Oh gaydar-schmaydar. I couldn’t tell at all. The denouement was a complete surprise to me. I wasn’t the only one, either. I had a friend who later thought Jaye Davidson was a woman with a prosthetic penis.

I knew going in that there was some kind of a big surprise coming, but I looked for it in all the wrong places. I thought it was going to be political, like Forrest Whitaker is really an evil man or something along that line.

Surprise or no surprise, I thought this was one of the best films of the 1990s: that alluring, dream-like opening shot with the Ferris wheel captured my interest, which only intensified over the next two hours. It got ever more complicated and interesting, not unlike “Chinatown” — the more complex it gets, the more involved you are, intellectually and emotionally.