Two of the young punks with a photo of Emma Goldmann (“a freethinking rebel woman”) as their room decoration. (All photos © Salzgeber & Co. Medien GmbH)

Bruce LaBruce is a Canadian writer/photographer/director active since the late 1980s. He is known as an art-pornographer and the founder of ‘queercore’ via his punk magazine J.D.s. His work has previously been outside the mainstream, although he did have a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 2015. MoMA’s website announced the retrospective like this:

For over a quarter-century the auteur/provocateur known as Bruce LaBruce has been disrupting, dissecting, and disrobing in the name of cinema.

LaBruce’s films have shown at international film festivals since 2004 and three have previously been released on DVD in the UK. The Misandrists was shown at Berlin in 2017 and is in some ways the closest to mainstream cinema that Bruce LaBruce has come (it is linked to the earlier underground film The Raspberry Reich (2004)). As the title suggests, the film’s narrative concerns a group of ‘revolutionary’ women led by ‘Big Mother’ (Susanne Sachße) and their attempt to overthrow patriarchy. The narrative is set in Germany (Brandenburg) and begins with two young women cavorting in a field and then coming across a wounded young man stumbling through the woods. One of the young women, Isolde (Kita Updike) takes the initiative and hides the young man, Volker (Til Schneider) in the basement of the secluded country house where the girls are part of a female community. It is a serious offence to bring a man into the building. Big Mother has created a community with four older woman as teachers and eight young women they have rescued from the streets as students. The aim is to become a revolutionary group. In order to raise funds they must create lesbian pornography – which Big Mother decrees is ‘liberating’. To the outside world the group gives the appearance of a group of nuns teaching ‘wayward girls’ in a country retreat.

Volker (Til Schneider) and Isolde (Kita Updike)
The iconic soft porn image of the pillow fight

As one viewer has suggested, Bruce LaBruce makes a better stab at re-making Don Siegel’s The Beguiled than Sophia Coppola. As well as that Hollywood reference, the narrative is also redolent of fairy tales with the forest setting and the invoking of female mythologies by Sister Dagmar. It’s a German forest (and several of the actors speak heavily accented English, as well as snatches of German). Somewhere in the background is LaBruce’s play around Nazi iconography and the gay world. The two major questions for mainstream audiences are probably: “Is it any good?” and “Is it ‘art’ or ‘pornography’ or both”? Before I try to respond to those questions, I should note first that the film looks very good in a ‘Scope frame with accomplished cinematography by James Carman, interesting mise en scène and an excellent use of limited locations. I was intrigued to read that LaBruce was a graduate student in film at York University in Toronto and studied under Robin Wood. I thought I discerned several classical film references including a pillow fight which could be both soft porn imagery and a nod to Jean Vigo’s Zero de Conduite (France 1933). Perhaps there is also a sense of Mädchen in Uniform (Germany 1933, remade in 1958)? Throughout the film, LaBruce uses the iconography and the narrative devices and settings of porn, but always in a careful, controlled way. What he is attempting is both a celebration and a satire of lesbian, feminist and revolutionary communities. My understanding, from some of the extensive commentaries on his work, is that he rebelled quite early on in the face of what he saw as ‘safe, conservative’ gay male culture – and this led to his interest in punk (two of the young women in this film are signed as punks). He also criticised the ‘separateness’ of gay and lesbian movements, wanting gay men and lesbians to work together against capitalism and patriarchy. I don’t claim to understand all of this history but there is a substantial essay by Jasmine McGowan on the Senses of Cinema website: ‘Making Revolutionary Love: Radical Sex and Cooptation in the Films of Bruce LaBruce’. This was written soon after the MoMA exhibition and the release of Gerontophilia, (2013) “the first of LaBruce’s films to feature sexual activity demure enough to avoid the adult classification”.

‘Big Mother’ (Susanne Sachße) leads the group in an ‘invasion’ of a local cinema

It’s clear from this that LaBruce is a serious artist/activist who is prepared to attempt a very difficult task – to make a film that is entertaining but also thought-provoking, using story material that mainstream audiences may find offensive/distasteful. Personally, I had no problems with the film’s use of pornographic images which are not used frequently (as they would be in a porn film) – only when they are necessary for the narrative, to show the young women studying porn and then, towards the end of the film, to show the results of their efforts. I was much more disturbed by a detailed sequence of a surgical procedure (credited in the end titles to the ‘Belgrade Centre for Reconstructive Surgery’). I won’t spoil the narrative but you can probably guess what it entails. Anyway, I was too squeamish to watch it properly. More than the pornography, LaBruce’s main difficulty is to present the rhetoric of Marxism and feminism within the context of his narrative in a satirical but not necessarily negative way.

I thought at first that the film was too conventional and too ‘clean-looking’ to be effective seeming to work against the attraction of the cult film. I thought about The Duke of Burgundy (UK-Hungary 2014) and how that film successfully developed the look of 1970s exploitation films. But as time went on I started to think more about the characters and the script and by the end of The Misandrists I was on board the project, at least in terms of following some of the arguments. The film is humorous and I liked the performances and the music. One critic suggested that the acting is “stilted B-movie” style. Make of that what you will, but Kita Updike as Isolde seems well-cast. She has the pivotal role which also makes the film topical. Do stay for the credits. LaBruce and his team have found some wonderful photographs of women at work and at war, emphasising solidarity and struggle.

If this is the kind of film and the kind of ideas that interest you, I think you’ll like what Bruce LaBruce has to offer in The Misandrists. It’s released on DVD in the UK on April 30th by Matchbox Films.