Mike Sobi [Sobieski] | Waiting / 2019 [animated film]

love is rejuvenating

by Douglas Messerli

 

Lee Witz, Catherine Ren, and Lukas Anderson (animators), Mike Sobi [Sobieski] (screenwriter and director) Waiting / 2019 [5 minutes] [animated film]

 

 Even before the remarkable animated work Pancakes (2023), Mike Sobieski was producing wonderful gay animations, as his 2019 film Waiting reveals.

    It’s New Year’s Eve and both of his gay characters, Nick (Hao Fengo) and Matt (Ryan Masson) are forced to work for the evening, Nick in the nightclub as a pianist at The Palace, while Matt works as a waiter at Cathy’s, a local diner.

   Even though Nick was supposed to get off work at one, is forced to hang on “looping,” as he describes it, the song Ald Lang Syne. He comes home, cake in hand, but so exhausted he can hardly keep standing. He calls Matt, who’s still working, telling him of his exhaustion. Matt even suggests that if he needs sleep, they can celebrate in the next day.

     But Nick seems determined to stay up, unable, however, to even stand up, and eventually falling into the cake box and into the bed.

    Matt calls back reporting that he’s about to finally get off: “Sorry, sorry, I just needed to talk to somebody. This shift is coming straight from hell.”

       But by this time, he can already hear Nick’s snores.

      Finally, Matt returns home to the Bijou where they live, only to discover that Nick has reawakened and decorated the place, put out the cake, and is waiting with champagne. “You stayed up?” he responds, in some amazement.

   “You sound surprised,” says Nick, as the two men kiss, and begin they little early morning celebration.

      The phone rings.

      “They have another favor to ask?” queries Matt.

      Nick simply tosses the phone away, answering “Probably,” as the two toast and kiss the New Year in.

      Sobieski’s animated works are so real and simple, presenting the gay world in real-life events, that you can’t help but love them.

 

Los Angeles, July 5, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (July 2026).

 

José Luis Torres Leiva | Vendrá la Muerte y Tendrá Tus Ojos (Death Will Come and Shall Have Your Eyes) / 2019

another story of love and dying

by Douglas Messerli

 

José Luis Torres Leiva (screenwriter and director) Vendrá la Muerte y Tendrá Tus Ojos (Death Will Come and Shall Have Your Eyes) / 2019

 

Chilean director José Luis Torres Leiva has created a work in his Vendrá la Muerte y Tendrá Tus Ojos (Death Will Come and Shall Have Your Eyes)—the title based on a poem by Italian writer Cesare Pavese—that might easily have slipped into good-willed sentimentalism given that its characters, Ana (Amparo Noguero) and María (Julieta Figueroa) are two late-40ish lesbians, one of whom (María) is suffering from terminal cancer and the film is basically a tracing of her progression into death. Even a few years ago, a standard Hollywood production would have drained any sexuality from their lesbian relationship in order to show how queers suffer just like heterosexual women, allowing them only a few sweet kisses while carting in and out their numerous straight male and female friends to wish María a well-deserved goodbye, perhaps with even a bit of sanguine pleasure in the fact that all LGBTQ figures just have to go before the camera shutter closes, and hinting, accordingly, that perhaps Ana may find a way back into the “wider” community (i.e. hook up with a sensitive straight guy who she’s always admired since “before” her sexual exploration).

     But Torres Leiva nearly bans all “well-wishers,” except for Ana’s quiet and profound-thinking sister, and dismisses any male admirers. This is a woman’s world where the two lovers can remain precisely that, two women expressing their love and regrets so openly and with such mixed feelings of hope and fear that at moments it is hard to believe this film isn’t a documentary.

     Ana, who works as a nurse, is perhaps the perfect companion, moreover, for her lover who has determined to cease all further treatments; and the two, choosing to spend the last few weeks or months of María’s life in an intense and quiet solitude where they can focus simply on one another, move to a hut in a forest still close enough that Ana can commute back and forth to work.

