Pierrot Lunaire (2014): A Woman Playing A Man Playing A Woman Playing A Man

Pierrot Lunaire (2014)
dir: Bruce LaBruce

SIFF 2014 Film #11
(Best of Festival)

Pierrot Lunaire is the Bruce LaBruce that you’ve come to know, expect, and love. But, it’s not mere political statement with hardcore sexuality. Pierrot Lunaire is a full frontal assault on your sensabilities that doesn’t ever let you get comfortable as you’re watching for its full 51 minute run time.

Did I just say 51 minutes? Yes I did. Being under an hour, Pierrot Lunaire barely counts as a film in length, but starts addressing so many different ideas in those 51 minutes that you can’t call it anything but. By the time, Pierre Lunaire is over, the audience will be overstimulated and exhausted.

Pierrot Lunaire is originally a series of 50 French poems by Albert Giraud published in 1884. These poems were translated into the German by Erich Hartleben. In 1912, Arnold Shoenberg created Three Times Seven Poems from Albert Giraud’s “Pierrot Lunaire”, an atonal musical “melodrama” that used speech-singing and a minimal chamber-esque group of musicians. And, finally, Bruce LaBruce decided to completely subvert that whole work in this short-ish film, which uses the Shoenberg work as his foundation, in as much as a subversive work can be further subverted.

Bruce LaBruce reimagined the main character, Pierrot, as a transsexual, a woman pretending to be a man. I say pretending because it's unclear if Pierrot identifies as a woman but dresses as a man because lesbians were generally not accepted, or if Pierrot truly identifies as a man.  Pierrot has a female lover, Columbine, who believes that Pierrot is a man. When Pierrot meets Columbine’s patrician father, the father figures out that Pierrot is a girl posing as a man, and prevents them from seeing each other. As a result, Pierrot embarks on a journey to covet and gain a real live penis for himself.

LaBruce tells the story in a manner similar to the intent of the original stagings of the play. The film is divided into the 21 different poems, each with a title. Each section of 7 poems are divided by modern old school club techno that sounds straight out of a German leather bar. In addition, LaBruce tells the story of Pierrot in two different stagings that he edits together: a cabaret-esque live stage staging, and a traditionally cinematic staging. LaBruce uses a variety of silent film techniques (a la Guy Madden) to pull all of the sections into a semi-cohesive whole, and even has title cards detailing the action on screen, while the poems undercut the action of the film because they have little to do with the onscreen action…or maybe they have everything to do with the action. I'm not entirely sure.

To say that I fully understand Pierrot Lunaire after a single screening would be to lie. This is a film that assaults you on multiple fronts. The music is old-school atonal classical with multi-chromatic poems being read/sang in a variety of tones that ranges from whispering to shrieking. The aural sensibilities never get adjusted from the deep bass of the techno that opens to the atonal apocalypse of the main music. Then trying to process the music and the poems with the multi-level on-screen action, plus having silent-film title cards. It’s a crime on your brain.

For me, Pierrot Lunaire will probably stand up on rewatches. Or, it may possibly fall apart under its own pretension. I don’t know. I know that I will enjoy figuring out what it means. It’s a puzzle box of an arthouse film. I’m not sure if LaBruce is saying something vast about gender, or just fucking with us (are we ever sure of that?). Even if this movie is all style with little substance, it will still be fun as hell to watch and rewatch.

Best of Festival.

Gerontophilia (2013): Provoking with Maturity

Gerontophilia (2013)
dir: Bruce LaBruce

SIFF 2014 Film #4

Director Bruce LaBruce is now 50, and was 48 when making Gerontophilia. He wants to fuck a 20 year old.

Gerontophilia is about Lake, a young man (probably 19) who discovers he has a fetish for old men. He hadn't known he was gay, as he has a girlfriend, Desiree. The film opens with Desiree kissing Lake intensely as she rattles off a bunch of radical feminists while perhaps having an orgasm. It's her list of female revolutionaries. Men not allowed.

