Gay Theme Tender In `Soldier' -- While `One Nation' Documentary Questions Notion Of `Curing' Gays

Movie review

XXX "For a Lost Soldier," with Maarten Smit, Andrew Kelley, Jeroen Krabbe, Feark Smink. Written and directed by Roeland Kerbosch. Harvard Exit. No rating; includes nudity, sex scenes. -----------------------------------------------------------------

While the gay characters in "Philadelphia" didn't have much of a sex life, Ralph Macchio brushed lips with Eric Stoltz last month in "Naked in New York," and Josh Charles and Stephen Baldwin got awfully cozy in last week's bisexual comedy-drama "Threesome."

Later this month, the Northwest International Lesbian/Gay Film Festival celebrates its seventh year in Olympia (among the titles are "Bill and Ted's Homosexual Adventure," "Keep Your Laws Off My Body" and "Great Dykes of Holland"), while the Asian-American Film Festival plans to show the gays-in-the-military documentary "Coming Out Under Fire" in early May.

Two more gay-themed films open this weekend for limited runs. One is a European memoir about World War II, the other an American documentary about organized attempts to turn gays into heterosexuals.

Based on an autobiographical novel by Rudi van Dantzig, this Dutch film deals with the taboo but tender relationship between Jeroen, a 12-year-old Amsterdam boy separated from his parents in 1944, and Walt, a Canadian soldier who helps chase the Germans out of the northern Holland farmlands where Jeroen is staying.

For a movie that deals this directly with the homosexuality of children, you'd have to go back to Lasse Nielsen's and Ernst Johansen's "You Are Not Alone" (1980). But that little-seen Danish picture was about an affair between 15-year-old boys. This one concentrates on a younger boy who is uninterested in his peers and openly pursues an older man.

It's tricky territory, but writer-director Kerbosch handles it with sensitivity and humor. The scenes in which Jeroen and Walt eye each other at a dance are as romantic as the masked ball scene in Zeffirelli's "Romeo and Juliet." The movie continues in this vein with scenes of the two jitterbugging, learning to speak each other's language and sharing a shower.

Jeroen, a stubborn, ungrateful, emotionally isolated boy played with astonishing honesty by Maarten Smit, is suddenly so delirious with infatuation that he can't complete a schoolroom essay. Ironically, the subject is what the liberation means to him.

Kerbosch doesn't neglect the effect of the soldiers' arrival on the other villagers. The girls giggle about their new romances, the local minister sermonizes about temptations of the flesh, while Jeroen's foster father worries less about the relationship between Jeroen and Walt than about Jeroen's reluctance to share Walt's chocolate gifts with the family.

The movie has some problems: a repetitious score, the occasionally awkward English-language line readings by Andrew Kelley (the novice actor who plays Walt) and a dopey framing story in which Jeroen Krabbe plays the adult Jeroen, a choreographer who's singularly inept at communicating to his dancers. None of this seriously detracts from the picture's heartfelt account of verboten first love. ----------------------------------------------------------------- XXX "One Nation Under God," documentary by Teodoro Maniaci and Francine Rzeznik. Varsity, Sunday and Monday only. No rating; includes discussions of sexuality. -----------------------------------------------------------------

This nonfiction film also suggests that sexual orientation is established at an early age, while questioning the notion that there's a "cure" for homosexuality.

The filmmakers concentrate on the efforts of a Christian fundamentalist group, Exodus International, which was partly founded by Michael Bussee and the late Gary Cooper in an attempt to transform themselves and others into Christian heterosexuals. Eventually, Bussee and Cooper fell in love, exited Exodus, left their wives and got married as Christian homosexuals.

The movie makes the most of this change of heart, wittily switching from a black-and-white "archival" look to full color as Bussee and Cooper discuss how they came out quite publicly within an organization determined to change "sexualized emotional needs." Also interviewed are "ex-gays," who talk enthusiastically about such re-education methods as "orgasmic reorientation" and softball games for effeminate men, and several more "former ex-gays," who refute Exodus' claims about the organization's success rate.

Especially articulate are Martin Duberman, who talks about the years he spent in therapy trying to shed his homosexual feelings, and Exodus' president, Sy Rogers, who is so androgynous that he/she seems to be in constant denial of any sexual identity.

Much of this is a hoot, although the movie's tone turns serious when it draws parallels between Nazi persecution of Jews and the current anti-gay rhetoric.

In the end, "One Nation Under God" is probably too "unbalanced" to be shown on PBS, but it does provide an outlet for many points of view.