      In this special retreat, they face their own fierce love for one another, sometimes let loose their tears, and at other moments, particularly in María’s case momentarily release her anger and frustration for having to be treated by her companion almost as a child. They listen to the sounds about them: the wind, the birdsong, the sea, and their own breathing, adding to it only their gentle comments during sometimes painful dressing and eating sessions and stories, two of which become central in reinforcing Torres Leiva’s LGBTQ-centric approach, pointing up distinctions that his film makes from so many hundreds of earlier films made by homophobic bigots or well-intentioned liberals, both of whom found ways around truly facing their characters’ and others’ queer sexualities.

     If there is any flaw in this beautiful work in which the director allows his camera to focus for long periods of time simply on the faces and bodies of his central characters, it may be these signifying stories, both of which have no central role in the lives of the lesbian characters upon whom the film focuses.

      Writing in The Guardian critic Cath Clarke argues:

 

“Two sizable digressions in the middle spoil the film a little. One dramatizes a strange fairytale María tells about a naked feral girl living alone in the forest; the other is a family story about her uncle. Both felt a bit generically arthouse, slightly awkward experiments.”

 

       But I would argue that these two unrelated episodes, not only help to reconnect these otherwise temporarily isolate figures with the larger community around them, but sets up paradigms for LGBTQ storytelling that might be useful to future directors whose works include queer figures of any kind.

      Late in the film, moreover, when Ana’s sister joins them for one of their last nights in retreat, she suggests that the eerie light, the sound of María’s heavy breathing, and the wind around them reminds her of the many nights they spent as children in the days of military dictator August Pinochet under curfew, during which outside they would hear occasional gunshots and screams, each telling one another stories to help them get through the frightening nights. It is often to storytelling that must turn turn when we are have no answers of how to face the horrifying present and the unknowable future. And both of the stories told in this film seem somewhat like mythical tales that present an extraordinary occurrence that helps to heal and salve our fears.

       Both also take place is a wild outland such as that to where Ana and María have retreated. In the first tale María tells, an old woman one days spots a wild child who has apparently been surviving like an animal in the jungle around her. Gently awakening the sleeping girl, the woman lures the animal-like child into her house through gentle strokes and words, offering her food, gently trimming her hair, and showering and cleaning her, but otherwise most specifically allowing the strange wild-child to remain just as she is, without demanding that she alter her ways to meet the expectations of the “developed” world who live outside and near the jungle in which the child has survived.

       One terribly rainy night, the old woman worries for the well-being of her new “friend,” placing a lamp in the window and also peering out to see if she might find her trying to make her way back to the protection of her house. What she does observe is the girl joyfully engaged with the heavy pelt of the raindrops, completely covered with mud but laughing and crying with pleasure for the natural downpour. It is an ecstasy that a so-called “civilized” person might never even have imagined, but so beautiful to observe that one might almost describe it as pleasure akin to sexual orgasm, so overwhelming enjoyable for the individual that one almost wants to pull one’s gaze away in shame for observing something so singularly meaningful.

      One only has to recall François Truffaut’s film of 1970 about another wild-child, Victor of Aveyron who, taken in by the equally well-intentioned Dr. Jean Itard, instead of being left as he is, is gradually transformed into a version of the paternalistic, normalized boy of French society who cannot help but feel tortured and fragmented from the being he was before his discovery, the same structures and concepts played out again in Werner Herzog’s Kaspar Hauser (1974) which, in this case, perhaps succeed in destroying the gifted child of that film.

     In the second story told by the two women of Torres Leiva’s film concerns María’s uncle (Ignacio Agüero), somewhat of an adventurer who always brought her gifts upon his many returns. A married man with three girls, the story tells of his awaiting his family’s arrival in a woodland vacation home, as he takes exploratory forays in the deep woods only to uncover a younger man (Edgardo Castro) swimming naked. Suddenly overcome with lust for the stranger, the two walk together in the woods for a while before engaging in a passionate sexual encounter, which the uncle later admits to his niece—the only one which he seems comfortable confessing his long-held secret—was a completely transformative sexual experience which he never before or again encountered. The two men corresponded in secret for a long while before losing linguistic contact and the memory of their intense touches.

      Why, one wonders, in a work almost entirely focused upon the love of two women and in which there are no other significant male figures would the director have chosen to introduce a gay love scene, particularly one representing such passionate lovemaking.

