USA
2008
95 min.
Genre/Subjects: Gay, Musical, Youth

Trailer

If High School Musical indulged in flights of homoerotic fancy, it might look something like Tom Gustafson’s Were the World Mine. But to truly capture the essence of the writer-director’s spirited debut feature, we turn to an ever more timeless source: Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

Were the World Mine originally began as Fairies, an award winning 2003 short film that used Shakespeare’s whimsical comedy to portray a gay teen’s struggle for acceptance. This feature presentation further fleshes out Gustafson’s exploration of teenage turmoil, lust and theatricality and retains one of Fairies’ finest actors: Wendy Robie (Twin Peaks).

Robie plays Ms. Tebbit, an unconventional teacher at a posh, all-male academy, who sets out to produce a stage version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and recruits her star student, Timothy (Tanner Cohen), to take part.

When not suffering the wrath of his homophobic classmates, Timothy withdraws into his imagination, where macho rugby players morph into dancing fairies decked out in go-go boy attire. Timothy first balks at acting in the play but eventually embraces the role of Puck and, armed with a magical pansy, turns nearly the whole town gay — with unexpected implications for his mother, his two best friends and the hot star rugby player.

As the play’s characters frequently say, “The course of true love never did run smooth.” In Gustafson’s clever hands, that course takes some strange — and beautifully staged — turns.

• Jonathan L. Knapp