George Pedrosa | Casa de Bonecas (Dollhouse) / 2023

the pink queers of the amazon

by Douglas Messerli

 

George Pedrosa (screenwriter and director) Casa de Bonecas (Dollhouse) / 2023 [16 minutes]

 

The three sloppy, piggish, heavily tatted boys of the Amazon who inhabit this celebration of polyromanticism—like the long ago but still delightful ode to the gay land of no inhibitions sung by the wonderful Kay Thompson in Funny Girl (1957)—“Think Pink”: with pink cellphones, cameras, drinks, the hair on their heads, the stockings (with shades of carmine, the sheets in purple) in which they lace up their legs when moving into drag mode, their fingernails and underwear, and even a laser light one of them willingly swallows as they enter into a lusty threesome animal-like orgy.

   Luty Barteix, Chico Gonçalves, and João Vinicius descend, however, not so much into their sexual organs as they do a gloppy, sloppy, gooey mess of liquid like purple emotions, replete with Halloween costumes in which they haunt one another and flaunt their S&M sexuality to the mentality of their own created machinery, while spewing up a yellowish-green drug-induced spittle.

     I suppose Brazilian director George Pedrosa, recognizing that Brazil has become one of the last bastillions of gay outré filmmaking thought perhaps that his movie would be a turn on for young men tired of the flesh, but I doubt it succeeded in seducing anyone to its mesmerizing visuals other than the terribly, terribly bored.

     This is a dollhouse you most definitely don’t want to get locked up in. Even Nora might not have escaped its necessary adulation to its long-haired satanic Dionysus.

 

Los Angeles, December 23, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (December 2024).