19/02/2024 - BERLINALE 2024: Transgressive and proud of it, Bruce LaBruce shows us, with his latest powerful film, that he has lost none of his subversive energy

After a brief but intense passage through the world of more “mainstream” productions (even if talking of the “mainstream” in his case is definitely against nature) with films such as Saint-Narcisse and Gerontophilia [+see also:
trailer
interview: Bruce LaBruce
film profile], Canadian artist, photographer and director Bruce LaBruce returns to the underground to investigate the dark corners of our neo-capitalist society in his latest feature film, The Visitor [+see also:
trailer
interview: Bruce LaBruce
film profile]. In this powerful and violently queer work, first presented as an installation during the Frieze art fair in London in the offices of production company a/political in Kennington, Bruce LaBruce confronts the audience to its own limits, through sexual scenes both very direct and aesthetically electrifying, which give way to unexpected synesthetic trips. Presented in a world premiere at the 74th Berlinale in the Panorama section, The Visitor is one of those unclassifiable films that hits the nail on the head.

The Visitor is a retelling, in a British porno queer key, of Pasolini’s masterpiece Theorem (1968). The enigmatic visitor, the protagonist from the Italian director’s film, transforms in LaBruce’s film into a refugee (the incredible Bishop Black) who comes out of a small suitcase abandoned on the banks of the Thames in London. The same mysterious phenomenon takes place in other locations around the city. Dressed in rags, the protagonist arrives at the house of an upper middle class family where the housekeeper passes him off as her nephew. Welcomed into this traditional heteropatriarchal space, the guest seduces and sleeps with each family member. Free of all inhibitions and ready to break down all taboos, the family experiences a radical transformation from a sexual and spiritual point of view.

Using porn as a political tool and challenging the cinematic medium itself, LaBruce’s new film confronts without any filters a series of controversial current topics: the oppression of British colonialism, puritanism, racism, xenophobia, and the oppressive, suffocating weight of the traditional, white, and well-off family. In The Visitor, these burning issues are faced head on, sublimated through porn sequences which could be described as ethical and militant. The viewer is forced to enter a world that they perhaps never imagined existed, a lascivious and cathartic universe where taboos are broken down through the medium of film. The dialogues, scarce but definitely impactful, tear apart the images, highlighting their political and subversive charge. Particularly effective and evocative in that regard are the slogans “Open borders, open legs” or “Fuck for the many not for the few.”

Similar to a night spent in the dark rooms of Berlin’s underground clubs (see the amazing score by Hannah Holland), The Visitor allows us to face our own limits, those which the neoliberal heteropatriarchal society would make us believe to be insurmountable. LaBruce shakes us from our lethargy and reiterates, with a healthy dose of irony and provocation, “porn is my medium.” Inextricably linked to the punk movement and to what was subsequently named Queercore, LaBruce’s cinema never gives in to compromise, transforming the sexual act into a weapon with which to impose alternative, anti-normative, and decidedly queer narratives.

In tune with what could be defined as antisocial queer, LaBruce too asserts the right of the queer community to be a “failure” (as Jack Halberstam would say), violently extreme, antisocial, and proudly ambiguous. The protagonist from The Visitor could be seen as a messianic figure of salvation who pushes the members of the family to open themselves up to a desire that rejects psychologizing interpretations, an experiential journey in which to experience desire to the point of no return. 

The Visitor was produced by a/political and is sold internationally by Best Friend Forever.

(Translated from Italian)