World-premiering at Finland’s Night Visions, CHRZU’s mockumentary Carlotta Moore and Me [+lire aussi :
interview : CHRZU
fiche film] introduces the audience to Carlotta Moore, already spotlighted in a few shorts. Now, she is off on a bigger adventure, proving that a film without Carlotta is “like a kiss without a moustache: a certain tickle is missing”.

Cineuropa: Mockumentaries are great; it’s just funnier when we pretend it’s all true.
CHRZU: I love them, too, especially those with Christopher Guest, like A Mighty Wind and This Is Spinal Tap. And Borat! Our film is a reverse Borat because Carlotta is a woman travelling from the West to the East, and Borat is a man travelling from the East to the West.

And once again, nobody is ready for it! Carlotta is already an established character here. But where did she come from?
Carlotta arrived in Finland in 2014. That’s when this character was born, but the first seed was sown earlier, when I saw John Waters’ Desperate Living. I have been watching horror, 1980s action and all these trashy films since I can remember, but I have never seen anything so wrong as Desperate Living.

In 2012, I started watching RuPaul’s Drag Race, which is now like this mainstream of drag, and when I was looking at the participants who weren’t doing so well, I went: “I could do better than them.” They had a tribute episode to John Waters, and I decided to make a short dedicated to him as well, with Carlotta. That’s when I forgot my old career goals and committed to this career suicide instead.

Your love for Waters is everywhere in this film. He was doing it in Baltimore, of all places, while you are doing it in Finland. “Carlotta had that star quality that Finns aren’t born with,” someone says.
I was a punk rocker when I was a teenager, but nowadays, drag isn’t shocking any more. It’s a vessel to raise awareness for the LGBTQ community and create loveable characters. In that sense, Carlotta is old-school. I wanted her to be shocking. First, you fall in love with her, and then you find out she comes from a racist background [laughs].

The drag scene has many subgenres: there is horror drag, monster drag, fishy queens and young, underground drag queens, who have this anarchic energy and these trashy looks, mostly because they have no money. Still, I don’t think Carlotta belongs to any of them, and as a Finnish filmmaker, I also feel like an outsider. Finland can be so conservative when it comes to films.

You certainly don’t make things easy – some explicit scenes could scare away potential collaborators, but you need them here. Given that you know this character so well already, what did you want to explore this time?
We introduce the fake me: the director. I love what this guy does in the film. He is an amateur, but he is so good at playing the moron without actually being one. There are so many improvised scenes, like when Carlotta and fake CHRZU are drinking. I wanted to do it because I was getting tired of all these male Finnish directors getting tipsy at various industry events and bragging about their movies. Fake CHRZU also thinks he is a genius. He loves all his ideas.  

With mockumentaries, there are some rules – we all know there will be “talking heads”. Yet the people who are featured here recall some crazy stories or even fantasise about killing Carlotta.
They were allowed to lie, and some of them came up with some great stuff. We told them that CHRZU and Carlotta are not the same person – that was the only rule. We started shooting back in 2017, and I was inspired by what went on when Trump got elected and this whole “post-truth” discourse kicked off. This is a post-truth shockumentary. It’s real if you want to believe that it’s real.

It’s Hillbilly Elegy on acid. But because Carlotta is American, I guess it allowed you to mock Finland a little?
At first, I thought there would be more of a culture clash. I was thinking of pulling a Borat and having her interact with the locals. Then we just decided to fuck some shit up. We hadn’t planned most of it – so many jokes just happened in the editing, like when she is sliding up a banister. It’s dumb, but it makes people laugh so hard. It makes us laugh, too.

We knew we would never get any substantial funding, so at one point, I said: “Let’s make a film that would never get any funding!” But then we actually got all of these great companies involved. It’s produced by It’s Alive Films, and before the Night Visions screening, Teemu Nikki said: “We made this because we want to make a lot of money [laughs]!” We will see. Carlotta doesn’t like to talk about her past in the USA. She has moved on, but there might actually be another film there – a prequel!

Carlotta Moore herself (© Noora Isoeskeli)