Yann Gonzalez | Hideous / 2022

radical honesty

by Douglas Messerli

 

Yann Gonzalez and Oliver Sim (screenplay), Yann Gonzalez (director) Hideous / 2022 [22 minutes]

 

For around 20 glorious minutes, popstar vocalist for the indie band The xx, Oliver Sim, after being introduced by famed drag queen Bimini Bon Boulash, performs in what pretends to be a TV interview but quickly turns into a three-act musical with Fehinti Balogun (playing Seth, the TV Host), singer Jimmy Somerville (as The Guardian Angel), Tommy Hibbitts (The Queen of Doom), and the beautiful César Vicente (who previously played the naked seminarian in Pedro Almodóvar’s 2919 film Pain and Glory), along with Sim’s band members and Vampires’ Kate Moran.

     The result under the director of French-born Yann Gonzalez (known best for Knife + Heart), is something close to what commentator Lillian Crawford describes: “[The film’s] aesthetic blends into the matted purple hues of 1980s queer art, the music videos of Derek Jarman or the film work of James Bidgood. It’s the childhood of Oliver Sim, bassist and vocalist for indie band The xx, whose story the film tells. …Hideous is a glorious celebration of queer euphoria while also delivering a clear message about HIV/AIDS. Gonzalez crafts a stunning visual contextualization for Sim’s music, putting the spotlight firmly on him and the story he wants to tell.”

     Sim, performing three tracks from his newest album Hideous Bastards, first establishes his intense lack of self-assurance through the haunting overlaid repetitions of “Confident Man,” before he attempts to answer the TV Host’s question about his dark heart or inner monster. He argues that it takes so very many faces, a monstrous child crying out for help or as big and powerful as a werewolf, but most of the time “lost in the mist.” As he goes on to describe himself as a child, his own boyish self (Cameron Bell) finds himself watching the adult Sim on TV and recognizing it as his own self in another time and space.

      Sim speaks of his long fascination with female rage, “whether it be Ripley in Alien or Carrie or Jaime Lee Curtis in Halloween” and in living in house dominated by women where he could be as femme as he wanted. Asked what he might say if he were to meet up with his young self, he sings “Fruit”: 

 

Far too femme

Surrounded by rocks

You're gonna look the gem

You can dress it away, talk it away

Dull down the flame

But it's all pretend

It's all pretend

 

[Chorus]

What would my, what would my father do?

Do I take a bite, take a bite of the fruit?

I've heard other people say

It can't be right if it causes you shame

Have I made you proud?

Take a look at me now

If I've got my father's eyes

I've got my mother's smile

 

    It’s a painfully moving piece and this film is particularly effective when at the end of the song, he reaches out to touch his younger self’s hand through the TV screen.

 

     Even the camera and sound crew are nearly in tears, quickly dried as Sim cries out in horror, his face transformed into a horrifically green-masked Jimmy Somerville, a being a female crew member describes as “a fucking creep, he looks so weird.” Somerville becomes the monster Sim has been talking about, creating a blood bath of the entire studio audience before singing what has quickly become a ballad to LGBTQ excess, “Hideous.”

     Gonzalez flashes throughout images of outrageously costumed drag queens, kissing dykes in leather, males and females engaged in S&M activities, along with Vicente as the confused face of “beauty.” But ultimately beauty loves the monster, describing his as “so sexy,” as the monster turns away to howl out the last two stanzas of the song:

 

                                              Follow my voice

                                              Sweet nature boy

                                              Just to keep you safe

                                              Listen for me

                                              Be bright, have trust

                                              Just be willing to be loved

 

                                             Radical honesty

                                             Might set me free

                                             If it makes me hideous

                                             Been living with HIV

                                             Since seventeen

                                             Am I hideous?

 

     And we realize in Sim’s song just how hideous, indeed, LGBTQ individuals have appeared to heterosexuals throughout cinema history, how terrifying their presence has long been, and how, no matter how beautiful they might look, people will turn away in disgust. And in the end, Sim and Somerville reveal the deep angst perhaps of all queer folk in their deepest heart.

     If at moments this British short film—what might almost be described as a music video for his album—borders on camp, it is too honest and autobiographical ultimately to push it in that direction, and remains, accordingly, a sort of raw cry from a gay man’s soul.

    The director, himself, very nicely sums up this work in an interview with Ava Cahen:

 

“When Oliver Sim suggested I made a film from his music, I felt in him a transgressive, adolescent urge which I immediately related to. Tackling face on the very intimate topics and intense emotions of his songs, and smearing them with gore, eccentricities, queer wit as much silliness and naiveté we could take, such was our common goal. Oliver dreamed of having a monster as a protagonist; a tragic, grotesque monster, both fragile and flamboyant, around which we had to create a strange but familiar cocoon, a TV set shot as a theatre stage that opens on fantasy or the shadows of one’s memories.”

 

Los Angeles, April 11, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (April 2023).