Lake is first seen with a job as a lifeguard where he's sketching old men floating when one old man is floating upside down. Lake rescues him by giving him mouth to mouth, but then discovers he has a boner and connects the two in his young mind.

Lake's single mother gets a new boyfriend who gets both her and Lake a job at an old folks home, where he starts out with bedpan duty and then gets upgraded to sponge baths. As time goes on, he befriends a firey old queen, Melvin Peabody, who is of sound mind when he's not being drugged, and they embark on a relationship that goes past friendship.

Bruce LaBruce isn't being his usual provocative self here, but that doesn't mean that he isn't provoking. He's just provoking differently. Bruce LaBruce isn't filling Gerontophilia with hardcore pornographic gay sex, as he is wont to do. He isn't filming with an ultra-low-budget aesthetic that is punker than thou. Instead, he is challenging what we think about youth and desires and robbing from the cradle.

To say there isn't hardcore sexuality isn't to say there is no sexuality. LaBruce's camera leers over both Lake and Melvin's bodies as objects to be fetishized. Lake is a traditionally beautiful object of youth, and Melvin is a traditionally attractive man of a certain age. To put them next to each other in such fetishistic manners challenges the current state of media of obsessing over youth as beauty.

Of course, LaBruce spends more time leering over Lake's body than over Melvin's body. Lake is frequently shirtless, and in shorts or underwear. But, when the time comes to leer over the older men, LaBruce doesn't shy away from it. In part because he wants us to see that they're all beautiful, and in part because he is hoping to lay young men himself as he gets older.

The style of Gerontophilia is that of the usual crop of indie films. The look is somewhat reminiscent of some cross between Winter's Bone, Short Term 12, and the music video for Dark Star, which is to say it is full of semi-lush but really cold imagery for the most part. There are slow motion shots, traditional montages, and some iconic LaBrucian images, such as Lake's bedroom has a gigantic wall image of Gandhi printed behind his bed, that's almost always in full frame. But, they all serve a much softer LaBruce feel than that of the VHS L.A. Zombie or even The Raspberry Reich which tended to feel overlit and under planned in a very punk manner. Even the acting and editing are softer and less overt than in his previous efforts. It's like LaBruce is trying to say that he can make a traditional movie that everybody will eat up because it's actually common.

But, the problem is that Gerontophilia is a cliche-ridden work that seems almost to loathe his fans. Desiree seems to be one of the people that LaBruce can't stand. She has her own older man fling with her boss at the bookstore, who has a bunch of feminist writers on his personal bookshelf that makes her all gooey with excitement. But, Desiree is all about revolutionary ideas and who and what is a revolutionary, at one point saying that Lake can't be a revolutionary because he's a man. If you replace female with queer in that list, then LaBruce seems almost to be pissing all over his fans who see something political in his overtly political movies. Kind of like he's been trying to piss off his fans for years, and by going through the montagey, cliche-ridden route and placing the words of his more ardent fans in the mouth of somebody he has utter contempt for, then he's testing to see if people actually notice what he's doing. He's provoking, and he's also provoking idolatry.

Gerontophilia is not what you expect from a Bruce LaBruce film. It's pretty, it's mannered, it's measures, it's typical, and it's mildly intelligent. It's not boring due to it's challenges. I quite enjoyed it despite the cliches and the usual plot developments.

LA Zombie (2010): Fucking the Status Quo

LA Zombie (2010)
dir: Bruce LaBruce

Bruce LaBruce is a provocateur, first and foremost. His films have, traditionally, ridden a punk line between political statement and pornography, with both vying for screen time. Most of the political statements are of the anarcho-punk nature, but they always seemed to be more pointed to a solution than to the ills of society, and the sex was there to make you take note.

With L.A. Zombie, Bruce LaBruce isn't providing any answers. But, he's seeing a hell of a lot of problems.

First off, any reader should know there are two versions of L.A. Zombie in existence. A 67-minute cinema and film festival edition, and a 103 Hardcore edition. You'll know which one you're watching because, LaBruce retitled the full movie to LA Zombie Hardcore in the credits. And, there is a lot of gay hardcore sex (a lot).