     In an interview with Cédric Succivalli for the ICS (International Cinephile Society) asks:

     

“There is a gay sex scene right in the middle of the film that comes a little bit out of nowhere, which I really liked, but I would like you to expand on it. How did it build up? Why did you want to incorporate that gay encounter?

 

JLTL: For me this subplot is important because it talks about desire and the discovery of love and desire.”

 

     Still, one might ask, why chose a gay scene to show the love and desire that the ailing lesbian couple can no longer demonstrate having obviously occurred perhaps 20 years earlier in their life which has become the basis of their relationship?

     But then, the true wonder of Death Will Come and Shall Have Your Eyes is that it is not simply yet another lesbian film made by a male, but that its central figures seem so true to life because they are not defined by their sexual desires—just as María’s uncle was not—but upon the love between two bodies, one healthy and one ill, who come together to help and save each other. As the director himself summarized it elsewhere:

    

“It’s a film which stresses bodies (healthy and ill) and faces like landscapes of human nature,” Leiva Torres commented. “It’s a film about love, death, family, the need to create close bonds which go beyond any condition or gender.”

 

     What is perhaps most interesting is not simply that Levia Torres was able to capture a beautiful lesbian relationship in action, but chose to represent his ideas about love, death, family, and bonding firmly outside of the heteronormative majority which has always felt that it defined this territory, posting it firmly instead in queer territory.

      The stories Ana and María tell one another, accordingly, are not just gratuitous tales but life-affirming stories that take away the fear of what we all know, that the true importance of living a life of love is that when death finally comes it is always through the vision of the other’s eyes.

 

                     For everyone death has a look.

                     Death will come with your eyes.

                     It will be like terminating a vice,

                     as seen in the mirror

                     a dead face re-emerging,

                     like listening to closed lips.                 

                     We'll go down the abyss in silence.

 

Los Angeles, October 28, 2021

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (October 2021).

Luther Price | Sodom / 1988-1989

on fire: the sacred vs the profane

by Douglas Messerli

 

Luther Price (director) Sodom / 1988-1989

 

After various pseudonyms, including Brigk Aethy, Fag, and Tom Rhoads—performing as an unassuming clown along with various of his family members, including his own mother—the director chose while making his most controversial work, Sodom, the name of Luther Price, which he would use for the rest of his life. His final pseudonym was an amalgam of names calling up the great Protestant religious reformer, Martin Luther, the important religiously inspired black rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr., and Vincent Price, actor in dozens of films of horror and sleazy pleasure.

    Price himself later commented on his name change at a presentation at the California College of Arts: “I actually changed my name to Luther Price because I couldn’t make the film under the previous name. He was much too innocent to make films like Sodom. Tom Rhoads, he made films about birthday cakes and mothers. Luther was thinking about other things. He had a different cake in mind.”

    The transformative film created over two years, 1988-1989, combined gay porno films he found in dumpsters behind Boston strip theaters showing X-rated films, darkly lit biblical epics, and Gregorian chants looped to play backwards. Like Stan Brakhage before him—Ed Halter described Price as being “Brakhage after Punk”—he scratched the surfaces of his 17-minute tape and, more innovatively, punched holes in the Super 8 frames which he carefully filled in with other images from the porno figures, while ecstatic faces and penises,as Roberta Smith described it in her The New York Times obituary, "jumped feverishly back and forth, almost as if the film were trying to escape the projector.” Connected by depictions of fire, the biblical masses are seen often carrying torches and flaming pieces of wood to which they often set fire to everything around them; the Gregorian chants are now and then accompanied with candles set with glass tumblers; and the male bodies heat up and symbolically burn with the friction of their inserted cocks and masturbatory hands. This can be described on all levels as a truly “hot” piece of filmmaking.

      Quite predictably, more conservative viewers—although given the obscurity of Price’s films and the paucity of their showings, one can hardly imagine who such viewers might have been—found the filmmaker’s work as being scandalous, in a way similar of the early reactions to some of the photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe. Critic J. Hoberman perhaps expressed their viewpoint best, suggesting that Sodom might almost be seen as an “illumination of Jerry Falwell’s unconscious.”

      Far more surprisingly, many influential figures of the gay world refused to show it at such otherwise open-minded film festivals such as those in Los Angeles and New York, describing Price’s cinema as being “homophobic.”

