The Current Cinema - David Hare's nostalgia bells get rung by QUEER (Luca Guadagnino, Italy, 2024)

I revisited last night these tattered remnants of my youth (bought way back in my palmy days of hustling, acid trips and “moral” abandon in 1968.) Back then William Burroughs felt like an endorsement, the smart older brother we never had to simply scorn the establishment, all the while shouting from the barricades “eat shit motherfuckers.” Being queer then was another proud crime and adjunctive slap in the face to bourgeois society.

Now, nearly sixty years later the western world seems to be strangling itself again in large part thanks to cannibilistic capitalism, egocentricity and transactionalism. All sugar coated with the cancer of PC and university minted degrees on things like film and gender studies, in the process draining those noble realities into garbage salaries for deeply unworthy New Economy Tertiary “learning” with their bloodless, intellectually zombified “curricula” ” and their completely worthless “degrees”

Which is all a roundabout way of getting to the point. After dodging every Guadagnino film since Call Me By Your Name which turned me avidly against this auteur of swoondom, I finally succumbed to. his new film, Queer.

I am in shock at its ability to completely capture me and take me back to places I hadn’t revisited since I was very, very young.

Let me just get this out there. The players in this literally gorgeous movie are all so wonderful they seem to have been waiting a lifetime to get their parts. Even my beloved Lesley Manville, here unrecognizable as the Jungle Botanist-Witch who feeds the boys Telepathy enabling Yage. 

David Hare's copy

Every step up the scale of stylization that Guadagnino lays onto the visual fabric just multiplies the pleasure - the 50s linen suits, the unbelievable goofy but beautiful miniature bi-plane flying wobbly on wires against a painted cartoon sky. From the entirely Cinecittã soundstage where they rebuilt a 1951 Mexico City and a Guatamalan jungle in lurid sea green and rattlesnake copper. To the final staggering trip sequence in which, unlike Burroughs’ novel, Lee and Eugene do in fact find Yage and imbibe its powers. The epilogue which sublimely and achingly recreates the endgame of Kubrick’s 2001, set to Reznor and Ross’ Vaster than Empires it may be the greatest “death scene” I’ve seen in movies.

I’m old now and I hate what the world’s become. This movie and its incredible passion made me young again, it brought me back real joy, real pleasure, real excitement. It’s so alive with outrageous taste and feeling you seem to apprehend the excitement of all the players, whose sheer immersion in their parts has turned them on too.

Screened at Container (Brisbane) Ben Cho revels in the new film by Joao Pedro Rodrigues FOGO-FATUO (WILL-OF-THE-WISP, Portugal, 2022)

Editor's Note:  This film was screened as part of Container, a Brisbane-based film society. More information about Container can be found at https://container.org.au/ 

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French Poster for Fogo-Fatuo

Unveiled at this year’s Directors’ Fortnight, Joao Pedro Rodrigues’ latest feature Fogo-Fatuo(Will-o’-The-Wisp) is a strange, singular experience with its sensual finger all over the pulse of a world on fire - our world actually, a world increasingly ravaged by natural disasters, viral plagues and political drama. 

A “musical fantasy” clocking in at just under seventy minutes, it’s a homoerotic adventure deep into the history and culture of Portugal, starting in 2069 (ha-ha) and moving back in time to the early 2010s and then onwards from there until finally returning back to a future Portugal ruled by a black president. 

You don’t need an intimate knowledge of Portugal’s history or terrain to enjoy Fogo-Fatuo but I can only hazard a guess that native Portuguese will find much of the film’s details, which are grounded in a world of that nation's terrain, music and history, resonating more than your average viewer in suburban Australia. Having said that if you’re familiar with Joao Pedro Rodrigues’ extraordinary body of work (spanning documentary and fiction, and sometimes directed with Joao Rui Guerra Da Mata as in the case of this year’s Where Is This Street? Or With No Before or After recently screening at the Locarno Film Festival) you’ll already have a solid sense of the kind of stylistic daring, graphic sexuality and narrative playfulness common throughout his filmography and certainly boldly on display here. 

What is perhaps more readily apparent in Fogo-Fatuo is an eerie tension between form and content that hasn’t been quite as pronounced in his previous features: the images here (cinematography courtesy of the brilliant Rui Pocas) are beautiful, the camerawork precise and meticulous, as is the art direction by Guerra Da Mata ... and yet that very precise form is all fused around a script which is jazzy, some might argue spiky punk too, and loose, full of winking nods to pop culture and political culture in ways that are joyful and deadly serious (at one point Greta Thunberg’s pleas are replicated by a character addressing the audience). This tension between style and narrative sits over the film’s outrageousness, its irony, its comedy, it tinges the proceedings with an unmistakable sense of unease about where we’re headed as a society dancing on the edge of catastrophe. Sure you can chuckle at some of the jokes thrown around, and the guessing game artistic recreations in the firehouse with naked firemen is funny, but the laughs never really can escape the sense a sociological fire alarm could go off any moment and trap our laughs in our throat. 

In an interview Rodrigues gave during the film’s Cannes opening, he made mention of his love for comedies and specifically called out Lubitsch. Crazy as it might sound, the basic premise of Fogo-Fatuo is something you could imagine a 30s or 40s comedy tackling quite well: a young prince of a noble European royal family decides to abandon a life of luxury and go for a job as a fireman, only to fall in love with someone on the job of whom his family would undoubtedly disapprove. Obviously Lubitsch would never go for quite the level of obviousness involving erect trees and erect penises like Fogo-Fatuo does, but he would have had quite a bit of fun with the sheltered and spoilt nobility trying to adapt to the rough and tumble world of firefighting (although there isn’t much actual firefighting in the film, it certainly won’t ever be giving Backdraft or The Towering Inferno a run for their money in the thrills department). 

While a specific number is unavailable, there is a lot of cock on show throughout the film, in all manner of flaccid, semi-erect and fully erect states, as well as one glorious interracial romp in the hills between two firemen that ends in, well, you can use your imagination but it ain’t the firehoses that end up spurting. What this means for the film’s broader chances of release I have no idea but I can only speculate after doing a run of film festivals, and LGBT-themed festivals in particular, it might find its way to a streaming service or on-demand platform. The other hopeful possibility is some distributor pairs it with Where Is This Street? for a Blu-ray twofer - seems like a perfect release for someone off OCN’s roster. 

The cinematic landscape is flooded with offerings but with so much slop out there and the industry itself undergoing momentous change due to Covid, a radical 67 minute queer fantasy musical with hardcore gay sex is something we should be celebrating and supporting for its bold and uncompromising vision, its commitment to a cheeky anarchy of form and narrative that is a rare beast in the wilds of filmmaking today. It might appear minor in run time and modest in production, but I can assure you there’s so much going on and so much to consider about the precarious nature of our world and the world of cinema, it packs more of a punch than many filmmakers could ever hope to achieve with triple the run time and one hundred times the budget.