Eric de Kuyper | Pink Ulysses / 1990

where the boys are

by Douglas Messerli

 

Eric de Kuyper (screenplay and director) Pink Ulysses / 1990

 

Having now watched three films, Casta diva (1982), A Very Strange Love Affair (1985), and Pink Ulysses (1990)—I have yet to find a copy to view his 1983 musical Naughty Boys—I can say with some confidence by the Belgium Flemish film director Eric de Kuyper, is one of the true greats of LGBTQ+ cinema. Filled with homoerotic images of beautiful boys, de Kuyper’s works show in varying forms, from a series of operatic tableaux vivants portraying pretty and handsome men in various relationships, to a fairly realistic romance of a boy who falls in love with his professor, to an utterly artificed series of staged tableaux and images stolen from movies, opera, and ballet that impressionistically recreate Ulysses leaving Ithaca, journeying to Troy, and in a slow 20-year cycle returning home to destroy the hundreds of Penelope his wife’s suitors.

   Lest you imagine that this is a rather boring series of on-the-road scenes representing Ulysses’ endless voyages, think again. Letterboxd commentator Nikola Gocic summarizes it quite perfectly:

“Taking cues from [Bob] Mizer’s beefcake photos, and offerings by the likes of [Pier Paulo] Pasolini, [Werner] Schroeter, [James] Bidgood and [Derek] Jarman, Flemish-Belgian and Dutch writer, semiologist, art critic and film director Eric de Kuyper loosely adapts the Odysseus myth into a formally daring, deliberately artificial experimental feature centered around the theme of homoeroticism. As Penelope waits for her beloved’s return to Ithaca, her home draped in many warmly hued layers of fabric, the hero’s adventure is broken into a series of sthenolagnia-inspired vignettes some of which presumably represent his visions. Glued with the cleverly inserted found footage – including, inter alia, the hammock sequence from Battleship Potemkin – these often anachronistic ‘sketches’ betray the author’s keen eye for striking visual composition, as well as his penchant for amped-up melodramatics reflected in his obsession with classical music and vintage ballads. De Kuyper’s intention is, apparently, not to retell the legend, but rather to explore the cinema’s painterly potentials, unapologetically objectifying the male body.”

One doesn’t need a plot to see the basic elements of Ulysses in his voyages to Troy, the island of the lotus eaters—hinted at through even the youthful Ulysses and later the elder version munching on the petals of roses which call up immediately associations with Schroeter’s masterwork The Rose King—his encounters with Calypso pretending to be Penelope, his survival on the beach of the friendly Phaecians, his journey, bound to the stern of the ship, through the straights of the Sirens, and his eventual return home where he poses as a beggar, testing both Penelope’s and his servant’s faithfulness previous to revealing himself to her and to his son Telemachus, who together roll in ecstatic homosexual joy in their reunion, before they join forces to kill all of Penelope’s suitors and their supporters.

    Yet, as de Kuyper makes clear, his is also a new telling, and in this version, the young beautiful Ulysses, tired with his feminized role of ironing his own clothes, and being refrained from his mad, almost demotic male dances, escapes his marriage to undergo his long voyage. Even if during those long years, his wife has successfully fought off her suitors, surely she suspected the attraction of the male body to her husband, as one scene clearly depicts. Having finally returned home to kill off all the other available males, Penelope, fed up with her husband’s homosexual adventures, literally stabs a “quill” into the back, rewriting this history, ending in a vast staged modernist reenactment of the pietà—the image that appeared in nearly all the early (version A) gay “coming out” films of figures such as Kenneth Anger, Curtis Harrington, and so many others.

    Finally, having properly brought his body into the Christian myth, de Kuyper’s pagans gather round the corpse and celebrate in a Classical version of an Irish wake, with bread, fruit, and numerous bottles of wine.

    If James Bidgood’s remarkable Pink Narcissus celebrated the artist’s individual fantasies, this filmmaker has captured an epic vision of the conflicted male drive, men moving away from their women to explore the suffering and pain of the male world of war in a search for tough love, the stereotypical struggle of male into manhood that is not always what it pretends to be. All that bouncing around on each other’s bodies, just perhaps, so de Kuyper’s work hints, represents a far more meaningful battle than the conquering of the female uterus. Women suffer from within, while men must push out to explore their own brutal bodies.

     If this myth is truly misogynistic, de Kuyper does not apologize anymore than he did in A Very Strange Love Affair for a young boy stalking his professor. This artist sees the sexual world very much from a viewpoint in which men struggle to control the direction of their lives—he even poses himself as the director in the final scene—but is actually a space in which females ultimately determine history. If the patriarchal story is all about Ulysses and his mostly male encounters, it is finally Calypso, Circe, Penelope, and Athena who control his fate.

    De Kuyper takes on major issues of sex and gender that few others of his generation ever attempted.

    Pink Ulysses signaled an entirely new generation of filmmakers of the likes of André Téchiné,

Isaac Julien, Constantine Giannaris, Michael Brynntrup, Todd Haynes, Gus Van Sant, Roberto Fiesco, Bruce LaBruce, Cheryl Dunye, Tom Kalin, Sally Potter, Ming-liang Tsai, Gregg Araki, Amos Guttman, and so very many others.

 

Los Angeles, April 10, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (April 2026).