Bruce LaBruce, the more consistent enfant terrible of Canadian cinema, begins his pornographic Teorema reformation, The Visitor, with direct quotation from Enoch Powell’s “Rivers of Blood” speech, delivered in Birmingham in 1968 to the Conservative Association. Bruce’s historical allusion — one rife with pointed jingoism and xenophobia — contextualizes, on initial glance, the methodologies of representation his England-set exploitation film will utilize, as the titular visitor, played by Bishop Black — birthed out of the canal of a beached suitcase on the banks of the Thames — seduces the white members of a bourgeoisie family. This seduction is framed as a matter of sequential interventions, of liberatory sexual explorations that radically shift the positionality of their passive opulence and self-congratulatory insularity, one family member at a time. Perhaps LaBruce’s most salient point, this shift amounts to the breakdown of these individuals, the family collapsing and their identities malformed into amorphous bursts of desperation. Without structure, LaBruce gestures at the bourgeoisie’s collapse: a curious and largely ignored dialectic when taking into consideration that the family members each present themselves through unambiguous queerness. Unfortunately, this friction is one that textually comes to feel incomplete, its ideas left hanging in the wind. Similar to the substance that its opening voiceover introduces us into, The Visitor elides much of the complication its semiotics imply, ultimately reducing them to vacant signifiers without much impetus or concern.
Moving further into the tensions developed through the film, Bishop Black being the only Black actor of the cast purposely provokes a consortium of racial undercurrents with regard to the class scrutiny ongoing through the project, most obviously invoking the migrant crisis in our protagonist’s introduction (alongside the aforementioned voiceover) and, in its most considered, yet still confused, rumination, offering unmitigated unease in the fetishism of Blackness that engulfs the gaze of each family member. LaBruce’s career is not blind to the political discourses that surface through the introduction of explicit perversion into historically tense dynamics of identity, however he remains faithful not to the ideology behind his flirtations with a politic, but instead allows it all to amount only to cooption, his gestures of radicality liberalized through the formation of aestheticist modulations, where their spectacle is the end-all of their discourse. His construction of a vacuous requirement for provocation seems to be the only coherent intention that strings along an inchoate but concise narrative. Across the film, inter-spliced through unsimulated sex scenes, flashing inter-titles like “sexual revolution of the proletariat” or “Anal liberation NOW” provide some insight into the imaginations of transgression and political conference that the project wishes to operate through. These admittedly playful revisions on familiar slogans come into direct alignment with the complex of negation that the film seems most curious to parlay with, going so far as to see a character eventually have sex with the L of a public installation whose intentionally collapsed sculpture spells out “capitaLism.” This negation is that of its own political faculty, where materiality as an analysis of social relationality is replaced by the nihilist anarchy of the characters’ aimless devolution. But this isn’t a new observation of LaBruce’s cinema, as his oeuvre is built of pornographic renunciations of political aesthetics, oftentimes complicating the images he gauchely appropriates to investigate the effects of queer sex as an open act of rebellion. But that’s typically as far as it ever gets. These contradictions he stumbles upon, however, seem not to have been of much bother over the past few decades, the acuity and sensitivity to his subject matter being as disinterested in their ontology as ever before. With The Visitor, it feels that La Bruce is repeating himself through pastiche, reusing old ideas through older narratives, puncturing them with an empty provocation that grows tired far quicker, culminating in a fairly gruelling 100 minutes.
DIRECTOR: Bruce LaBruce; CAST: Bishop Black, Macklin Kowal, Amy Kingsmill, Ray Filar; DISTRIBUTOR: Circle Collective; IN THEATERS: March 7; STREAMING: April 4; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 41 min.
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