There's a great idea at the heart of Desert Migration. A description of this community of older gay
men who are AIDS survivors from the 1980s reaches out and touches many
populations. One of its major
contributions, of course, is to talk about the lingering effects of the horrible AIDS
epidemic that swept the gay community in the 80s and what it’s like to have
survived that. The film's concept also gives insight into what it's like to simply be an older gay man. And for
all its focus on the gay community, it deals with things that any
older person has to deal with.
It's a great idea that reaches into a number of areas that we don't
see represented in film very much
And Desert Migration succeeds in many of these points. People thought an HIV
diagnosis meant almost certain death in the early period of the epidemic, and
several of the men here describe how they responded to that. Michael, for example, went on an alcohol and
drug binge until he realized he wasn’t going to die, and several others talk
about spending all their money until the same realization came to them. In these cases, living through the epidemic
meant the men faced not only rebuilding their lives, but doing so with
compromised health and few resources.
This is a unique aspect of the epidemic, and one rarely addressed.
The men in this film also talk about surviving friends and lovers who were their
age or younger, reminiscences which have
poignancy in Desert Migration and speak to a lasting legacy of the AIDS epidemic.
Beyond the effects of surviving AIDS, the men also find
themselves coping with issues common to both older gay men and to older people
in general. One of the major challenges
they face is loneliness and isolation, and Desert Migration shows us how its dozen or so subjects cope. Joel,
for example, volunteers as a clerk in a nonprofit shop, and Juan-Manuel has launched
himself as an artist. A half dozen of
them maintain a friendship, and we see them at a dinner. In a more gay-oriented direction, Erik and
Doc have a leather relationship, and Doug dates at a local gay bar while Steve
participates in Western dance classes at another. They all try to cope with being alone by using the resources available to them. However, some of the men don’t break
out of their isolation and remain alone and lonely. Will, showing us the sores on his back, remains
unhappily solitary, and Keith philosophically accepts being alone.
In addition to the scope of Cardone’s concerns, he brings
several other strengths to this film.
For one, he accepts many elements of gay culture as a given and simply
uses them without excuse or explanation.
Doug has a Peter Pan complex, but in the film, he is coping with age and
AIDS by flirting and staying as young-acting and feeling as he can. And he’s happy. Leather is also an element in several of the
men’s lives, but Cardone treats it as blithely as an Appalachian director might
show a quilting bee. And the gym and bars
play outsized roles here without getting much explanation. It’s a directorial approach that normalizes
unique aspects of gay culture, showing the world from within those norms.
And Cardone brings several stylistic flourishes to the documentary. His clips follow something like the pattern
of a day, with morning activities among the subjects followed by those of midday and
evening. It’s a documentary structure familiar
to people who know the city symphonies or classics like Man with the Movie
Camera, but it works here to show how a specific group lives. And within that structure, other loops connect
between events. For example, we see Erik
setting up a sling assembly (late afternoon) and only later see Doc showing up
to use it (evening). These elements give
some structure to the many snippets of information we get throughout the
film.
Cardone isn’t afraid to use showier techniques in his
documentary either. He often uses time lapse photography
for effect, as in the scene that shows the sunrise progressively illuminating
the mountains near Palm Springs or the few cars on the streets of the
city. The technique calls back to Godfrey
Reggio, who uses it to great effect in Koyaanisqatsi and subsequent films. More affective still is the way that Cardone
fuses soundtrack with visuals. We often
gaze at clips of the silent subjects, who themselves stare back at us, while we hear the voice
track of comments from an interview with the subject that was done at another
time. A technique like this could be
tremendously informative, giving us two information feeds at the same time –
the visual and the verbal, the present and another time – and freeing up the filmmaker to be able to use only
an interview's sound track without the video footage that could be weak or distracting.
However, in Desert Migration, Cardone often misses the
opportunity to use this technique to strengthen his film with the result that
the technique soon becomes shallow flash.
It would have been enlightening, for example, to hear the men reflect on
the lingering effect of seeing the loss all around them in the early days of
the AIDS epidemic, but Cardone doesn’t seem to have pushed such questions; instead, he leaves us to listen to remarks we
might have expected to hear. This weakness
in interviewing is well-illustrated in a comment by Juan-Manuel about excluding
negative words from his vocabulary.
Because Cardone doesn’t include elaboration of the remark, Juan-Manuel’s
comment is left to hang, sounding almost frivolous, because we don’t understand
the background for it. A disappointing part
of this film is that Cardone is content with trite or clichéd comments when a
few follow-up questions could have yielded insightful remarks from these men.
There’s an echo of this interviewing weakness in the
way Desert Migration looks, too. Most of
the visuals are striking, but they often seem more flashy than purposeful. When we see the time lapse of sunrise on the purple
mountains, it’s an appropriate visual for a voiceover talking about the healing
energy of the area. But most of the
time, we watch clouds, palm trees, and sparse traffic that isn’t related to the
content at all. Perhaps more
objectionably, some of the footage in the film seems like gratuitous
stimulation. We didn’t need to see the
horrible sores on Will’s back to understand that he feels like he’s rejected
because of them, and it’s unclear why we watch Doc do a nipple piercing. It’s a graphic, compelling moment, but one
that is more sensational than informative.
We learn nothing of Doc from this footage or the accompanying voiceover.
With so much attractive stylistic veneer in this film,
we can almost be forgiven if we don't think much deeper. For example, many of the men here are
strikingly muscular, and working out clearly plays an unusually big role in their lives, but the film hardly addresses the motivations behind it or
how it makes the men feel. A man like Doc,
who we first see in full-frontal, multiply-pierced nudity, never talks about his
extravagant body art. And we watch Bill flipping
Post-its a couple of times, but we never learn what is behind that action. Likewise, why do we hear the long discussion
of real estate?
Daniel Cardone has a great idea for a documentary here, but
he leaves us with too much of an attractive cinematic surface and fairly shallow observations. Desert Migration is a contribution to
documentary, particularly documentary about gay men and AIDS, but it also leaves us wishing the film-maker had been more
rigorous with the film.
