Playland (2023)

2023 TRIBECA FILM FESTIVAL REVIEW!

Playland Café, a place for diversity, a place for fun, a place that has ruffled the feathers of onlookers for years and years. Playland Café is the oldest gay bar in the world, located in the heart of Boston, Massachusetts–and it’s been surrounded by controversy for years, causing outsiders to look at the establishment and complain about its every single intricacy.

What’s so interesting about Playland is the fact that most of it plays out like a silent film, where the characters on screen have almost no speaking lines and are tasked with bringing this story to life through their body language and facial expressions. Yet, Playland isn’t completely void of dialogue. Much of the film has historical dialogue play over the visuals and the actions of the characters we see living their lives before us. There are so many moving parts, and so many things come from these decisions.

Light:

There is a revolving door of light that exists throughout the course of Playland, and it’s constantly shifting to address the tone and the content at any given moment. Playland transitions from light to dark and back again, over and over again, ultimately exploring a spectrum of emotion from happiness to grief and everything in between. Then there are moments that have the potential to induce epileptic shock, and while they are a tad challenging to watch, they are brilliant. They pull viewers into the story in a way that just one perspective on emotion wouldn’t have been able to. In just seconds we get light and dark in a way that evokes powerful, crippling emotion. As much as those moments are physically challenging, they are emotionally challenging as well–effectively bringing to life all that Writer-Director Georden West was aiming for.

Sound:

Playland is a playground for sound, a place where it seems that all sound comes to converge, to become one Jackson Pollock painting of noise. Playland is a clusterfuck of sound, and I mean that in the best way possible. From the second the film begins viewers know that they are going to experience something unique, and while they see that with the use of light, the sound amplifies that tenfold. Sound drives the film forward, sound enhances the characters, their subtle narratives, and the historical content strewn throughout the course of the film. This allows the film to become immersive, fully grabbing hold of me and other viewers and refusing to let go until Playland concluded.

Technically speaking this is one of the most beautiful films that I’ve ever seen, dripping with cinematic and stylistic potential. Light, sound, and more work together to create something so brilliantly enthralling, groundbreaking, challenging, and enveloping–and I’ve never seen anything like Playland before. There are films that exist in pockets of cinema that house only a few other titles, but they are still similar to other films. Playland, and let me be as clear as possible, is one of a kind. I’ve never seen a film that is able to do what this film does. It’s a frumpy, bumpy, wild ride; it lacks rhythm, it’s fractured, and oftentimes the things depicted on screen don’t make any sense–and yet Playland is brilliant, everything that West could have hoped for and more.

Written & Directed by Georden West.

Starring Danielle Cooper, The Lady Bunny, Aidan Dick, Constance Cooper, José Lapaz-Rodriguiez, Miranda Quinn, etc.

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐½/10