[REQ] Queen Lear (1982)
Posted: Mon Sep 18, 2006 9:54 am
Has anybody ever seen this (apparently) weird movie? Read this:
Queen Lear (1978/80)
with Joe Dallesandro, Laura Garcia Lorca, Fabrice Josso, Jean Gosselin, Gil Vidal, Thomas Maurer, Victor Israel, Martine Della Torre, Robert Perkin, Rita Schibli, June Maurer, Lilly Chorfi. Directed by Mokhtar Chorfi. 88 minutes, French-Swiss.
(Spoiler Alert: Because of its scarcity, and for the record, I will be detailing much of the plot.)
"Have you read your psychology lesson?" asks mom of her 12-year old boy as he works on his dead father's car in the living room. He says he has, then asks mom about Oedipus and the Oedipal Complex, but it's us who probably need the psychology lesson more than him. Queen Lear, one of Joe Dallesandro's most eagerly sought after and rare European titles, lives up to the odd in terms of its plot reputation, but not the director's claim to a French newspaper that it would "reveal a Dallesandro who is not only a perfect lover, but also a high class comedian, a dizzying presence on the screen...a fitting successor to Marlon Brando."
At the height of his personal troubles with drugs, Joe looks uninspired and fully detached from the strangeness around him, though he was used to working in bizarre circumstances with directors who told him to do things he had no clue what they meant. His hair is flat and at an awkward half-too-long stage, requiring him to push it behind his ears to keep it from falling in his face. He sits down to write a letter to Patrick, his secret male lover, who supposedly needs money to get out of jail in Bolivia. Joe moves to the bed to ask his naked fiancee for advice and we see that she has tiny figurines over her nipples, one of which looks like an oil field tower.
Joe's elderly dad has flashbacks about his arranging and insisting on the marriage between the young couple two months after the two year anniversary of his own wife's death, but the visit from Joe for money elicits the shameful truth: Pops knows Patrick is still in town and has been lavished with gifts, including a car, bought using money already given to Joe. The old man tells his son that Patrick doesn't want to see him anymore and that he has returned items, including the keys to the car parked out back and, most curiously of all, a bottle of Joe's semen. After a shocked Joe runs out of the house only to get struck down by a delivery van, his fiancee wanders into pop's room, sees the bottle, asks what it is, is told it's Joe's semen and that she may do with it what she likes, and then quite naturally drinks it down.
Miraculously, she has a baby boy from doing so, and can't help but occasionally see her dead fiance while out on a stroll with their son. He appears in a toy store window dressed like Zorro, brandishing pistols, and smiling like a madman. Later, when the boy is 12, Joe appears and re-appears from time to time in ghostly white make-up with dark raccoon eyes, dressed in a delivery man's uniform. At one point, he's in this get-up and riding a horse behind a cab, holding a stick from which a bouquet of flowers dangles and cackling like a loon.
Dolls. Broken mannequins. Flowers. A vision of father and son as blind beggars wearing nightshirts in the house. A boy licks a crucifix. A distraught mother brings home a girl and washes her nude in front of her son in hopes that they will one day be married. The son later tastes the bathwater and spits it out. Perhaps it takes a "European sensibility," or at least an avant-garde's grasp of symbolism, but I'm more inclined to believe that only the filmmaker can explain what he was after. Queen Lear is low-budget and artless, but it has undeniably arty pretensions.
It's also utterly without humor, even in the face of Joe showing up in a red leotard to explain that he doesn't have feelings for his fiancee while talking to a Styrofoam mannequin's head on a stick with a cross painted on the forehead. We discover that he was part of a drag queen carnival act, both he and his lover, and in one of several "dreamlike" sequences, we see him delivered on horseback to his nude fiancee on the beach. His reaction is to run into the sea. Later, she'll be on the beach again holding a placard with her naked image on it and he'll be on top of the public toilet shooting holes through her nipples on the poster, while his son hands him a fresh pistol.
Lots of dialogue between mom and son about their mutual worries and hopes and dreams for each other is offset by a visit to the carnival in which the gymnastic dance and impressive splits by a performer in a red leotard is revealed to be Joe--literally or only figuratively alive, I'm unsure. The boy wants to run off with his father and leave momma behind after Joe is seen mounting her with his leotard pulled halfway down his backside. After he dismounts, he shakes a generous supply of gymnast's powder inside his leotard crotch. Joe decides to abandon the boy, too, leaving him with his partner, so that he can now go off and truly be free.
