Fully Furnished

I met David Furnish at the Hazelton Hotel in Toronto's Yorkville and staff seemed to have no idea he was something of a big thing--we got bounced around a bit trying to get seated and had to firmly ask for a corner table even though the inside of the hotel restaurant was mid-afternoon empty.

Furnish was honest and humble. I think being chosen as parade marshal in his hometown had made him reflective about his life's journey from Scarborough to LA/Windsor/Etc. But I would say that our interaction was pretty formal until my prepared questions ended and we started talking about the cult Canadian musician Jane Siberry. I had interviewed her in 1996 for a Vancouver magazine I was editing; he had interviewed her the same year for Interview magazine, when her album Teenager came out.

We both agreed that she has cleared the way for the commercial success of the many female Canadian singer-songwriters who had followed (especially Sarah McLachlan). Even though Furnish had already talked to me in great detail about how he and Elton John parent their two kids, it seemed like his enthusiasm for Siberry was our first totally unguarded moment.

When you're married to one of the world's most famous men, I suppose, you probably welcome moments where you can speak about something with passion, where that passion won`t likely end up in the tabloid headlines.

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interview

A figgy pudding

How strange is it to be delighted by a documentary about AIDS activism?

Inspired, sure. Provoked, of course. Overwhelmed, probably. But it was delight that most infused my feelings about John Greyson's Fig Trees, which played at Inside Out this week. I was skeptical going in: I heard it was an opera. But the moment I saw the narrator was an albino squirrel--sometimes a real squirrel, sometimes a puppety one and sometimes a boy dressed as one--I knew that opera wasn't going to be taking itself serious.

Fig Trees juxtaposes the lives and works of two AIDS activists, Tim McCaskell in Toronto and Zackie Achmat in Cape Town, South Africa, through interviews, opera arias and experimental film techniques. Having admired McCaskell for a long time, I loved that the film found in him and Achmat two subjects who could embody some of the heroism of the personal side of social change but also two subjects who are critical of an individual's role, knowing that there there is so much more to be achieved by collective action. And they're both so forward-looking, neither have ever seemed tempted to say, "That's it, honour us now for all the work we've done." The film shares this resistance to self-congratulations.

So I loved the two people profiled. But I also loved Fig Trees' ingeniously eclectic style. There was AIDS and opera and an albino squirrel, yes. But there was also Gertrude Stein, palindromes, train sets and satirical music videos. Some of it was out of left field but none of it was random. I've seen a few things lately where their makers' tendencies to throw a lot of "stuff" at audiences seemed aimed at covering a lack of rigour in the writing process, as if a first draft was rushed into production. While I would not claim to understand all of the connections Greyson makes in the film, they are asserted with such inventiveness and purpose, I feel I have put my emotions and thoughts in the hands of someone who has thought things through. Fig Trees is frequently silly, but never shallow.

Even if audience members left with new (or renewed) disgust with corporate and government complacency in the face of HIV/AIDS, a deeper sense of the daunting task of the fight against HIV/AIDS, I don't think Fig Trees left any room for despair.