     Although eventually the film grew in fame as its iconic imagery came to be recognized over time for a new opening for gay cinema, and that initial reaction—probably still held by some—completely stymies my thinking. Who’s kidding who, I immediately wondered at reading of this response? Didn’t nearly every gay boy and many a lesbian learn about their own hidden sexuality in the days before computer availability through porno magazines and films, to say nothing about all those heterosexual kids who were exploring the more normative variations?

    The director surely knew, given his name change, that what one critic described as his “Boschian vision” of gay sexuality might rub some even otherwise sympathetic viewers in the wrong way. Price himself, however, argued against the viewpoint that maintained he was presenting gay life was a monstrous Rabelaisian-like hell: “I became known as this gritty, badass, gay filmmaker and…I’m not. Yeah, I’m gay, I like to look at guys’ asses, but Sodom is not a pornographic to me. It’s just very fleshy and visceral, and it talks about a story.”

      I think we have little choice but to perceive those images torn from the biblical epics the director employed as being far more violent than are the sexual interchanges themselves. In almost every brief scene that this film shows us of the biblically recreated world, the crowds seem to be massed with arms held up in anger or revenge, sometimes, as I mentioned above, holding burning beams of wood or torches, while in many scenes these religiously inclined men are perhaps burning up with sexual passion, but also involved in an almost sacred ceremony of the holy spirit and flesh.

      I can well understand why the viewers of 1989, at the height of the AIDS epidemic—the year when the number of cases in the US reached 100,000 and artist Robert Mapplethorpe died—perceiving the film as a vision of those who saw gay men deserving their hellish sufferings precisely because of the orgiastic behavior that the film seems to portray. Narratively, the crowds with burning torches seem to be routing the evil sexual perverts, their torches a kind of Nazi-like denunciation of their seemingly tormented sexual actions.

    But looking at this film again today, in 2023 I see a very different film from the one the gay community would have seen upon the film’s release—had they even been able to see it. First of all, it is very much a piece with Jerry Tartaglia’s movie of the same year, Ecce Homo, which uses similarly doctored and collaged images of male pornography to, as Vito Russo argued, “reclaim desire in the age of AIDS.” Tartaglia argues, moreover that gay men should not give in to the notion that it was their sexuality and its representations that brought on their sufferings, or that such behavior should now be controlled—and perversely enjoyed as did the prison guards in Jean Genet’s Un Chant d’Amour—but should be explored. As I described Tartaglia’s use of the porn images in my essay on that film:

“His 'preposterously' inverted film reveals this through several methods, first by his recitation of a mad mass-like incantation, with Gertrude Steinian logic, chanted with the musical accompaniment of something like a Gregorian chant by monks. While focusing on the Genet image of the guard peeping in the cell, the director overlays what the guard observes in his prisoners’ sexual activities with gay footage of men having sex from porn films, tinted various colors—purple, green, red, blue, yellow, and sometimes in the original colors or black-and-white—which render the images of men with their penis’ inserted to men’s asses and penis’ endlessly spouting semen almost as something like Hallmark greeting cards. No matter how shocked heterosexual onlookers—the doctor, the women and others who might make up any such board of decency—might be when realizing what is being portrayed, they cannot help but recognize them as standing apart from whatever one might describe as pornography: “printed or visual material containing the explicit description or display of sexual organs or activity, intended to stimulate erotic rather than aesthetic or emotional feelings.”

   And this is precisely how we might look at Price’s film, not as a pornographic work itself to which the societal forces are reacting negatively, but as a celebration of gay sex, an act of faith and conviction that results, as the Gregorian chants suggest in this work, in a true worship of the holy body in all its possible forms and expressions by these hallow-headed porn boys. And just as Lot’s wife did not at all wish to leave her town of Sodom in James Sibley Watson and Melville Webber’s gay romp Lot in Sodom, even Lot enjoying the pleasure of getting “to know” the visiting angel, the sensual celebrants of Price’s Sodom don’t seem at all distracted in their communal eucharist, truly eating the blood and flesh of their God-blessed fellow communicants and certainly giving no evidence of being run out of their cloister. Instead of reading the flickering images of hands raised in protest as the masses of city on their way to destroy their Frankenstein, we might as easily read those raised arms and their flaming faggots as celebratory cheers in the manner of a Woodstock-like concert, the actual fest celebrated one year after this film was made.      

