Pedro Lemebel, the writer who chronicled Chilean queer life throughout the fall of the Pinochet regime, the rise of democracy, and the AIDS epidemic, proclaimed the strength and vulnerability of queer life in his poem “Manifesto (I Speak from My Difference)”: “I speak of sweetness, comrade / You have no idea / What it costs to find love / In these conditions.” While delivered to confront the homophobia of leftist politics during a political action in 1986, these words also ring true with regard to Chilean filmmaker Diego Céspedes’ new film The Mysterious Gaze of the Flamingo. Centering a community of queer people at the dawn of the AIDS crisis, Céspedes movingly depicts both the threat of social hostility and the sustaining force of communal love.
Céspedes’ debut feature presents at first as a queer neo-Western with flashes of magical realism. Filmed in the Atacama Desert in northern Chile, the film centers Lidia (Tamara Cortes), a child who has been raised by a closely-knit group of gender non-conforming queer people (contemporary audiences will likely view most of them as transgender women, though the characters’ definitions of gender are more fluid, referring to themselves as maricons and travestis, and using various pronouns for one another). Lidia’s caretakers, and many members of the wary mining community who surround them, suffer from a mysterious illness they call the “plague” and, as rumor has it, is transmitted by queer people through a predatory gaze. Céspedes, at first, plays up genre influences — the rundown canteen the central family lives in recalls the seedy saloons of classic Westerns, and the legend of the ocularly-transmitted illness is repeated with the hushed wonder of a dark fairy tale — but when a tragedy forces Lidia to mature, the genre trappings slowly give way to reveal a sensitive work of social realism, albeit one told with a distinct sense of style.
Lidia, we learn, had been abandoned at the doorstep of the canteen as an infant, and has been raised by drag queen Flamenco (Matías Catalán). Flamenco is maternal and caring, but his longstanding entanglement with miner Yovani (Pedro Muñoz), who is intermittently violent and who blames Flamenco for his own illness, drives a wedge between Lidia and Flamenco that proves insurmountable. Lidia’s other caretakers, led by the elder Mama Boa (Paula Dinamarca), fill the gap, teaching her self-reliance while giving her unconditional love. Yet the mining communities’ animosity constantly threatens their safe haven, as does the slowly progressing illness that nearly all of them suffer from.
AIDS is never mentioned explicitly in Flamingo, but its shadow hangs over the film. There is some ambiguity at first as to whether the film’s invocation of a “plague” works as an allegory or if its characters are literally suffering from AIDS-related illnesses, but as its characters’ symptoms progress, leaving some covered in sarcomas, it becomes undeniable that AIDS has spread among their community. Yet in the early days of the epidemic, and in a highly isolated region, nobody fully knows what they suffer from, causing rumors to spread. By building in this ambiguity, Céspedes places the audience in the shoes of Lidia, whose slowly dissipating conviction in the illness’s transmission through a powerful look parallels her painful coming-of-age.
While ultimately a poignant portrait of the wide-reaching effects of AIDS, homophobia, and transphobia, Céspedes directs the film with a light touch that emphasizes moments of joy and community. Céspedes, directing his own script that is largely episodic, takes care to spotlight effervescent scenes, including a scrappy annual drag pageant, a convivial dip in a local lagoon, and, delightfully, the entire family easily turning the tables on a group of retired miners who have clumsily invaded their home and blindfolded them. The performances reflect this tonal balance between collective pleasures and recurring tragedies, with Catalán and Dinamarca especially encapsulating their characters’ efforts to live full, vibrant lives despite illness and the ever-looming threat of violence.
Flamingo demonstrates some issues common to first features, most prominently that the narrative structure meanders in the film’s middle stretch. Céspedes does recover a sense of narrative propulsion in the final act, and some structural vagueness is a minor quibble, anyway, in a film marked by both sensitivity and boldness. Céspedes, with a distinctive point of view, holds the community of queer outsiders that populate his film with a loving yet unflinching gaze, ensuring that the viewer feels the same warmth as Lidia does for her adoptive family.
DIRECTOR: Diego Céspedes; CAST: Tamara Cortés, Matías Catalán, Paula Dinamarca, Claudia Cabezas, Luis Dubó ; DISTRIBUTOR: Altered Innocence; IN THEATERS: December 12; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 44 min.
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