full family love
by Douglas Messerlli
Bruce LaBruce and Martin Girard (screenplay), Bruce
LaBruce (director) Saint-Narcisse / 2020
Since 1987, Canadian director Bruce LaBruce has
been making short and feature, often controversial queer films, now consisting
of more than 25 works.
His 2020
movie Saint-Narcisse, if certainly somewhat
more “palatable”—a word often used in connection with his films—than many of
his early works, still crosses, for many, sexual and religious boundaries which
only a few directors these days seem to have the courage to engage.
In this
case the handsome hero, Dominic (Felix-Antoine Duval),
whose grandmother who has long cared for him has just died, discovers in the
attic a small box of his own mother Beatrice’s (Tania Kontoyanni) letters.
Startled to see that she is still living after having been long told that she
died in childbirth, he sets out to find her, seemingly setting the film on the
course of a “on the road” voyage which quickly is imbued with several of the coming-of-age
themes that often travel along on such journeys. And, in that sense, Saint-Narcisse is also a rather perverse “coming
out” film, filled with the admissions of frightened outsiders, in this case not
just with regard to Dominic and his entire family.
Finding
the small village from which the letters are addressed, Dominic soon hears of a
woman who bears his mother’s name, described by a local waitress as a witch who
has hooked up with a younger woman who, strangely, “never seems to age.”
On the
way to the home in the forest, which already begins to lend this work a kind of
magical and mythical element, Dominic stops by the local graveyard, discovering
the grave of his mother and father, and also, quite unexpectedly a twin
brother, who evidently died in childbirth, of whom he has never before even
heard.
He is
greeted at the “witch’s” large house with a rifle pointed at him by the younger
woman, Irene (Alexandra Petrachuk) who would rather shoot the intruder than
permit him to wait outside for Beatrice among the handmade artworks sculpted evidently
by the missing woman.
Irene
returns inside, however, until Dominic, discovering a shower in the middle of
the yard, almost dares the rifle-toting dryad by stripping off his clothes,
posing in a full-frontal nude position and proceeding to clean off the dust accumulated
from his long motorcycle trek.
This
time, gun-in-hand Irene is even more serious about sending the male intruder away
from their property or straight off to heaven. She immediately recognizes him
as a narcissist, which is repeated throughout the rest of the film. Before she
can pull the trigger, however, Beatrice has returned and noisily shoots off her
own bullet into the heavens to stop Irene’s further actions.
Almost immediately, she recognizes the
handsome young man as her missing son Dominic, and invites him in for dinner
and a long sleep before she finally tells him the painful story of her and his
past.
It’s
not an easy narration, as she explains; living with his strict and conventional
father, she fell in love with a woman, Agathe (also played by Petrachuk) with
whom she began to experiment with lesbian sex. The two fell in love, attempting
to hide their relationship.
But
her husband evidently knew of her behavior, and the moment Dominic was born
ousted her from the house, just as the family did and the local church from the
community.
With
Agathe, she moved into the woods where she currently resides, the two of them
together learning to live off the land and become one with the wilderness. And,
no the younger woman with
who she now lives is not
Dominic’s lost sister, she explains, but her current lesbian lover, hence the
small-town gossiping that her lover simply never ages.
Dominic receives this sudden packet of information with a great deal of
difficulty, seeing her behavior, particularly when pregnant, as despicable. And
why has she not attempted harder to get back in touch with him, to affirm her
existence, to reclaim her son.
In
great pain Beatrice attempts to help to comprehend how the entire community
refused to allow her back into her child’s life. Even her letters to her son
were hidden, and she admits she wrote them knowing they would not even be read
by Dominic but out of a kind of desperation to communicate.
Irene,
also quite jealous of the new being in her life, resents his inability to perceive
how in the such a small community Beatrice could only be recognized as a guilty
adulteress. She finds that Dominic also carries with him numerous photographs, all
of himself, which convinces her even more that he is interested only in his own
existence, not in redeeming the family tragedy which has nearly destroyed
Beatrice’s life.
But
then, Beatrice has not told him everything, that she herself had presumed that
she was pregnant with twins. No one told her of a second birth, of which
Dominic was told only that the child, his brother, Daniel died.
Soon
after, discovering a photograph in Beatrice’s and Irene’s bedroom, he also
realizes that Irene is Agathe’s daughter, who has turned up one day at Beatrice’s
doorstep with nowhere else to go.
Startling as these gradual revelations
are, Dominic has no time for them, since he has encountered another part of the
endless familial puzzle. In the town he has encountered a group of monks, belonging
to a nearby order which Beatrice describes as sex-crazed freaks, having no true
religious values. Among their group he has spotted a young man, dressed in a
cowl, who looks precisely like Dominic—if were to, as Irene suggests he should,
might shave his frazzled beard.
