Manfred Rott | Bacchanal / 2006

desire and fear put to rest

by Douglas Messerli

 

Manfred Rott (screenwriter and director) Bacchanal / 2006 [12 minutes]

 

On one level Bacchanal, directed by the Austrian filmmaker Manfred Rott, but performed entirely in Czech, is an absolutely ridiculous amateur theatrical revisit of the Dionysian myth, yet on another level it is a kind of wondrous and almost frightening realization of the internal that through the ceremony of these unknowing devotees of Dionysus brings inner to desires into reality.

   A young erudite man (Lázaro Bermúdez), perhaps a theater student, keeps quoting throughout the first third of this play information about Dionysus, declaiming lines such as “You are the whirlwind of mighty change, destroyer of great cities; perhaps he is preparing for a performance of Aristophanes’ The Frogs in which Dionysus is a character.

    Meeting up with his best friend (Tomáš Milostný), he continues his spiel as the two wait for the arrival of his girlfriend Klara (Petra Mošovská). When she arrives, she demands he stops, but he merely continues, she walking off in apparent boredom. Both boys follows. But the young student continues pontificating, “The powerful loving ones, the keen of perception…” she finally walking completely away, the friend noting “Such are the lovers of Dionysus.”

    Finally, the boys decide to bicycle off to their woodland escape near the river without Klara, the two of them lighting up a bonfire. “You want her back?” asks the friend of the Dionysian didact, he answering only “She’s a bitch.”

    Perhaps seeing this quiet moment as an opportunity to speak his mind, the friend begins a sentence which we imagine might be his confession of love to his thespian friend: “For a long time I’ve been wanting to tell you something…,” but almost immediately his sentiment is drowned out with more vague talk of Dionysus, although we might read his comment—“Dionysus is the reality of nature hidden deep within the body, blood burst, desire, and naked fear”—as a kind of acknowledgement of the sentiment his friend is about to confess.

    At that very moment, however, Klara returns, this time prepared, as she argues, for a proper bacchanal. She pulls out a bottle of wine and costumes, a kind of priestess robe for herself, and short Greek-style togas for the boys.

    As she begins to portentously call up the spirits of the powerful god of wine, fertility, festivity, insanity, ritual madness, religious ecstasy, and theater, insisting that she and her boyfriend are possessed of Dionysus, Milostný’s character begs her to stop, and wanders off.   

    When he returns, torch in hand, he finds them sprawled out on the ground intensely kissing one another, and watches for a short while, obviously entranced but simultaneously hurt.

    Yet only a moment later, Klara reaches up and pulls him down to her former position, he now kissing the Dionysian thespian, the two of them obviously engaging in sex.

     In the morning the boys awaken, still lying closely beside each other. It’s clear what all desirous and fearful gay boys need a gracious facilitator like Klara to put into action what they find so difficult to express.

     What formerly seemed ridiculous has now come to represent a real sexually transformative event.

    

Los Angeles, October 19, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (October 2025).