The movie centers around a being who emerges from the Pacific Ocean as a zombie with vampiric fangs and a gaping red mouth. Throughout the movie this being changes into a regular homeless man, and also a beast with huge teeth or horns, and an modified fantasy cock. The essence of this character, played by Francois Sagat, could be that he's a schizophrenic homeless man. And, he could also be a zombie and a monster, which is how society regularly sees our mentally ill homeless population.

Homeless Zombie Monster, once out of the ocean, hitches a ride with a guy, who promptly crashes his truck and dies with gigantic gaping holes and a heart on the outside of his body. HZM then proceeds to fuck the gigantic gaping holes with his deformed fantasy cock, and ejaculates black semen in order to bring the driver back to life and in order to have a full-on hardcore sex scene with the living, but still completely injured, driver.

Much like David DeCoteau with his 1313 series, this pattern repeats itself rather ad nauseum. Guy dies. HZM sees the dead guy. HZM fucks dead guy back to life. And, then they have hardcore sex. Repeat.

With almost no dialogue whatsoever, Bruce LaBruce is forcing us to watch the images and see if we actually care about this. The sex, for the most part, isn't shown as erotic, being largely overlaid with somber boner-killing music that makes the sex almost dirge-like. The one exception to that is a 4-person leather orgy which is punctuated by men making manly gay sounds of passionate orgiastic gay sex.

The characters that HZM runs into, though, are actually symbols of the ills of society that we're constantly ignoring, or not caring about. The truck driver represents the ills of driving. There is a business deal that goes bad, with the business man surrounded by his white collar crime money. A black gang member who is dumped, dead, in an alley. A homeless guy who died alone in his refrigerator box home. And, four leather guys who are killed in a drug deal.

The film ends with HZM crying tears of blood as he looks over societies ills, before he digs the soft dirt over a grave marked "Law" as a storm brews overhead. Whether LaBruce is saying that the law of the land has created these horrible conditions, or whether he's saying that HZM wants to fuck Law back to life to fix these things is unclear. HZM never finds the body of Law to fuck it back to life. And, law never returns to the land.

Bruce LaBruce is creating a weird pornographic blend of political commentary that is pointed straight at the materialistic heart of society, namely American society. He isn't fetishizing these ills. He shows that he has the ability to create hardcore porno that's kind of hot when he actually shows us the pre-death 4-man leather orgy, which is the only scene I found stimulating. LaBruce is exposing these ills in society to the gay art house audience.

But, his main problem is that he puts in a lot of hardcore sex into this film. I mean, A LOT. We're talking about 10+ minute scenes of semi-unerotic blowjobs and fucking. Given that LaBruce cut out these scenes for the festival circuit, it leads to the question of why film them like this at all?  What's the statement he's trying to make, if any? Is he trying to say, "if you're bored of this, imagine if you were living like this?" Or, is he just trying to provoke some sort of shock value out of gay sex, but ending up with boredom?

LaBruce isn't a master filmmaker. Never was. Never will be. He's a punk filmmaker. He knows how to shock, or get a reaction. When you watch Sagat's unadorned cock starting to probe the shotgun wound in a guy's head, you're still a bit shocked, even if he's penetrated many other wounds before that. LA Zombie is almost Cronenbergian in its obsession with blood, wounds, and sex and the intersection thereof. Blood and open holes exist so that HZM can fuck people in their wounds back to life. But, LaBruce is no Cronenberg. His set ups and shots are like mid-level porn quality in the mid-90s. And, his editing is mildly atrocious.

But, does it provoke? Does it communicate his intention? Not as well as he hoped. And, it is in this that LA Zombie is ultimately a failure. Sure, I just spent an inordinate number of words talking about LA Zombie's cataloging of society's ills, but a lot of movies do that. LaBruce brings nothing much to the table, except, possibly, that we're killing ourselves. It's a sour note, in part because its a sour message that you have to give some credit for trying.

But, I do miss overly punk LaBruce.