      Even if one cannot get the image of the crowd’s violence out of our minds, mightn’t we then ask if the sometimes seemingly tough sex scenes are far less horrific than the men of God revenging, one presumes, the heathens around them. Both visions are single-minded in their intensity, and both involve, to a large degree, the ecstasy—bodily (expressed also in the obvious materiality of the film itself) and spiritual, both enhanced by the perverted (spoken as in the Devil’s

language in reverse) monkish chants, which at one point sound almost like a series of howls before they return to the quieter male choral monophonic sacred songs of the 9th and 10th centuries. In none of these worlds are women allowed, and all three share a commitment of patrimonial action and belief that is implacable, unable to be mitigated as faith generally is. In the end, it all depends on what you perceive as the sacred and what you determine to be profane.

      In fact, these visions are embodied in both Old and New Testament figures and their stories from Abraham and Moses to finally Christ, who is the body made holy by the spirit of God (to slightly restate The Apostle’s Creed).

      In a very clear way Price’s film is similar to the famed photograph of two years earlier, which also received severe criticism from both conservatives and established artistic communities: Andre Serrano’s Piss Christ, which pictures a small plastic crucifix floating in a tank of the artist’s urine—yet another statement of the body linked to the holy. Indeed, Serrano’s reaction to the outrage his art received is remarkably similar to Price’s reaction: "I had no idea Piss Christ would get the attention it did, since I meant neither blasphemy nor offense by it. I've been a Catholic all my life, so I am a follower of Christ."

      The major apologist for Price’s film, Michael Wallin, describes it in terms quite close to those I have used in my linking of the sacred and the profane:

 

“Beauty, pain, compassion, power, pathos decay, tenderness… These words all come to mind trying to get a fix, as it were, on this super-8 film by Luther Price. It is elusive. Sodom is a visceral experience of such passion and intensity that coming to terms with it in words seems a futile exercise. Yet it’s a film so provocative and confrontational that it demands response. …It hits somewhere in the solar plexus, that nebulous area where emotional and physical sensations converge.”

     If the word “emotional” can in any way linked to the word “spiritual” or as something of the imagination and mind, then I think I very much agree with Wallin. But finally, the work also very much a formal work with its rhythmic and repetitive actions gradually picking up in pace as it eventually spins out and erupts, like the semen exploding from the cocks over these men’s bodies, in a series of crescendos as fully realized as the spectacular white “fireworks” of Kenneth Anger’s 1947 experimental film of that name.

 

Los Angeles, July 22, 2020 / revised March 12, 2023 | Reprinted from World Cinema Review (July 2020) and (March 2023).

Ksenia Ratushnaya | Аутло (Autlo) (Outlaw) / 2019

there are no taboos in nature

by Douglas Messerli

 

Ksenia Ratushnaya (screenwriter and director) Аутло (Autlo) (Outlaw) / 2019

 

It’s difficult for Europeans and Americans to even comprehend, perhaps, the extreme difficulties faced by a truly experimental film such as Ksenia Ratushnaya’s 2019 feature film, Outlaw. That it was even made, let alone briefly released in the West is amazing, not only given the Russian restrictions on any film that might even imagine describing itself as involved with gay issues, but the critiques of European and US critics who simply don’t know how to assimilate or relate to such a gay/transgender surrealist fantasy, particularly since nothing positive seems to occur for the LGBTQ figures in this film. But then, how could they, given the law passed in 2013 that portraying homosexuality in a positive light was made punishable by fines and imprisonment?

     In an interview in the on-line site Meduza and an interview with Samuel Goff in the New East Digital Archive, Russian director Ksenia Rutushnaya describes some of the difficulties in producing and, more importantly, finding distribution for her film.

      The Meduza article summarizes her problems:

 

“Released in Russia on October 29, the film Outlaw centers around a transgender woman living in the USSR and gay high school student living on the outskirts of present-day Moscow. The drama, which was filmed in Russia, has already been subjected to an inquiry by the Attorney General’s Office. A festival that screened the film in March was fined for violating Russia’s “gay propaganda law” and according to the filmmakers, other screenings were cancelled due to “a phone call from the top.”  The film also drew heavy criticism from LGBTQ activists, particularly inside Russia.

