His boyfriend is a revolution

Bruce La Bruce is simply created for Russian film festivals. We can say that he is the western festival director closest to us in spirit. We can recognize as much as possible in love for the Berlin school, review Grandrhea or arrange retrospectives of unobvious ethnic cinema, but not a single director will deliver us such joy as la Bruce. Because the film festival is a holiday, and on holidays we allow ourselves that on other days it is expensive and harmful. In our latitudes, this is precisely La Bruce.

Every Russian viewer will find something like that from La Bruce, only to him expensive. The viewer will rejoice at the games with Brecht and the Revolution, the spectator is patriotic with carnivorous excitement to talk about the rotten West and shaken scraps, the simple viewer will see how naked men kiss, whistle and say: “Give” - the topic for conversations for the next month is provided. This is first.

Secondly, La Bruce is a bad director. His films are an inhuman gay-porno with politics and acquaintance, and at modern film festivals they play the same role that dwarfs, mermaids and bearded women at fairs played in the old days. The overseas wonders, which beckons and scares, but in real life is useless.

Actually, these two points must be kept in mind when you see La Bruce films in the program of the Moscow Film Festival, so the victim, according to Nikita Sergeyich Mikhalkov, from international sanctions. But no sanctions can spoil the small holiday of disobedience to us - and this year two La Bruce films were brought to Moscow at once: the relatively brand new Gerontophilia (2013) and the Lunar Pierrot - a video version of the play staged by La Bruce in the vocal cycle of Schlenberg.

The choice of these films for the show is incredibly successful: these paintings make La Bruce's work differently. That is, the reason for our hot interest in his cinema remains unchanged, but you can already argue about how much Bruce Bruce is.

But let's start in order. If you have not seen a single La Bruce film and suddenly watched Gerontophilia - you do not know anything about his work. If you saw his other films and decided not to watch Gerontophilia - you do not know anything about this film.

"Gerontophilia" was shot by a man who knows how to make a movie. First of all, this is a very touching and funny romantic comedy, and it is simply nice to watch. The story is resolved in the spirit of films, which are usually shown at the Sandance festival. Here we get acquainted with Lake - a young orderly from the nursing home. Lake has a girlfriend. She considers herself a feminist and makes up an endless list of women revolutionaries, which includes Winona Ryder (if property is theft, then the theft of property becomes a revolutionary act). Lake and his girlfriend are constantly kissing, but Lach does not really like it. But Lake likes the old people. And especially-Mr. Pabodi , an 86-year-old actor. Once Lake will decide to steal Mr. Pabodi and go with him to the ocean, where Mr. Pibody was once happy.

For his history, La Bruce elects, perhaps, the only true intonation. He does not try to prove that gerontophilia is normal, he initially accepts this fact as a given and simply tells the love story, using all the arsenal of a romantic comedy and independent cinema available to him. For example, the quarrels of Lake and his mother are elusively reminiscent of the first film of Dulan (the fact that they pass in French, the hero is a French -francokanad) gives additional similarities. However, La Bruce does not frown by eyebrows, does not try to speak with an anguish, does not even convict, and therefore a pair of scenes manages to tell what the Dulana needed a whole filmography. La Bruce looks at his heroes with tenderness and light irony, and therefore he manages to avoid vulgarity. The film contains the only truly unpleasant moment - the dream of Lake, in which he kisses the ulcers that arose on the body of Mr. Pabodi - greetings from past paintings of the master.

"Gerontophilia" turns out to be the most (and the only, perhaps) by the traditional film by La Bruce - and this traditional director achieves more than all his radical works. Removing a love story, he manages to crush all possible barriers inherent in our culture at once: racial (Mr. Pibodi - Africanarian), age, sexy and even class (obviously, the Lake family is poorer than the family of Mr. Pabodi).

But in order to evaluate all the innovation of “gerontophilia”, it is worth talking about the “lunar Pierrot” (and indeed about the rest of the work of La Bruce). "Moon Pierrot" - the sight is very terrible. A dumb film about a lesbian who cuts off the genitals by a taxi driver to marry the daughter of a fat capitalist. At the same time, part of the scenes is placed in the style of Brecht, and the part is actually gay porn, and all this is accompanied by Schengberg's music. In the frame they masturbate, urinate, swear and sniff out of others' boots. The venerable audience fidgets in a chair, is indignant, but does not dare to leave the viewing. Ejaculation occurs in the frame. Leaving. Indeed, the rest is not so interesting.

There is a tragedy in all this. But this is not the tragedy of the main character, but the tragedy of the author. La Bruce is trying to play wise men, overwhelms the action with cultural allusions in everything in the world, exposes the bourgeois society, the Virgin crumbles and fiercely tries to fight the whole world, the role of which the viewer plays for him. It turns out cold, a little boring and in some places it is too similar to shocking for the sake of shocking. Actually, the “Moon Pierrot” is most reminiscent of a parody of radical art, so many in it ... too characteristic. Such films also love to come up with the authors of Simpsons or Gryffins when they need to portray an independent movie .

But naked men appear in the frame. And in La Bruce, his eyes light up. He knows how to shoot it, he knows how to shoot it, he finally wants to shoot it. The fact is that erotica also requires the author of skill. Even a genius. And this genius La Bruce clearly possesses. He is trying to play a revolutionary with worthy admiration for selflessness and shouts loud slogans: “Heterosexualism is an opium for working masses!”, “Homosexuality is the highest manifestation of the class struggle!”, “Anal freedom against world imperialism!”. However, it is worth recognizing: in the well-known formula from the “Raspberry Reich” “Revolution-My boyfriend” the main thing is the main thing for him is the word “boyfriend”.

If you close your eyes to all the provocation of his films, it turns out that La Bruce is a deeply sentimental author. He is interested in love and good ends (in every sense). Behind the life of marginals, radicals and leftists in his films, a very simple story is always hidden about the search for love and the erotic aspects of these searches. The revolution is turning for La Bruce into justification, in an attempt to declare the right of each person to this search and his right to shoot these searches.

But the artist does not need an excuse for creativity. The fight against the phenomenon is a form of recognition. And sometimes, in order to free yourself from the phenomenon, you just need to begin to ignore it. Having ceased to expose the gender inequality in Gerontophilia, La Bruce freed himself as an artist. And he began to create.

In the end, the highest therapeutic task of Quir-Kino is to help people admit themselves and others as they are. This is exactly what happened to La Bruce. Now for the story he does not need either slogans or zombies (this eternal metaphor of the oppressed masses), or talk about the right to inhumanity. Even penetration in the frame becomes some kind of inappropriate. And as soon as La Bruce refuses all this, it turns out that he is really a good director.

How long and productive this new period of La Bruce's work will be is not yet clear. But there is a chance that we can find out in the coming years, at the new shows of the Moscow Film Festival.