Georden West’s Playland is a visually stunning blend of performance art and documentary that asks the audience to be witnesses of Boston’s oldest queer bar as it transcends time to tell the stories of its patrons, performers, and personnel through the decades, on the eve of its demolition. The film is West’s first feature and premiered internationally in the Tiger Competition at the 2023 International Film Festival Rotterdam and then premiered in North America at the Tribeca Film Festival. The film utilizes a blend of performances (making it feel like a play), found footage, and archival sound to tell the history of the LGQBTQIA+ community in Boston throughout the years, as well as the difficulties Playland faced as a business in its sixty-one years of business.
The film is a fascinating blend of techniques from the Silent Era and performing arts. It utilizes title cards reminiscent of silent-era film, complete with the white border, and introduces the “players” of the film with images that look like they could have been on the cover of playbills. Outside of this introduction and the archival footage and sound, this is the most historical context the film offers. While it has the makings of a documentary film, this causes it to lean more into the territory of art cinema. While this is not a terrible place for the film to reside, it is perhaps the weakest part of the film. The performances are captivating, the aesthetics are equally enthralling, and—combined with the archival footage—these elements create an intriguing story. The film focuses closely on the people who frequented Playland Café, either through performances, working there, or as guests of the café, but it only leaves the audience with implications of what their lives were truly like. It is a film that has the purpose of telling their stories, but leaves them half-finished, perhaps making the café feel even more haunted when morning comes, and the ghosts fade into oblivion.
The aesthetics of this film are its strongest factors. The lighting and sound design aid the haunting atmosphere of the film, creating a moody environment. While the film transcends time, showing performances and crowds during its various decades, the setting always looks dingy and run-down rather than new and pristine, reminding the audience that the café has already reached the end of its life, and the activity is merely an echo of its past. Two of the characters, Rabbit (Miranda Quinn) and Steff (José Lapaz-Rodriguez), deliver the most intriguing performances, as they work in the café. While the film does not provide clear details about their lives, the actors offer implications of friendship and perhaps something more blooming between the two characters, and as they interact with each other and the environment, they occasionally gesture to the camera—or the audience—watching them, two ghosts caught in plain sight. These small actions create a fascinating world as the audience witnesses the ghosts’ last evening in the café.
While the film lacks historical context, and creates more confusion about the events transpiring, Jo Jo Lam presents outstanding cinematography. She previously won an award in 2021 for Best Cinematography from the Los Angeles Cinematography Awards (LACA) for her short film, So Long (2020). Lam utilizes wide shots throughout the film to show all the characters on screen at once, encapsulating the café’s dining area, the bar, and the kitchen, to show all the players interacting with the camera. This is one of the most poignant shots of the film, as it exhibits the different decades the film covers all in one image, reminding the audience the café is haunted and this film is about those who haunt it. Combined with the lighting and sound, Lam’s cinematography creates a moody atmosphere. These wide shots are mixed with tight framing, making the film feel as though it is taking place on a stage, and the events taking place lean more toward performance art.
Despite the film’s shortcomings, it succeeds in creating a haunting account of Playland Café’s history. However, without doing more research on Boston’s queer history, and the café itself, it is difficult to fully understand what the film is trying to convey. At times, the archival footage aids the story greatly, and at others makes it even more confusing and disjointed. Lam’s incredible cinematography, the lighting, the set design, the costuming—they all create an ethereal and chilling setting; but not having the historical context is what hurts the film the most. Even so, it is evident that this film is crafted by passionate and skilled filmmakers, and West, as a director, brings all elements together to create a film that commemorates queer history and tells their stories. This is one of the film’s greatest achievements and, in doing so, West creates a touching piece that reminds audiences that queer people, trans people, are still here, and even if our history is lost or demolished, we will still and always exist.
Author Biography
K. A. Vale is a nonbinary filmmaker who recently earned their MFA in Filmmaking from the University of North Carolina Wilmington (UNCW). They are currently pursuing an MA in Film Studies from UNCW and intend to graduate in May 2025.
