperfect exercise of filmmaking and performance.
Playland is showing at Tribeca Film Festival and on Tribeca At Home.