Katarzyna Gondek | Deer Boy / 2017

finding his kind

by Douglas Messerli

 

Katarzyna Gondek (screenwriter and director) Deer Boy / 2017 [15 minutes]

Through a very hard labor, a mother (Katarzyna Sobiszewska) bears a male child, who grows up in their peasant household with the antlers of deer, just small nubs at first which as the boy grows into an adolescent turn into a small crown of horns.

      Marko Stojiljković, writing in Ubiquarian pretty much summarizes the entire story:

 

“The boy is born with a hint of antlers, but, as we know from the title and learn it further down the road, his presence is not demonic at all, and not even that of an animal. Deer Boy is a dear and playful boy, with only antlers to separate him from his peers. However, the opposite reactions from his parents to his existence and dual identity is something that will define him. While the mother is a force of mercifulness, the always grim-faced father (Janusz Chabior) is a force of nature trying to impose strictly human, that is predatory, identity on the boy. The father cuts his horns, teaches him to shoot and takes him on the hunting trips with his buddies once the boy starts coming of age. However, the other part of the boy’s identity starts rebelling and the young man has to make a choice – is he a deer or is he a boy.”

     If the father, in what appears to come as an almost sudden decision as he moves out of his brooding presence to take up a saw and cut away his young son’s antlers, is deeply disturbed by his son’s “difference,” as time goes on the adolescent boy himself can be seen in the bathroom, sawing away at his own crown, as if it were simply a part of grooming. Frankly, it is the eeriest part of this constantly moody film.

    The goriest moment, however, is when the father and his buddies shoot a buck deer and bring it home, hang it up to let the blood drip out, and cut into up into venison slabs for meals which will last them through many a month.

     The men do the butchering, while the mother cooks the daily meals for her carnivorous brood.

    The terror of these scenes come from our awareness that the boy has already begun to identify with the herds of deer roaming about the family cabin. In his attempt to be one of the family, he too, we realize, must consume the food which his symbolic ancestors have been slaughtered to provide.

     Yet, there is no protest. In fact, the movie is basically without dialogue, language replaced here but grunts and gestures (at times provided by the dubbing of Croatian actors). But we sense that despite his attempts to be just like everyone around him, there is an undercurrent of desperation in the deep glare of the boy’s (played at different ages by Mieszko Czachor, Eryk Maj, and Andrzej Adamczak) tender eyes.

      Obviously, this is a story of outsiderness that is as old as storytelling itself, as Stojiljković notes, part of the endless discussion about “identity as a choice category or as a predestined necessity,” an argument embedded into battles between the rationalists and the empiricists.

      But for any LGBTQ viewer it also cannot help but call up the entire experience of being a queer individual in a normative household. The metaphor is simply too strong to be ignored. And whether Polish director Katarzyna Gondek has intended it or not, one cannot help but associate the antlers that keep growing back as metaphor for gay desire that in most children is tamped down and controlled again and again in an attempt to live a heteronormative life before it becomes so all powerful that it can no longer be controlled or ignored.

      In most cultures, moreover, deer are associated with the qualities that defy male macho behavior—which the brooding father clearly represents—deer being connected instead with kindness, softness, and gentleness, and because of those qualities with the imagination and the spiritual. Moreover, in at least two large cultures, deer are associated with homosexuality. Throughout Arabic poetry a deer often symbolizes an effeminate young man. In Portuguese culture, particularly in Brazil, the word deer (yiado) is used as a slang word to mock gay men, mostly because the word, linguistically, is a corruption of the word “transviado,” which means an individual who has strayed and lost his way.

      The young “deer boy” of this story, however, seems intent upon pleasing his family, at one point from an overhead blind for hunters catching the eyes of a deer in the lens of his gun before shooting it dead. The father and his friends are clearly proud of the boy. And when later the father descends to find and claim the trophy, standing below while the boy has stayed behind to point out the boy’s prize, we hear the gun go off once again.    

      In the very next scene we see the boy, now grown and naked, with a full head of antlers, walking away toward the wilderness, obviously as his way to join his own kind.     

    The promotional comments, finally, put this film very much in the context of gay literature by describing the film as being about “how man kills the thing he loves,” which cannot help but call up Oscar Wilde’s much quoted maxim from The Ballad of Reading Goal, “Each man kills the thing he loves.” In that single scene this boy has seemingly killed both his kind and kin.

Los Angeles, March 22, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (March 2023).