Following the wedding preparations of a gay, middle to upper middle-class Catholic couple as they seek to be married in the Catholic faith, Abigail Honor and Yan Vizinberg’s Saints and Sinners is a lighthearted and sincere, but largely superficial exploration of the issues faced by homosexual couples searching for inclusion, acceptance, and basic human rights afforded to heterosexual couples in society. Unfortunately, after seeing such seminal issues as life and death, racial intolerance, and abuse of power presented in this year’s festival, I had hoped to see an equally compelling and impassioned film on the issue of gay rights (perhaps on the very timely issue of the recent spate of same-sex weddings being conducted throughout the country or something akin to Sandi Simcha Dubowski’s Trembling Before G_d on gay Orthodox Jews or Kimberly Peirce’s thoughtful Boys Don’t Cry on murdered transgender youth, Brandon Teena) instead of watching a fairly privileged couple fretting over whether their nuptials will be listed on the highly coveted New York Times Style section – a bourgeois validation of marital union that isn’t afforded to the majority of New Yorkers, irrespective of sexuality.
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