Carlos Conceição | Carne (The Flesh) / 2010

reminder of love

by Douglas Messerli

 

Carlos Conceição (screenwriter and director) Carne (The Flesh) / 2010 [20 minutes]

 

Angola-born Portuguese director Carlos Conceição’s first film, Carne is a very queer film that is not entirely LGBTQ-driven. At the center of this beautifully filmed short picture is a nun, Violante (Anabela Moreira), who, “married to Christ” by her devotion, each night sins dreadfully by seeking out men on the streets and in bars while dressed in the drag of full habit and ruby-red slippers.

     Returning home, she encounters, once more, her lover, Christ himself (Carloto Cotta), a beautiful man still wearing his crown of thorns, who rails against her behavior, binds her hands in a chair and in Sado-Masochistic manner takes out a totally anachronistic tool box in which he has placed various kinds of twicers and other tools obviously to be used in her torture by clipping and paring away her nails. He quotes Old Testament scripture presents him as a terribly cruel misogynist, including passages such as a passage from the book of Ezekiel 16.38:

 

  "I will sentence you to the punishment of women who commit adultery and who shed blood; I will bring upon you the blood vengeance of my wrath and jealous anger, and I will hand you over to them, and they will tear down your mounds and destroy your lofty shrines and they will strip you of your clothes and take your fine jewelry and leave you naked and bare. They will bring a mob against you, who will stone you and hack you to pieces with their swords.”

 

     In turn, she quotes back from the New Testament of Christ’s forgiveness and love, words which evidently Christ, indoctrinated in the words of the Old Testament writer’s and prophets, does not yet know he will be remembered for. Eventually, he removes the tape in which he has bound her without pulling out yet another toenail for her carnal sins.

     It is a truly engaging interchange between the two theologies, which as Letterboxd commentator Joshuah R. suggests is “a brilliant protest against dogma within Catholicism,”—or for that matter any religious viewpoint which invokes the Old Testament wisdom against the notions of love and forgiveness documented by the followers of Christ in the New Testament.

     The second half of this provocative film takes us to what seems to be the present wherein the nun visits a gay bar with a transgender owner (Eduardo Moreira) and a cute boy bartender. She orders up a brandy, downing it almost immediately, as a bar client (Eduardo Sobral), spotting her in what must appear simply as a drag uniform begins to flirt with her a comical manner that can only remind one of the scene in the inn with Tom Jones and Mrs. Waters in the 1963 film directed by Tony Richardson, no food but with plenty of alcohol to lubricate their gestures of tongue play and crotch shots.

  The man and desperate woman finally hook up, after he buys the prerequisite drink for her, in the alleyway outside of the gay bar, where she fellates him, he pushing her aside immediately upon coming, a brutal scene that reminds one of the abuses the Biblical Mary Magdalene must have grown used to.

 

     Returning to the nunnery, she again encounters her now crucified husband, who wanders from the cross to pick up the apple, obviously dropped there for him by the now ancient Eve.

      He takes a bite, and so presumably is able to forgive all of us from our sins of transgression.

     Conceição’s film, while using the iconography of postmodern theater and film is able to also express a truly profound acceptance of those of us who seek out the flesh in the rejection of all those who daily deem it necessary to remind us of the sin of Christ’s total embracement of love as the most important aspects of human behavior.

      This is a quite brilliant new telling of the Christian miracle by the director who would later work on many a commercial film, including as sound director for The Last Time I Saw Macao (2012).

 

Los Angeles, March 2, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (March 2024).