And I like him, like it, like it

On Moscow screens, the two strange -strange film rhyming with each other coincided. “Konli” (“Love Witch”, 2016) Anna Biller was recently shown at the MMKF (moreover, the text about this movie today could already get into the section “What to download this week”). And in the summer cinema of the Museum of Contemporary Art “Garage”, the film of the shocking Canadian director Bruce La Bruce “Misandronists” (2017) will be demonstrated . Both paintings talk about the struggle of women with men. Not for life, but for death, but opposite methods.

The “sorceress” is a strange kinunization for today's arthouse, a little reminiscent of the films of Douglas Syrc and Kenneth Enger, but most of all - the luxurious style of Jalo. The main character Elaine (Samantha Robinson) is a novice witch, a student of a sorcerer who has a crooked magic. Having drunk love potions, men instead of falling in love with really, first hysterize, begin to sob and capricate, like children, and then die from emotional overheating. And Elaine thought that they could create the “polarity” of her hyperenaries and achieve the perfect balance in a couple! Elaine is a champion of gender inequality, which is the witch, on the contrary, a werewolf witch. She appointed herself an agent of Patriarchate, as a pervert, confident in that she carries out the fantasies of another. But in fact, she is a serial killer of men, since not one of her partners is able to withstand her requirements for masculinity. She objectified herself - in insanely feminine outfits, makeup, cooking, needlework and willingness to realize all the sexual fantasies of men, but at the same time turned into deadly weapons that objectifies others. “I am your last fantasy,” she says to one of the gentlemen. But the man is not able to cross through his imagination and be on the other side, along the covenant of the Lakanovsky psychoanalysis. But Elein passes through his fantasy about the beautiful prince on a white horse (literally), when he faces a courageous policeman (Jan Kis), who managed to free himself from her spells to caricature. But on the other side of the scienceism, psychosis lies: a picture with a maid, eloquing the beautiful prince, which she painted, turns out to be a self -explosive prophecy.

In addition to reading in the feminist tradition, the “sorceress” Biller, which removed the musical “Viva” ( “Viva” , 2007), also fully admits Quir-interpretation. The emphasized masculinity of men in the film is not only a tribute to the traditions of classical Hollywood. She indicates that this is a certain type of gay, the one that behaves as heterosexual and even hyperheterosexual (they are called Trade in Quir Terminology). Then Elein is Queen, a feminized gay trying to attract and hold the courageous gay, which, in turn, despises it, since in the dynamics of these relations only masculinity is an object of desire, and femininity occupies a lower stage in the hierarchy. Actually, all women in the film provide Quinins - and Rieltorsha Trish (Laura Waddell), from whom Elaine leads her husband and who, wandering into her apartment, “kampet”, putting on her erotic rags and wigs. Witches are a drag-flood, and according to the rules of the game, Trade hates them. Although the film is almost deprived of irony, it can be considered a real camp, which in the era of digital cinema should really be shot on a dying 35 mm film.

In the "mudgens" La Bruce, on the contrary, no one hides his intentions. The action takes place in a secluded worker in a forest organized by radical feminists. Their goal is the overthrow of Patriarchate by destroying men. Men to school are not allowed under any kind, you can’t even touch them, as if masculinity was infectious. Feministic courses of different sciences are read by students: for example, they say that in the future women will multiply with parthenogenesis. Relations between students are in every possible way, and chastity, jealousy and possessive instincts are condemned.

Both the “sorceress” and “Muchenian” are films about the female masquerade. “Sorceress” shows that it is not enough to be a woman, but it is necessary to dress up with her, as Elein does. In this regard, the detail with a black wig is especially good: under the luxurious black hair of the heroine - his own, quite magnificent, black hair. You can’t do without doubling, only natural reality is not enough. Femininity is a performance. Without a masquerade, it may not exist at all. The "mudgens" have its own masquerade. Radfem-Yachi pretends to be a monastery shelter for girls with a difficult fate. But inside everyone goes to the hypersexual school uniform, and the abbess herself, a large mother (Suzanne Zaks), and other sisters wear catchy makeup and dress up - for each other. Or in a refutation of the idea that Lesbian is an asexual creature arising from many gender theories.

