Tag Archives: Gay/Queer

CAPSULE: LOVE LIES BLEEDING (2024)

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DIRECTED BY: Rose Glass

FEATURING: , Katy O’Brian, , Anna Baryshnikov, Dave Franco,

PLOT: In a small Southwestern city, Lou (Stewart) manages a gym and generally keeps her head down, keeping an eye on her sister, Beth (Malone) and her abusive husband, JJ (Franco), while keeping distance from her dad, Lou Sr. (Harris), a major player in the local crime scene. When Lou meets Jackie, who’s temporarily working for her dad while saving money for a body building competition in Vegas, sparks fly, setting off a conflagration which threatens to burn everything to the ground.

 

Still from love lies bleeding (2024)

COMMENTS: It’s reductive to call Love Lies Bleeding just a queer neo-noir, but that is basically what it is. It hits all the right noir notes: shady characters mired in shady dealings for questionable reasons. The setting (New Mexico, 1989) brings the “neo” to the noir, along with the fact that the star-crossed protagonists are a lesbian couple instead of the usual heterosexual pairing. And at first glance, it seems that, interesting and entertaining as it is—performances are good all around, as well as Glass’ direction—there’s nothing truly “weird” about this, at least not in the way we at 366 Weird Movies define the term.

However, as an A24 release, it’s at least atypical: it ain’t no Bound, for sure. For one thing, the setting allows for Glass and co-writer Weronika Tofilska to make some cultural commentary. There’s a solid background of violence always hovering about, and Lou Sr.’s club/shooting range is always packed with people eagerly exercising their Second Amendment rights, evoking specters of the wild west. There’s also the gym rat culture: intimidating motivational slogans and steroid use, which is a major plot point in the story.

The weird elements aren’t exactly subtle, but they are startling and metaphorical: a massive ravine in the landscape that reads as rather vaginal and several instances of ‘roid rage. At the bodybuidling competition, Jackie vomits up a full-grown Lou. The climatic confrontation between Jackie, Lou, and Lou Sr. has been called “the most A24 ending of A24 endings.” It works well, as long as it’s not taken literally, and it doesn’t detract from the denouement, which isn’t afraid to put the worm in the apple, as noir endings go. It may not be “weird” in the full sense, but there’s enough weird to notice in this hot, queer neo-noir.

Still 2 from Love Lies Bleeding (2024)

Currently streaming on several platforms like Max, Hulu, and Sling, the film is also on a Region-free Blu-ray with a commentary by Glass and Tofilska, two featurettes—“In the Land of Guns and Muscles” and “Sex, Steroids and Codependency”—and an image gallery. A 4K UHD will be available in January 2025.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“… an exciting, instant classic that will hopefully usher in a new era of unapologetically weird lesbian cinema.”–Jourdain Searles, Autostraddle (contemporaneous)

CAPSULE: ENTER THE DRAG DRAGON (2023)

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DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: Beatrice Beres, Sam Kellerman, Jade London, Samnang Tep, Mark MacDonald, Phil Caracas, Natalia Moreno

PLOT: A kung fu proficient drag-queen detective investigates a missing dog, which leads to a hidden treasure, an Aztec mummy, and zombies.

Still from enter the drag dragon (2023)

COMMENTS: In a movie so silly that the lead is played consecutively by three different actors—Crunch gets a drag makeover and a whole new look each time she awakens in the hospital after a trauma—it’s hard for even the anti-wokest viewer to take offense. (The film’s disclaimer that it was shot on land stolen from the Algonquin and Kanein’keha:ka Nations may raise some colonist ire, though).

Detective Crunch and roller-skating delivery girl/hot cis chick Jaws live in an abandoned (and haunted) movie theater owned by Fast Buck, where they screen old kung fu flicks 24/7 for training purposes. They are opposed by F.I.S.T. (Fearsome International Spies and Thieves), a cabal of ersatz Bond henchmen led by Gorch. There’s also an ancient Aztec mummy to deal with. The story may traffic in occasional immorality, but not amorality; it’s irreverent, but too goofy and harmless to be offensive, and it’s surprisingly chaste when it comes to sex. The heroes are loyal and determined, and the villains all reap the rewards of their infamy. Take off the drag, lose the dildo wipes, and tone down the gore and nudity, and it’s a wholesome adventure the Hays Office would gladly pass. (Instead, the poster informs us, it was “rated X by an all straight jury.”)

