CIFF 2012: The Bella Vista

Doc about the Bella Vista club, originally a sports (soccer) clubhouse and team. The building, having fallen into some disrepair, was bought up by a woman who made it into a nightclub with transvestite barflies who dance and flirt with male clientele.

Although for the most part the bar seems okay, neighbors and the now middle-aged soccer players petition a judge to turn the club back over to the soccer team, who have formed a board to oust the transvestites. It appears they dislike the sexual orientations of the Bella Vista's employees rather than have a real, legal complaint against them.

A couple of the transvestites are interviewed. One is married to a man and has adopted the son of a woman who couldn't afford to keep him. The birth mother appears still distressed that she had to make this decision, but the film shows the adoptive mother is a loving and doting parent. The film does not dig into how the birth mother feels about another woman raising her child (although she does have other children she kept), much less a transvestite. The transvestite's husband is not shown or interviewed at all. She later reveals that she had a problem with a silicone implant.

Another barfly seems to want romance and fantasizes about a long-term relationship with a particular guest, even coercing a young bar patron into playacting as the guest. The young guy falls for her but his friend makes fun of him. The bar owner berates her for spending too much time with the young guy and not spending more time with other men who want her attention.

Prostitution at the club is suspected by the soccer guys but the film does not show any evidence of this.

It is obvious to me that this film is trying to show the discrimination against the transvestites, but at times the interviews seem staged. For instance, for the documentarian to chance upon the storyline of the soccer team taking back control of the club as a narrative conflict seems too timely. During the woman's story about the implant, which is supposed to appear like spontaneous girltalk between her and her friend, she flubs a line and it sounds more like she had been coached what to say.

The soccer guys come off as bigots and old school conservatives, whereas the transvestites come off as working women in a world of men, with the added discrimination of being transvestites. One of them even states that if she lived as a gay man, it would be less of a stigma.