Wildness (Spanish/English) (Documentary)

Wu Tsang was a 25-year-old art student when he and some friends decided to start a weekly club night at the Silver Platter, an immigrant gay bar near MacArthur Park. On most nights, dolled-up transgender Latinas swirled around a checkered dance floor, singing in Spanish and sipping $4 glasses of champagne. But Wildness, as Tsang’s Tuesday night party was called, drew a different crowd. Now each week, flocks of artists, queer punks and dance music junkies packed the bar for boundary-pushing performances and DJ sets. This collision of the two underground scenes and the unintended consequences of the party’s growing popularity is what this documentary tries to cover.

We are introduced to a small town bar called 'The Silver Platter', a bar and beacon of sanctuary for the Trans community. We spend some time learning and appreciating how this small club has been a safe heaven for Latin trans members giving them opportunity to be themselves, perform on stage, hang out with people without fear of hate crimes, immigration or deportation. Wu and several of his hipster queer art friends fall in love with the bar, and start to host a dance-party/performance series on Tuesday’s called “Wildness.” The weekly event takes off, garnering press and citywide attention for the bar. This culminated in a selection for “Best Tranny Bar” by the LA Weekly, in which journalist Sam Slovick crammed every invidious stereotype of trans women he could come up with into a couple of paragraphs. He presented the bar’s patrons as sexually aggressive down-and-out streetwalkers, and the bar as a seamy site of titillation for jaded mainstream straights. Wu and other patrons were horrid learning about this and their protest campaign led the writer to a heartfelt apology. The film momentarily shifts tone as it next delves into issues of deportation and violence against the Latino transgender community. The death of one of the bar's patrons leads to dispute of his will.  Although things eventually got resolved and the owners asked Wu to bring "Wildness" back, but Wu realized that the moment has passed.

It’s easy to see this as a story of exploitation. But things are a bit more complicated than that. The queer hipsters do put The Silver Platter at risk in various ways, and they are surely obligated to try to minimize it as they can. But, at the same time, relationships are about making yourself vulnerable. It might be more useful to think of the link between Wildness and the Silver Platter not as exploitation or initiation, but as bittersweet romance. The film is stylistically experimental, blending documentary with magical-realist techniques to create a dreamlike meditation on a small moment in queer history, the ramifications of which tell an important tale about safe space and solidarity. Personally, for me , the most important and interesting bits were when the club itself is given a voice and tells us about the history and th artists who performed there. Coming of Wu and her friends was a bane or boon , is something that would be forever debated, but a lively heart-filled documentary, in the meantime, at least doesn't try to sugar coat anything. (4.5/10)