If you apply the Lakanovsky distinction between male and female - the man has a phallus, and the woman is, that is, it is a meaning - it turns out that Elain is too actively signaling him and indicates his power - so no phallus ends up. Or, in order to be a phallus, you need to kill a real phallus (in this case, an ineffective policeman), and those that are fake, will chop yourself. In the "Muzenovitniki" no one was going to be a phallus, but those who have it seep in the slender ranks. A well-rebuilt radical-phuministic scheme is falling apart. Cathedral girls not only hide the wounded partisan-Levaka hiding in the basement of the school from the chase-her hermaphrodite was still hidden among them, something like Erkulin Barben, about which Michelle Foucault wrote.

“Women are not born, they become women” - this is how the famous phrase of Simona de Bovoir sounds. Hermaphrodite was not born a woman, but he became and feels her fully. However, the feminist cell and a large mother, as they say, essentialists and believe only in women from birth. Even the rudimentary phallus is fraught with danger. The forest school seems to be designed to confirm one of the theses of another important theorist of Gender, Monica Wittig, that there is only one floor - female, because a man takes the position of a universal subject and is outside the believing categories of the floor. In the film La Bruce, two men are hiding left -handed people and a policeman looking for him. But both are about one person, while the girls are extremely individual and diverse, despite the uniform, and La Bruce shows each very carefully. Feminine - the kingdom of the particularized and concrete.

“Women are not born” - so Wittig cut off the phrase by Bova. They are not born neither women nor men. All these false appeals for supposedly nature are needed only in order to maintain the economy of heterosexuality and the continuation of the genus. Before this imaginary biological division happened, people were in a state of fullness of being, Wittig believed. The fact that in the “muddenoists” a resolution of the conflict becomes a shooting of porn, hospitably immersing everyone indiscriminately-black, white, police under the guise, herfrodite-to his euphoric atmosphere, speaks of a attempt to return the polymorphic pleasure and heavenly state of gender non-identity. The final porn value was shot in almost the same way as the scene of the battle with pillows at the beginning.

Who is more effective in the fight against men? The feminist sabbath from the "hubborn", openly ate the entire patriarchy as a whole, or a lone witch from the "sorceress", who managed to freeze three men? It's hard to say. It seems to be the last, but the film La Bruce also has an open finale: the enlightened faces of women watching a lesbian porn that the wards of a big mother were brewing. Maybe nobody but women is left in this world? If the gender destroys the initial fullness of being, one of the ways to restore it is to destroy one of the poles of duality, and there the category itself will break up.

P.​ S.​ At the session in the Garage, another film by La Bruce will be shown - “Ulrike's Brain” ( “Ulrike's Brain” , 2017): a woman with the brain of Ulrika Minhof in the box comes out of one point, and a man with the ashes of the leader of neo -Nazis in a vase moves almost to her (more about the background of the “brain” - in the interview with the “brain” - in interview director ). Both the brain and the ashes emanate the appropriate discourses (the brain still complains of headache all the time). Who will collect whom in the end? With the “mudzenvyniki” the “Ulrika’s brain” is united by the same actress Suzanne Zaksa, who plays a large mother and a neurosurgeon who has received the remains of Minhof. In addition, in the course of action, the girls in the shelter watch a fragment of the film. “The brain of Ulrika” is an example of a cinema of a completely different kind. As well as the previous “gerontophilia”, “muddy” against his background - almost classic, firmly made, professional cinema. But the “brain of Ulrika” is a real Quir-Kino, because Quir is not only a topic and a plot, but also a letter itself, which does not have to be professional (because such requirements are normalizing heteronomy) and allowed to be strange, even “bad”, to put everything in one pile, not to think about the logic of installation and stylistic transitions, to leave the seams and not try to smooth out.