Ulrike Ottinger | Laokoon & Söhne (Laocoön & Sons) / 1971-72, premiered 1975

the widow, the ice skater, and the gigolo

by Douglas Messerli

 

Ulrike Ottinger (screenwriter, based on a text by Chiquita Brook [Xavier Arrovuelo] and Ottinger, and director) Laokoon & Söhne (Laocoön & Sons) / 1971-72, premiered 1975

 

Subtitled “The Story of the Transformation of Esmeralda del Rio,” Ulrike Ottinger’s Laocoön & Sons like her later Freak Orlando is inspired by Virginia Woolf’s fictional “biography” based on the imagined life of her lover, Vita Sackville-West. The focus of Ottinger’s first cinematic work is her own lover, Tabea Blumenschein. In this instance, Ottinger foregoes the historical contexts, locating her work more in the world of the fairy tale, a territory wherein female figures often dominated. But already realizing her personal vision, the director does not place her narrative into a rational or even temporal imaginary world, but allows for the various assemblages of what Patricia White has described as the “referential tableaux, rituals, and performances shot on location in places layered with disjunctive cultural histories” that so dominate most of her early work. Moreover, Ottinger sets down her heroine, Esmeraldo del Rio (not at all so very different from Bette Midler’s later comic mermaid persona Dolores del Rio) into the mythical all female land Laura Molloy, which has its own myths, rituals, and customs:

“Once upon a time there was a country known by the name of Laura Molloy.

Laura Molloy was the name of this country. Only women lived in Laura Molloy. Esmeralda del Rio was a woman. One day Esmeralda del Rio had the idea to undergo a series of transformations, which were to take her very far.

So far did she go that she had no way of knowing how far she had gone.

Two things were certain: Esmeralda del Rio was blond and in her own way she practiced a kind of magic which I would like to call 'blond magic'.”

 

      What we also immediately recognize in this early work is that Ottinger will focus not only on outlandish customs, costumes and behavior but reclaims the world of magic and witchcraft which as many feminists are argued over the years has traditionally been associated with the female outsider and, in particular, with lesbian behavior. Throughout this film, women will be observed not over boiling pots brewing up strange mixtures but also looking through the glass orbs of fortune tellers.

      And finally, beyond all of these layers, is simply a great deal of comic, almost adolescent goofiness that, at moments, turns into pure narrative genius. Indeed, as the narration adds, “Is not Laura Molly a country of small absurdities?”

      To begin with Esmeralda decides one day to transform herself into a widow, Olimpia Vincitor.

Unfortunately, her lover had died without Olimpia remembering who she was, why, and when. Accordingly, this new Ovid-like figure must go on a search of the past. Desperately seeking out her much-missed lover, Olimpia finally is forced to commit necrophilia: “Even gravestones have their charm. They let themselves be caressed.”

      Finally, tired and worn out of seeking a past that she cannot find, Emeralda determines to make another significant transformation, well-chosen particularly given the cold, arctic conditions, so we are told, of the country of Laura Molly. She now becomes the ice skater in the manner of Sonja Henie, named Linda MacNamara. Throughout, Linda stands upon the ice-cold beach in the positions of ice-skating champions, although we never see her from the waist down.

      A circus comes to town, which involves nearly all Laura Molloy’s citizens involving being embraced by a large python, a paper snake that several of the carney people hold as they run around the others, embracing them and capturing them within their prop. “And now they are snaking -it’s unbearable, it’s unbelievable!”

     At other points the narrator describes a Duchess and a Countess: “While the Duchess and Countess discussed their silly ideas in all detail, their daughter, lover of gestures that were unjustifiable from a strict theatrical perspective, stepped onto the balcony to let herself be booed by the peasant women who found her to be frankly decadent.”

     And finally, tired of skating, Esmeralda del Rio puts away her skates, becoming Jimmy the gigolo who courts one of the older members of the Laura Molly community who in order to maintain their roles in society inexplicably become pederasts, the figure here played by an effeminate gay man speaking in a high female-like voice. Eventually, even Jimmy, interested only in the older pederast’s money, has to go on the run.

     In short, even the fairytale runs dry and the hurries to its end. Some of the figures such as the carnival folk reappear in Ottinger’s far more complex 1981 Freak Orlando. But throughout one can perceive this as an early dry run for the later exploration of being forced to live in a world of constant metamorphosing in attempts to fit in the various evils of society at large.

 

Los Angeles, November 30, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (November 2022).