A young American wanders around Buenos Aires, looking for the grave of the famed pirate Hippolyte Bouchard, who once conquered the American’s hometown of Monterey, California, for a couple of days. The trip goes awry when the American gets robbed and loses his wallet, his passport, his money. With nowhere to go, he sleeps in Bouchard’s graveyard. He awakes to a surreal sight: a play, with a pair acting out a fight between Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, while a third films on his phone. They notice the yankee lying in grass, and after a little deliberation, they invite him along with them. They’re a group of queer, radical anarchists, and they’re making a play to put Henry Kissinger on trial for his crimes against Argentina and humanity as a whole, and they finally found the perfect man for the role.
Yanqui (played by writer-director Michael Taylor Jackson) finds himself within the group of anarchists: not a coming-of-age, but a coming-of-identity. When he keeps calling himself an American, he’s quick to be corrected that America is a continent, not a country, and realizes that in English there is no word for a “United Statesian,” which is a form of colonization by language, as Jackson points out in an interview conducted by Blake Simons, recounting a time Jackson himself made that mistake while talking to a cab driver. Here, amongst the anarchists — the actors — Yanqui realizes what he thought were firmly established pieces of his identity were actually imposed concepts, and now he’s free to explore who he really is, finding freedom in a way similar to how actors can explore on the stage.
Simons points to Jacques Rivette as a reference point for Jackson’s film — and indeed there are some parallels to be drawn in how Rivette and Jackson use theater as a method both in the diegesis of a film and as a way of transforming the artifice of cinematic performance into a world of spontaneity. However — and this is perhaps a result of this writer’s Baltimore bias — a more apt comparison to make might be toward John Waters. Not in the sense of Waters’ inclinations toward direct taboo-bending or wondrous vulgarity; instead, Underground Orange feels at home with the radical communal aspects of Waters’ work, something that was usually obfuscated during Waters’ most successful times as a filmmaker. It became clearer and clearer as time went on that Waters’ films always were about his violently queer and beautifully anarchic friends at a very specific place in time, and it took until Waters’ nearly sentimental Baltimore return with Pecker (1998) for those sticking around and still watching his movies to realize that that was essentially what he been doing the whole time. The closest film to Underground Orange, though, is Waters’ maligned Cecil B. Demented (2000), wherein a diverse group of young people (diverse in every way — in race, in gender, in sexuality, in movie taste) go to war with bad movies, combining the act of terrorism with making art. It’s also a tribute to Waters’ friends from his younger Dreamlander days, where the ensemble is made up of thinly-veiled reflections of his old regulars. The ensemble is equally important to Jackson: the dynamic between his romance with Paty (Sofía Gala Castiglione), Goya’s (Bel Gatti) distrust of it, his more easy-going relationship with Dante (Gianluca Zonzini), and the stewardship of the group by Frida (Vera Spinetta) serves as the main dramatic tension of the film while the group is readying their play and more direct, confrontational politics.
Underground Orange similarly links radical political action to the art of living free, and the freedom of living to make art. Yanqui’s identity becomes decoupled from his “American” assumptions, and his sexuality is liberated from exploitation. Early in the film, when he is listlessly looking for a place to stay, he’s taken in by Mr. Schmidt (Heinz K. Krattiger), although it quickly becomes clear that Schmidt is using his position of power to get sexual access to Yanqui, so he grabs his bags and leaves in a hurry. When with the anarchists, however, Yanqui is free to explore amidst the fluid polyamory of the group. This is not without tension, though, as his outsider status in particular makes Goya uncomfortable, initially reading Yanqui as the man from the States who is there to take from the group, not contribute to it. Yet as the group transitions from performing activism on stage to taking action on the streets, Yanqui proves that he’s serious to their cause, their way of life.
The freedom that Yanqui finds within the group is reflected in the constantly bending and shifting form that Jackson’s direction takes — what starts as a film locked down on sticks, presented formally and with Yankee often filmed from a distance, starts to go handheld and film more up-close and intimately once he gets taken in with anarchists. The style keeps shifting, culminating in a beautifully surreal sequence where theatricality overtakes reality, where halls of an old hotel become a ball of people dressed in mid-century formal wear and gaudy makeup, like out something out of the more oneiric sides of Rainer Werner Fassbinder or Luchino Visconti. Jackson describes this shifting in style as “genre-fluid,” and it’s a demonstration of all the possibilities of cinema being open to a young filmmaker. In exploring the fluidity of his own identity, Jackson finds fluidity in film form, creating a personal, exuberant, and radical first feature.
Published as part of New/Next Film Fest 2024.
