Chico Lacerda | Estudo em Vermelho (A Study in Red) / 2013

reading red

by Douglas Messerli

 

Chico Lacerda (screenwriter and director) Estudo em Vermelho (A Study in Red) / 2013 [16 minutes]

 

This highly original short film begins with what appears to be a death, a man lying on the bathroom floor, blood leaking from underneath him.

 

     This appears to be the self-advertised prologue of the film’s subtitle: “A Prologue, Two Acts, and a Musical Number.”

      In the first act, a well-dressed young man, sits in a carefully lit room with paintings and drawings on the wall, reading from a book on how to care for a bleeding individual, the details amounting to several long paragraphs. Finished with that, we get a brief view of a car traveling through the city streets of a Brazilian town. In the open sun roof of the automobile, a man in drag, wearing a bright red dress, stands waving his hands as the car moves through the boulevards.

      We return to the young man in a suit now reading from a book describing what appear to be military maneuvers for soldiers on parade.

    Meanwhile, the car with the drag queen in red now drives through what seems to be a suburban section of the city and crosses a bridge.

   From yet another book about how to properly dine out with business colleagues, including the etiquette of proper subjects of conversation appears to be the third reading selection from the handsome young man, dressed in a red bowtie and sitting against the wall of art as he reads.

     The car with the lady in red, now driving a road with woods on both sides, continues to wave as if to an invisible audience, a bit like the Argentinian first lady and politician, Evita Perón.

 

     Our next reading lesson concerns how to prepare for meditation, advising, for example, “Stretch out your spine, head and neck before sitting down. Place your hands on your thighs and sit comfortably. Sit on a firm cushion, that gives you stability, be it in an armchair, chair, on the floor, anywhere.”

      There is now a break in the tape, as the screen goes black, presumably the beginning of the musical number. We are now in a quiet jungle spot, or a least a heavily wooded area. The drag queen appears as if my magic and begins to sing and dance a song in English, “Wuthering Heights” by Kate Bush, which begins:

 

                                 Out on the wily, windy moors

                                 We'd roll and fall in green

                                 You had a temper like my jealousy

                                 Too hot, too greedy

                                 How could you leave me

                                 When I needed to possess you?

                                 I hated you, I loved you, too

 

                                 Bad dreams in the night

                                 They told me I was going to lose the fight

                                 Leave behind my wuthering, wuthering

                                 Wuthering Heights

 

     Once more we return to the young man reading this time from Spinoza from a of philosophical essay: “If, quoting Spinoza, ‘one does not know what the body can do,’ only aesthetic experience allows us to perceive this ignorance, by promoting the expansion of its possibilities.” He continues in comparing daily life to the aesthetic experience. He reads about art being our major aesthetic experience, which causes a destabilization of our senses, “quite the opposite of mass culture, which functions through the reassertion of the shared practical meanings. “Instead of working through destabilization, mass culture takes place through the stabilization of the familiar, reinforcing the body’s imprisonment imposed by the utilitarianism. If the work of art gives the body access to

life’s possibilities, we may say mass culture works hand in hand with death.”

      The camera cuts, once more, to the dead body on the floor, blood now pooled behind his head. In the second act, a director off-camera calls “Cut!” and the body stands up, a towel put around his shoulders. The camera roves throughout a space with several crew members, actors, etc, at work, including our young reader, now dressed more casually, apparently waiting for the make-up artist. Nearby, on the terrace, a group of women are drinking wine and talking as people are wont do at cocktail parties. gossiping about a cute boy, while others suggest that it’s “too tacky for women to like soccer.” In a back room two people lie nude on a bed. A couple of gay boys are discussing on air their experience of openly holding hands in public in a small Brazilian town. We are presented with brief TV and movie scenes playing on a nearby screen, all ending again with our drag queen performing Kate Bush’s 1978 best-selling single:

                                          Heathcliff, it's me, I'm Cathy

                                          I've come home, I'm so cold

                                          Let me in your window

                                          Heathcliff, it's me, I'm Cathy

                                          I've come home, I'm so cold

                                          Let me in your window

 

                                          Heathcliff, it's me, I'm Cathy

                                          I've come home, I'm so cold

 

    Writing on Letterboxd, commentator Wesley Pereira de Castro enthused about this work:

 

“I saw it by chance on TV and was taken aback: what a lesson in survival in the face of censorship, what a call for total resistance, what a resignifying firecracker of pain, what a marvel of daily militant work. With each movie, I become more in love with Chico Lacerda's work of extreme emotional and nostalgic conviction. Wow!” [translation from the Portuguese by Messerli]

 

      For me, however, Lacerda’s highly intelligent work had less to do with censorship as much as it explores the struggle between those aspects of culture which function under strict laws of control: rules, regulations, and unity of action as opposed to the personal, the eccentric, and even actions that destabilize or subvert—namely art in all its forms.

    Yet, as the director seems to indicate, even art, in its temporary illusions, can itself easily shift into a regulated social behavior as we see in the gossip of the female wine drinkers at the end of the work; the dead man that so moves us in a film gets up and walks away, the reader turns out to be a rather handsomely dressed young man in real life (although still reading while he waits for his make-up); the defiant drag queen transmogrifies momentarily into the good-looking performer Bush.

      If Cathy has severed herself from normative society because she is “too hot, too greedy,” by the end of both song and fiction, she comes home because she is “so cold.”

      What is read can turn into red blood, the hot blood turn back into mere words in a book. It seems to me that what Brazilian director is exploring in his Study in Red is the limitations and boundaries of art, realizing that in pushing the limits of what mass culture enjoys as art, the art itself can be turned into an illusion, itself a force of destruction and death. Censorship may be an anathema, but it also depends upon what the artist has to say and how he says it that truly matters.

       I have certainly gained a high respect for Lacerda’s work in the two short films I’ve now watched, this film and his later Virginity (2015).

 

Los Angeles, April 14, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (April 2024).