 

     I’ll reiterate the brief history that both interviews reveal. In 2017, Ksenia Ratushnaya, the owner of a noted public relations firm, wrote a film script for the first time in her life. She perceived it as an art-house drama for adults, centered around two timelines, one set in the Soviet Union of the 1980s which tells the story of a Soviet officer (Vitaliy Kudryavtsev), already promised to the daughter of one of the major generals of the Soviet military, who falls in love with a dancer at a nightclub, Nina (Vitaly Kudryavtsev) whom he soon discovers is transgender, but continues the affair nonetheless, even more in love with her after his discovery. The second somewhat intertwined story involves a young gay high school student, Nikita (Viktor Tarasenko) in modern day Russia who falls in love with the school tough, who also is the most popular boy in his class Alpha (Gleb Kalyuzhnyy), who befriends him while still taunting and bullying him simultaneously.

       The connecting link is that one of Nikita’s teachers, who attempts unsuccessfully to help ease Nikita’s unhappy relationship with his peers, may also be the same transgender figure who was beloved by the general in the 1980s, saved only because she ran away and transformed herself back into a male teacher who has been in hiding ever since, although mocked by his/her own students for his homosexual mannerisms.

      Overseeing Nikita and Alpha’s relationship is a woman, the rebellious outlaw of the title (Elizaveta Kashintseva), who with her partner Wild (Sergey Dvoynikov) seems to have been allowed governmental free-range to do to individuals whatever she wants, including entering a grocery store and slitting the throat of a bourgeoise customer and other actions, as long as they are confined to a permitted period of time. Going outside that limit, she determines to kidnap Alpha and seduce him, the wimpy Nikita amazingly uncovering her and Wild’s whereabouts and saving his high school lover/nemesis from whatever fate she had in store for him. Whether or not Alpha ever perceives that Nikita has possibly saved his life is left open, but it does appear that through his actions, Nikita has grown into a full human being who is no longer quite so fascinated with the popular classroom bully. The Outlaw is ordered to be punished for her behavior, but somewhat like the transgender dancer Nina, the Outlaw herself escapes, with even the governmental authorities unable to find her—another hint, perhaps, that not all anarchistic behavior can ever be successfully controlled.

      Film critic Anton Dolin described Outlaw in a way that seemingly moderates its quite eccentric and even in the US, rather radical sexual scenes: “It’s a normal youth film, moderately provocative, with several erotic scenes and representation of, let’s say, various sexual practices, including those that are commonly referred to as ’non-traditional’ in Russia. At the same time, there’s nothing that goes beyond festival cinema, as a rule, there’s no trace of any problems getting [it] into Russian distribution.”

      That said, it’s clear that director Ratushnaya certainly feared that she might be able to get a distribution license due to the belief that she may be violating Russia’s gay propaganda law. But since the film was aimed at an adult audience she had no problems in getting a license.

        Films without such a license can only screened at international film festivals approved by the Culture Ministry. But even those with a license such as the film The Death of Stalin have had their license revoked for “additional review.”

        Outlaw received a Russian premiere in March of 2019 at the Spirit of Fire Film Festival (“Dukh Ognya) in Khanta-Mansiysk, after it have been screened in the Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival in Estonia and the Santa Barbara International Film Festival in the US.

     Evidently, there was some backlash among Russians belonging to the VKontakte site called “Typical Khanta-Mansiysk,” describing it as “an abomination,” which led other local residents to describe it quite negatively. Although the festival organizers expected protests at the festival, there were no incidents. The organizers had all spectators show them their passports with police on hand to confirm that there were no minors in attendance. The film won three awards at the Festival.

        But soon after, it became clear that the Attorney General’s Office had come to take great interest in the film, prosecutors asking why no one else had screened the film in Russia before its premiere. At the same time, according to Rataushnaya, no one contacted her. The first letter was delivered to the festival’s main sponsor, demanding to know why it supported LGBTQ propaganda. 

        The director, however, seemed to feel that the inquiry was instigated by a complaint from the children’s rights commissioner, although none of their departments or its officers responded to inquiries.