Later,
Dominic does precisely that—shave his beard—and finding the hidden monastery,
spies on the younger male brethren first playing at volleyball and later
swimming in a nearby lake. There, his twin, Daniel (also played by Duval) eventually
appears naked, the two boys, as The New York Times critic Teo Bugbee cleverly
putts it, “falling in love and lust at first sight.”
The
tale now worms its way even further into a kind Grimm’s fairy tale as it pulls
in the ancient Greek myth of Narcissus along with Edgar Allan Poe’s story William Wilson,the doppelgänger horror
stories in the several versions of The Student of Prague, and Louis Malle’s version
in the omnibus Poe collection, Histoires extraordinaires (Spirits of the
Dead) of 1968.
As if
it might be necessary to throw in just a little more spice into this devil’s
brew of witches, warlocks, and seemingly doomed self-reflections, LaBruce also
takes us into the monastery life itself where we quickly perceive that brother
Daniel has been abused since he was a young boy by the head of the order,
Father Andrew (Andreas Apergis), who not only nightly makes love to the boy but
tortures him believing that he is the reincarnation of San Sebastien. Wine,
drugs, drag, and
madness join hands in Daniel’s
nightly sufferings.
Now that the Narcissi have fallen in love,
the only thing left, it appears, would be for Dominic so somehow come to save
his brother, who has now been banned from even leaving the monastery. Instead,
the two boys, after a passionate lakeside sexual encounter, switch costumes, Daniel
returning to Beatrice’s forest cottage and Domonic entering the monastery.
With
the melodrama of inter-familial affairs, the absurd twists and turns of plot,
and the mish-mash of genres, any but the most clueless of viewers now surely
realizes that LaBruce has taken us down into the bowels of pure camp. As Bugbee
rightly argues, however, “for the most part, LaBruce tries to maintain fidelity
to the idea that camp is best performed straight. If keeping up the pretense of
unwinking entertainment causes the pace to drag at times, at least this movie
never fails to follow through on its scandalous promise.”
Back at the witch’s coven (it is useful
to realize that there is a long tradition in LGBTQ theater and film to fuse the
heteronormative confusion of a witches and lesbians) the now sexually
interested Irene tries once again to arouse Domonic into a kiss, surprised,
without realizing the switch, that Daniel—clearly more experienced with regard
to sex—is quite ready to go at it, as the two seem to fall into a mad
heterosexual lip clinch that almost might match his full-body mating with his
brother. Once more, however, Beatrice comes to the rescue, and again realizes
that this is not Dominic but his twin who she never even knew she bore. Mother
and son embrace anew, Daniel explaining where his brother has gotten to as the
three, now suddenly desperate to save Dominic, start up the old car in Beatrice’s
backyard and speed off to the monastery to rescue the boy, having already been
discovered by Father Andrew to be a duplicate, into whose devilish body the
priest now ready to jab the metal arrows his was saving for his Sebastian
replicate.
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By the time they’ve arrived, with kisses
between the two kiddies between, Andrew has already pierced him with little arrows
and is about to go for the big last jab. While Daniel distracts the now nearly
drugged-out degenerate reiterating his true love for him (Daniel is clearly
sexually conflicted), Dominic is finally able to unwind his straps and place a small
sword into the priest’s back.
Irene,
Beatrice, and Daniel carry Dominic back to the woods to be healed, we presume,
by Beatrice’s magic potions.
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The
very last scene reveals yet a new twist, LaBruce taking his twisted fairytale
of family love to an entirely new level. The boys speeding on motorcycle with
bodies entwined show up to a celebratory dinner table with both women, Beatrice
and Irene dressed in in long dresses with floral wreaths upon their heads, a baby girl plopped in between.
As the camera follows the two men, one goes to Irene to kiss her, patting her once
again pregnant belly, the other brother soon bends down to kiss her as well,
patting her stomach as well, as if to suggest, this one is probably mine. The
two women kiss deeply. The boys, beaming, wink at one another, letting you know
that their love for each another and pleasures haven’t disappeared from their
lives. Everyone seems as perfectly pleased as peaches in this polyamorous
family party, just as delighted as any domestic scene ever portrayed in a Norman
Rockwell drawing or image posted on a Hallmark Card. It is the perhaps the most
perversely natural expression of full fucked-up family love portrayed on film
since John Waters’ 1998 film, Pecker.
Los Angeles, August 30, 2024
Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (August 2024).
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