This is, if you haven’t guessed yet, an extremely silly movie. There’s lots of Z-movie gore—the kind where zombies pretend to yank intestines out of their victim as the actor plays dead, or people get telescopes slammed through their eye sockets. There are a handful of cheesy kung fu battles, which actually look like the choreography has been slowed down rather than sped up. There are minor cult cameos from ,  and from pal . We also get musical numbers, poison bosoms, laser hula hoops, a character named Dick Toes, and lots and lots of deliberately lame jokes, many involving dildos or kicks to the nuts. The location manager found some really keen outdoor locations to exploit, with mossy cliffs, waterfalls, and shallow caves, and our heroes even get a skydiving scene (in drag, of course). No one in the large cast can really act, or shows much interest in trying to. In other words, Lee Demarbre (best known for 2001’s similarly campy and transgressive-adjacent Jesus Christ, Vampire Hunter) throws everything he can think of at the screen without breaking the bank, having a blast in the process. The results are in the vein, but with less mean-spiritedness or jagged satire. It’s woke trash, to be sure, though perhaps not as woke as it pretends to be. Drag Dragon does fully deliver the trash, however, just like a drag queen delivers a nunchuck dildo upside a bad guy’s head.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…high camp where comparisons to the work of John Waters are apt, especially when logic is dropped for gags and the performances have an awkward stiltedness to them.”–Addison Wylie, Wylie Writes (contemporaneous)

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: CRIMINAL LOVERS (1999)

Les amants criminels

DIRECTED BY: François Ozon

FEATURING: Natacha Régnier, Jérémie Renier, Miki Manojlovic, Salim Kechiouche

PLOT: High schooler Alice seduces shy Luc into a plot to kill her ex-boyfriend; they get lost in the woods while burying the body and stumble upon a cabin, whose lone occupant captures them for his own ends.

Still from Criminal Lovers (1999)

COMMENTS: Let’s begin at the end, with two men in custody and a young woman gunned down by the police. Criminal Lovers dabbles in the language of fairy tales, so it would be natural to expect some kind of a moral here at the end of the journey. But writer-director François Ozon is much more interested in the morally compromised, and arguably all three of these people have done something to earn their fate. So the closest thing to a life lesson might be: those who do bad things will ultimately pay the price.

The most commonly referenced fairy tale in reviews of Criminal Lovers is “Hansel and Gretel” (a tale we have encountered here a few times before). At face value, the comparison is apt: a boy and girl get lost in the woods, and encounter a malevolent force who plans to eat them. But fairy tales are dependent upon a clear division of good and evil, and Criminal Lovers has not a good soul in sight. This is most evident in the personage of Alice, the amoral teen who leads on her erstwhile paramour Saïd, and then persuades the feckless Luc to join in her murder plot. The film believes it is revealing the depth of Alice’s monstrousness as we go, as it flashes back to her repeated machinations with Luc, as well as to a literature class where she reads the poetry of Rimbaud with a clearly sinister interpretation. But Ozon establishes her unscrupulous nature in the very first scene, as she lies to Saïd while teasing him. Even more than the world of fairy tales, we seem to be deep in the realm of the murderous femme fatale, a genre populated by such films as The Postman Always Rings Twice, The Honeymoon Killers, and most especially Double Indemnity.

That’s where the movie’s biggest twist comes into play, in which a nameless Woodsman captures the couple and proceeds to lavish his attentions not on Alice, but on the guileless Luc. Ozon seems intent on subverting the traditional male gaze, as Luc becomes the subject of the Woodsman’s carnal urges. This, even as the tensions are kept high by the suggestions that both teens are likely to end up on the grizzled man’s dinner plate. Ozon doesn’t focus on the anticipated violence; it’s your expectations for the romantic partnerships that he wants to disrupt. This was shocking 25 years ago, and it’s still a decent surprise today.

The way that Alice is kept around to act as an ugly counterpart to the ongoing gay seduction hints at the film’s sensibilities. Despite being trapped in the crawlspace beneath the Woodsman’s cabin, she still seizes upon every opportunity to rattle Luc’s cage, patronizingly complimenting him on finally achieving arousal during one of the hermit’s assaults, or laughing bitterly as she clues him in to the source of the meat he has just consumed. The film suggests that Luc is a more innocent soul, having done Alice’s bidding despite not really being into her (or, possibly, to women at all). Alice, even when she is in the most peril, is still a bad, bad lady.

