20/02/2024 - BERLINALE 2024: The Canadian director adapts Pasolini’s Theorem as a modern piece on immigration, the paranoia revolving around a white exodus, and political radicalism

In his latest feature, The Visitor [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Bruce LaBruce
film profile], Canadian filmmaker Bruce LaBruce turns to one of his filmmaking idols, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and adapts his classic 1960s flick Theorem as a modern piece on immigration, the paranoia revolving around a white exodus, and political radicalism. His pornographic vision, which has screened in the Panorama section of the 74th Berlinale, tackles all of these contemporary issues, while also challenging family dynamics and broaching incest.

Cineuropa: Your movie is based on Pasolini’s Theorem. What was it about that film that fascinated you?
Bruce LaBruce: I'm a huge Pasolini aficionado. I’ve loved his movies since I was a film student. He's also one of my queer cinema masters along with Rainer Werner Fassbinder. I saw Theorem when I was in film school, and it greatly impacted me. The narrative is that of an interloper who arrives in a family and ends up disrupting them by having sex with them, leading to a transformation or liberation. It's also a movie about psychosexual relationships. You’ll find Freud's idea about family romance, the sexual attraction between members of the nuclear family unit, and the taboo, which results in repression and shame.

Furthermore, it’s a political metaphor. Pasolini's movie comments on modern alienation, industrialisation and the disassociation that people feel. I updated it to have a political metaphor. He is an immigrant, a refugee. He's a representation of this idea of an invading force that has come to rape and pillage.

Pasolini’s movie was not exactly heteronormative either. Where else did you see the potential for an update?
My agenda was to use more contemporary queer aesthetics and sexual-identity politics to tell the story. In my version, the daughter is played by a trans-masculine actor. She is a character who presents as female, but has facial hair and ends up being impregnated by the visitor. Old models of the family unit are being challenged, and trans men are having children. The other thing I did was the pornification of the original. In Pasolini's movie, it’s just very heavily coded that the visitor has sex with the father. It's not shown, and it’s the same with the maid. I made those into actual explicit sex scenes.

You also have the whole colonial aspect to it. The father says, “You colonised the coloniser.”
It's meant to be very cheeky. All of those slogans in the film are based on actual Labour Party slogans that I changed so as to sexualise them. So instead of just “Open Borders”, I changed it to “Open Borders, Open Legs”. They had a slogan that went “Not for the Many, but for the Few”; I changed it to “Fuck for the Many, Not the Few”. That's what the entire paranoia, the “invasion”, is about.

Not all of your actors are actually from the porn scene, though.
The visitor, Bishop Black, was a professional porn actor. I've worked with him before. The rest of them were more burlesque performers. I think they all did remarkably well: there was a lot of chemistry going on between them.

Have we become too conservative about proper sexual intimacy on the screen?
That's how porn started in the 1960s and 1970s. It was a more communal experience: everyone would go to porn theatres and watch porn as a group. It was more interactive and maybe less shameful. I've been doing independent narrative films since the early 1990s. People always tell me that they have gone to my screenings and seen people having sex or jerking off during them. Maybe that's a way of getting people back in the theatres. I think my films allow people to see that there's nothing inherently evil or shameful about sex or porn.