         But according to her interview with Samuel Goff, Rataushnaya observed, ““Before we started working on the film we didn’t realise the high level of anti-LGBTQ prejudice in the creative sphere.” The director herself declares she is not a member of the LGBTQ community, and continues in her interview with Goff speaking in a kind of naivete which for even an outsider from the Russian community, like myself, sounds somewhat insincere:

 

“The LGBTQ themes didn’t really complicate the process of pre-production and shooting, everything went smoothly without any governmental restrictions or prohibitions. The only thing we couldn’t do was use underage actors. I’ve long been interested in the histories, psychology, and fates of the LGBTQ community. I did have to read some studies into the lives of gays and lesbians in Russia in the 19th and 20th centuries (I wasn’t able to find any specific research on transgender people). I used a lot of what I learned from these books in the script. Of course, there’s also a lot in the film that comes from my own life. Whilst I myself am not LGBTQ, love is love and freedom is freedom for everyone.”

 

      There was, however, not to be much freedom after the movie was released for possible distribution and further offerings. The director of the festival, Larisa Zhuraveleva was fined 50,000 rubles (about $635) for “promoting non-traditional sexual relationships among minors,” even though there were no minors in the film and, as I have already reiterated, and no minors were allowed to view the film in the festival showings.

      Given the subject matter as I described above, although this is not a typical LGBTQ-oriented film, Ratushnaya and her producers rightfully described the work as an “LGBTQ drama” in their press releases. “We tried to formulate what the film could be called, if the two storylines are linked to LGBT people. In Russia, the easiest way to define it is to call it a LGBT drama. Though we understood that in a strict sense it isn’t an LGBT drama, it’s an art-house [drama]. We decided to present the film this way for simplicity,” the director states.

       Several LGBTQ activities called on the filmmakers to stop calling the film an “LGBT drama.” The writer for the queer culture magazine O-Zine, Anna Filippova, notes that when she first saw Outlaw in the fall of 2019 she gave it a positive review, but after seeing it again the following year, she “realized that it only nominally refers to the LGBTQ community and is in fact mainly devoted to teenage nihilism, drugs, BDSM.”

 

“An LGBT film should be representative, show their lifestyle, and the problems they face. Outlaw isn’t like that. It talks about anhedonia, coming off mephedrone, and depression. These aren’t the main problems that the LGBT community in Russia faces. They’re persecuted and killed here.”

     Although you can understand both the caution and the narrow expectations of Russia’s beleaguered LGBTQ community, what Filippova describes isn’t at all what really happens in the film. Both the transgender figure and the gay boy may certainly be tortured by the society in general, the outlaw forces in government, and the government itself, but they also both survive and become even stronger for their experiences. Despite the fact that the film spends also a great deal of time on so-called perverted heterosexual relationships, it is truly revelatory of LGBTQ difficulties in all societies, not even just in Russia. And its central theme, “There are no taboos in nature,” should find resonance in all LGBTQ communities. Finally, in the US today the definition of a film as art-house theater has little, if any, meaning.

      Director Ratushnaya herself, despite her pretended or real naivete was clearly moved in her film by almost a hodge-podge of gay and other sexual perspectives from film history.

 

 “In some scenes, even at the script-writing stage, I decided to employ references to Lynch’s Blue Velvet, Visconti’s Death in Venice, George Lucas’s Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith, Nicolas Winding Refn’s The Neon Demon, Laurence Dunmore’s The Libertine, and Tom Ford’s Nocturnal Animals. That might seem like a lot, but really, I was more influenced by literature, painting, architecture, and other forms of art. Everything that I love went into Outlaw, a very strange and beautiful mix, my blood.”

 

     If I don’t precisely see the influence of those images in the film—although I do recognize several images related to Federico Fellini’s Satyricon and Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange—I’ll still give her credit for creating one of the most remarkable works of cinema engaging LGBTQ figures in contemporary Russian cinema. And given all the challenges that involves, that is saying a great deal about this ultimately very entertaining if, at times, quite contradictory and perplexing film.

     Evidently, its distribution was limited to only a few theaters in Russia, and now that it has disappeared from Dekkoo, is apparently currently unavailable to most US and European audiences.

 

Los Angeles, September 3, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (September 2023).