Michael Brynntrup | Ipanema / 2003 and Blue Box Blues / 2004

reality lies

by Douglas Messerli

 

Michael Brynntrup (director) Ipanema / 2003 [3.30 minutes]

Michael Brynntrup (director) Blue Box Blues / 2004 [8 minutes]

 

Since 1982 German conceptual artist and filmmaker Michael Brynntrup has been exploring philosophical issues, taboos, and how reality is created, questioning quite literally, often comically, how we come to define what we perceive in the world around us. Other than his numerous art exhibitions which interact with his filmmaking and his longer mock-historical films such as his 2-hour Jesus — The Film of 1986, he has accomplished this mostly in short films, several of them with homosexual contexts and implications.

     Ipanema and Blue Box Blues from 2003 and 2004 represent two tonally different pieces that challenge our notions of reality while also involving his fascination with doubles (Brynntrup was born a twin whose “other” was stillborn) and self-identity.

     In Ipanema the director takes the popular 1962 Brazilian bossa nova song with by music by Antônio Carlos Jobim and lyrics by Vinícius de Moraes. Using the English lyrics of Norman Gimbel, Brynntrup transforms the classic for what he describes as a “lip synch” Karaoke video. The film does display the lyrics in blue which in time to the rhythms of the music turns lavender with each passing word. The music is strummed on an electronic-rendering of a guitar, but no lyrics are sung unless we at home jump in to play the Karaoke singer—although if it played the LGBTQ film circuit I am sure that whole choruses of audience members must have joined in.

      Moreover, the “tall and tan and young and lovely” girl is not at all passing by the two males in this case (Tiaago Grandeza and Gerard Raffray), on her way to the sea, but sitting inside her car as the muscular, bare-chested hirsute gay boys, their blue jeans slipped low upon their hips, thoroughly wash and clean her vehicle, one of them twice positioning the spouting hose next to the part of his body with a similar function to shower the car with water.

      If you have chosen to join in, moreover, the girl to whom you are singing is a drag queen, who unlike the girl in the song most definitely does recognize the two boys, doing everything possible to get their attention, including displaying her shapely legs in purple stockings and, at one point, even getting up from the steering wheel, to move over nearer to one of the boys as he works.

      In this upside-down version of the heterosexual fantasy, the boys pay utterly no attention to her—just as my eyes were locked upon the beautiful boys. At the very moment when the song repeats, “She doesn’t see, she doesn’t see,” one of the boys, in his attempt to clean every last spec off her front window, blows upon it as he rubs, completely blurring any vision of her within. And so ends the video.

      In short, Brynntrup has transformed a sexy straight ballad into a gay visual feast for the eyes, from which even a drag queen is excluded. Just as the director’s 1993 film All You Can Eat defined itself as a product for “a special and limited audience namely adults,” so Ipanema defines itself for gay eyes only, demanding that you recognize that if you sing along not even the subject of your song is really a woman.

      Although even then we have to ask, might this girl be transgender and the boys discretely flirting with her, just as the girl in the song perhaps was doing with her heterosexual admirer, by pretending not to notice?

      And what does it mean in this version of the song that it is no longer the pretty girl who is in control of the situation, but the pretty men? As the objects of our desire have we also converted them to mere objects, eye-candy car washers instead of a tall, tan, young “thing” on her way to beach? And if we should begin singing as the video encourages us to do, are we singing to the drag queen or to the boys? What, we have to ask in this version of reality, is the meaning of gender?

 

To some doing a sexual photo shoot which requires you to lock lips with another human for a long period of time may seem like a pleasant undertaking. But for the two lesbians (JoE and Shannon) in Brynntrup’s Blue Box Blues it is clearly a sad and emotionally empty task.

      Their lesbian kiss is based on an apparent S&M act, a hard slap across the face, followed by an act of contrition with a seemingly endless kiss while the cameras and the cameramen with them go circling around one another and the two locked in a blue-colored space. A reshot requires another slap, an oddly sexual reassurance from the art director (Paula Rosegarthen) who seems to continue her gentle hand-petting of the more feminine of the two characters a bit longer than a friendly pat, and a long lip-lock that hardly leaves any room for breath, the camera circling round the two again like they were on the sexual prowl.

      Which indeed they are. They are not filming action, but inaction, attempting to catch the interlocked couple at just the right angle, with the right light and the facial gestures that can be achieved only over long periods of time. For the two intertwined individuals it must seem like eternity, like they have been frozen in an act that can no longer have any possible sexual excitement, let alone logical meaning.

      If the one is playing sad to the other’s contrition, by the time they have spent the full 8 minutes of the film, they both, as the title suggests, must feel blue like the scenery into which they have been cornered by the shoot.

      But there are several things that occur that do quite make sense. Why slap the other girl when it is not a live shoot. Does she need to actually suffer the pain in order to play a character who is hurt? What does she feel about the attentions of the art director, and are the two women really a couple or merely actors portraying lovers? Is the sis-identifying character repelled or attracted to the bald headed, pale-skinned women who is attempting to comfort her. Are the two really involved in S&M bondage or have they simply been asked to perform those roles? And for whom are the art director and the cameramen doing this shoot? A lesbian magazine? A magazine for heterosexual males who like the idea of a tough woman slapping a weaker one and the two making up—and out—with a kiss. Do they treat their own wives and girlfriends in a similar manner?

      Surely these girls must know that their images might attract just such viewers even if they imagine they are performing for their fellow lesbians?

      Once more, as in nearly all of Brynntrup’s films, something is wrong with the picture. It simply doesn’t fit into predictable ideational frames. What is happening seems to point to other worlds outside of the evidence placed before us. Like a detective looking inward instead of out, we must ask ourselves how do we want to interpret what we are observing.

      Finally, the cameramen and director seem to get the image they are looking for, but at what cost? And what does the image itself mean to the world outside of those who have created it?

      In both of these short films, reality it appears to hiding something, telling us a lie.

 

Los Angeles, February 12, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (February 2022).