Outfest: "Playland" - Film Review
This piece was written during the 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes. Without the labor of the writers and actors currently on strike, the movie being covered here wouldn't exist.
There’s a shot in Playland, about seven minutes in, that’s constructed in the style Wes Anderson is best known for. The audience sees servers and cooks in a kitchen area through a perfectly centered window of sorts. The employees wear a dull, pastel pink uniform and their motions feel choreographed and effortless in an Andersonian way. And yet, this moment doesn’t feel like first-time feature director Georden West is attempting to mimic Anderson’s style in lieu of creating their own. It’s simply West’s way of playing with the audience’s perception of space, time, and place.
Playland is named for the historic Playland Café that existed in Boston from 1937 to 1998. While not originally created for that purpose, Playland Café was the oldest gay bar in Boston. West’s film uses primarily archival audio, as well as some archival footage and images, to create a tribute of sorts to this now-gone place of community for LGBT people in the Boston area. There is no linear story in the traditional sense. Instead, Playland is a party. A one-night-only celebration that’s an ode to the café’s entire existence. Time periods collide to showcase the importance of spaces like Playland Café, which always seem to be disappearing.
Georden West
If the description of Playland sounds daunting, you wouldn’t know it from the execution. The narrative structure is built around archival audio clips, and various contemporary footages accompany the clips. There’s not always an obvious connection between what the audience is hearing and what they’re seeing. Sometimes it’s dancing to what sounds like a TV interview and other times it’s a much more literal interpretation of the narration. Playland requires a certain willingness to surrender to the experience. It’s a bit Lynchian in that way, but the archival material keeps Playland a little more grounded. The way these old clips are talking about LGBT people doesn’t sound too different than how current politicians are speaking. In that way, it’s unfortunate that we’re still here, circling around the same outdated and illogical ways of thinking. Playland gives these historic voices their due. So often, LGBT voices are erased from historical documents and narratives. Playland reclaims the voices of the café and the people who used to frequent it and inserts them into the larger conversation of American history.
Playland doesn’t unfold the way one would expect it to. It feels like a series of vignettes, each celebrating a memory. Perhaps that’s the best way to describe it: a memory that’s not your own, yet somehow is. Maybe that’s a specific response as someone who identifies as queer because the film is so wholeheartedly in awe of Playland Café’s history and our present day. It’s fascinating to wonder about the hours spent combing through archival material to get to this point, then beginning to conceptualize the visuals to go along with it. The film’s setting is the decrepit Playland Café with a bright pink neon sign ever-glowing in the background, a mix of what was lost and what endures. Playland is a rhapsodic testament to existence.
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