A VERY SERIOUS PERSON

Moviegoers familiar with Charles Busch's outrageous gender-bending stage parodies, such as Psycho Beach Party and Vampire Lesbians of Sodom, will be pleasantly surprised by his feature directorial debut. A Very Serious Person is a sweet-natured coming-of-age tale, loosely based on director Charles Busch's life, which touches on profound issues of cultural identity and self-acceptance. Making a rare appearance out of drag, Busch (who co wrote the screenplay with frequent collaborator Carl Andress) steals the show as Jan, an effete Danish male nurse, who is charged to look after a terminally-ill woman (Polly Bergen) and her 12-year-old grandson over the course of a summer at the Jersey Shore. The distant and reserved Jan soon develops a friendship with the boy, whose love of show tunes and old Hollywood movies may presage his emerging sexuality. Feeling protective, Jan tries to put a damper on the lad's enthusiasms, aware that a very different life awaits him in Florida at summer's end, and that he had best start acting less like an embryonic queen and more like a "serious person." Thus, the film becomes less about the boy's encounters with homophobia and more about how the gay adults around him try to cocoon him from its effects. Newcomer P.J. Verhoest shines as the younger half of this charming duo, while Busch, the auteur, makes an effortless transition from high camp to conventional comedy-drama.