Showing @ Cineworld, Edinburgh, Sat 21 Jun & Filmhouse, Edinburgh, Thu 26 Jun
Bruce LaBruce / Germany, Canada / 2014 / 56 mins
If the name “Pierrot” conjures up images of sad-faced clown dolls and 1980s posters, Bruce LaBruce‘s updated version of the classic commedia dell’arte characters (screening as a double bill with The Incomplete) might just alter your perceptions forever. Whether that change is unnerving, illuminating, or both will very much depend on the viewer.
Pierrot Lunaire (Susanne Sachsse) is a transgender cabaret performer who is spurned by Columbine (Maria Ivanenko) when her father (Boris Lisowski) discovers that her “mister is a sister”. The lovesick Pierrot plots to win back his lover, visits a very 1980s gay bar, and mayhem ensues. It is played as a melodrama but there are signs throughout that this clown has his tongue (and maybe more) very firmly in cheek.
Featuring a Modernist atonal score composed by Arnold Schönberg in 1912, Sachsse’s own singsong interpretation of Albert Giraud‘s accompanying poem cycle, stark Expressionist imagery and lashings of campy sleaze, this is a jarring clash of high culture and the gutter that doesn’t always work. It looks and sounds intriguing, but halfway through the punning subtitles begin to grate and it begins to seem just a little too impressed with its own cleverness. Queer culture has often knowingly turned “style over substance” into an art form, but it’s not a vocabulary that everyone speaks.
Showing as part of the Edinburgh International Film Festival 2014