Criminal Lovers makes a final strange turn in the final scenes, when Luc and Alice make their escape and the film turns into a full-on parody, as the pair frolic in a pool beneath a waterfall and finally consummate their union in the forest while woodland creatures cavort around their intertwined bodies and lush music plays. It’s played for laughs and eye rolls, and seems to be mocking the audience’s expectations as much as the conventions of fairy tale romance. It’s a solid joke, but coming on the heels of the tense thriller, the forbidden romance, and the dark character study, it becomes just one-too-many shifts in tone for a film that never settles on any one. So that final scene, with the violent end to one character and the probable lifelong incarceration of the other two, doesn’t pack a punch on its own. It’s been too inconsistent to make an impression at the end. Criminal Lovers always keeps you guessing, but never seems to have a final answer.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“At times, the film’s mordant absurdity plays with poetry, but of the most self-conscious brand… It’s one of those cases where the director trips over his own brains; he’s too smart for his own good.” – Elvis Mitchell, The New York Times (contemporaneous)

(This movie was nominated for review by Motyka, whose assesses the film as “definitely weird, if a little pretentious [well, it’s French.]” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

CAPSULE: QUEENDOM (2023)

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Queendom is currently available for VOD purchase or rental.

Recommended

DIRECTED BY: Agniia Galdanova

FEATURING: Jenna Marvin

PLOT: A queer Russian performance artist fears for her freedom as she clashes with the law.

Still from Queendom (2023)

COMMENTS wrote that the responsibility of the artist is to “keep an essential margin of non-conformity alive. Thanks to them the powerful can never affirm that everyone agrees with their acts. That small difference is important.” It’s difficult to imagine anyone embodying this principle more explicitly than “drag” artist Jenna (sometimes spelled “Gena”) Marvin.

I put “drag” in quotes, because, although her act is drag-inspired and drag-adjacent, that term hardly describes Marvin’s bizarre performance art. The locals who are discomfited by her appearance clearly recognize that she is challenging gender norms—she is frequently met with the Russian word for “fag”—but her costumes are so otherworldly and alien that they don’t meet a strict definition of cross-dressing. Tall, lithe (almost a ballerina body), and completely hairless, Jenna adorns herself with elaborate makeup and an assortment of bizarre sartorial choices including ruffs, duct tape, giant pipe cleaners, tentacle fingers, surreal latticed headgear, and so on. The only consistently feminine element are the high heels that accessorize every outlandish outfit.  She ventures out in public to, at best, stares, and at worst verbal abuse and harassment. She also makes short films for Tik Tok and Instagram—often set in amazing Siberian wilderness locations—where she takes out her frustrations by thrashing around in the mud in wild interpretative dances. Most dangerously, she attends protests against the Putin regime. In one, she dresses in a stilleto-heeled mockery of the Russian flag, which gets her thrown out of college; when the Ukrainian invasion comes, she walks down a Moscow street nearly nude wrapped in homemade barbed wire, which earns her a citation from the police and the threat of a court date.

With no narration and only a tiny bit of direct questioning from the documentarian, Queendom is almost entirely a fly-on-the-wall affair. It conveys enough information to keep you grounded in the developing story, although some knowledge of recent developments in Putin’s Russia is helpful. Anti-LGTBQ sentiment is encoded into the law there; faces of protestors or Jenna ‘s artistic collaborators are often blurred or carefully kept out of frame out of a sense of caution. But the social ostracism Jenna faces is perhaps even more telling. (“We have fear and subservience in our DNA,” Jenna’s friend tells her, referencing the country’s Soviet legacy.) Jenna’s contentious relationship with her grandfather—who, we gather, raised her—takes up a large portion of the story. Grandpa supports her, in his way, but does not pretend to understand either her sexuality or her creativity. His main concern is that, if she’s going to continue dressing as a freak, she better figure out how to make some money at it.

In the end—mild spoiler alert—Jenna does not go to prison or (worse) succumb to conscription, but is able to flee Russia to a European capital where she feels at home in a far more tolerant society. She has more courage than most of us, but does not, like Alexei Navalny (whose protest she attended dressed as the flag) have the ultimate courage to become a martyr. And who among us would? If I were in her heels, I would have fled far faster. She may have a duty to keep a margin of nonconformity alive—but she also has a responsibility to keep herself alive.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…more than a mere cabaret act, Marvin’s myriad outfits are a thrilling combination of theatricality, circus craft, avant-garde performance art, high camp, and something more otherworldly besides — as if H.R. Giger and Derek Jarman had a grotesque, unsettling baby… as well as the straight documentarian footage, there are surreal vignettes, Marvin creating visual art with her outfits and her emotions.”–John Nugent, Empire (contemporaneous)