"Freedom" means wearing feathers on one arm, spangles on the other, a pair of sequined bikini briefs, kissing a stuffed bird, and then pulling a pistol from his shorts and blowing a hole through the center of one of his rubbery hands. Oh, did I mention that all of this takes place while he's standing out on the bow of a sailboat?
Queen Lear has the funk of a hippie movie about it. It's a personal vision that plays like a home movie made by a headcase friend back in the 70s. As to what Joe Dallesandro is doing in it, I can only refer you to Bela Lugosi's participation in Glen or Glenda, I Changed My Sex (1953).
I wonder whether this one is OT or not...
Source: http://www.joedallesandro.com/queen.htm (no longer available)
Queen Lear (1978/80)
with Joe Dallesandro, Laura Garcia Lorca, Fabrice Josso, Jean Gosselin, Gil Vidal, Thomas Maurer, Victor Israel, Martine Della Torre, Robert Perkin, Rita Schibli, June Maurer, Lilly Chorfi. Directed by Mokhtar Chorfi. 88 minutes, French-Swiss.
(Spoiler Alert: Because of its scarcity, and for the record, I will be detailing much of the plot.)
"Have you read your psychology lesson?" asks mom of her 12-year old boy as he works on his dead father's car in the living room. He says he has, then asks mom about Oedipus and the Oedipal Complex, but it's us who probably need the psychology lesson more than him. Queen Lear, one of Joe Dallesandro's most eagerly sought after and rare European titles, lives up to the odd in terms of its plot reputation, but not the director's claim to a French newspaper that it would "reveal a Dallesandro who is not only a perfect lover, but also a high class comedian, a dizzying presence on the screen...a fitting successor to Marlon Brando."
At the height of his personal troubles with drugs, Joe looks uninspired and fully detached from the strangeness around him, though he was used to working in bizarre circumstances with directors who told him to do things he had no clue what they meant. His hair is flat and at an awkward half-too-long stage, requiring him to push it behind his ears to keep it from falling in his face. He sits down to write a letter to Patrick, his secret male lover, who supposedly needs money to get out of jail in Bolivia. Joe moves to the bed to ask his naked fiancee for advice and we see that she has tiny figurines over her nipples, one of which looks like an oil field tower.
Joe's elderly dad has flashbacks about his arranging and insisting on the marriage between the young couple two months after the two year anniversary of his own wife's death, but the visit from Joe for money elicits the shameful truth: Pops knows Patrick is still in town and has been lavished with gifts, including a car, bought using money already given to Joe. The old man tells his son that Patrick doesn't want to see him anymore and that he has returned items, including the keys to the car parked out back and, most curiously of all, a bottle of Joe's semen. After a shocked Joe runs out of the house only to get struck down by a delivery van, his fiancee wanders into pop's room, sees the bottle, asks what it is, is told it's Joe's semen and that she may do with it what she likes, and then quite naturally drinks it down.
Miraculously, she has a baby boy from doing so, and can't help but occasionally see her dead fiance while out on a stroll with their son. He appears in a toy store window dressed like Zorro, brandishing pistols, and smiling like a madman. Later, when the boy is 12, Joe appears and re-appears from time to time in ghostly white make-up with dark raccoon eyes, dressed in a delivery man's uniform. At one point, he's in this get-up and riding a horse behind a cab, holding a stick from which a bouquet of flowers dangles and cackling like a loon.
Dolls. Broken mannequins. Flowers. A vision of father and son as blind beggars wearing nightshirts in the house. A boy licks a crucifix. A distraught mother brings home a girl and washes her nude in front of her son in hopes that they will one day be married. The son later tastes the bathwater and spits it out. Perhaps it takes a "European sensibility," or at least an avant-garde's grasp of symbolism, but I'm more inclined to believe that only the filmmaker can explain what he was after. Queen Lear is low-budget and artless, but it has undeniably arty pretensions.
It's also utterly without humor, even in the face of Joe showing up in a red leotard to explain that he doesn't have feelings for his fiancee while talking to a Styrofoam mannequin's head on a stick with a cross painted on the forehead. We discover that he was part of a drag queen carnival act, both he and his lover, and in one of several "dreamlike" sequences, we see him delivered on horseback to his nude fiancee on the beach. His reaction is to run into the sea. Later, she'll be on the beach again holding a placard with her naked image on it and he'll be on top of the public toilet shooting holes through her nipples on the poster, while his son hands him a fresh pistol.
Lots of dialogue between mom and son about their mutual worries and hopes and dreams for each other is offset by a visit to the carnival in which the gymnastic dance and impressive splits by a performer in a red leotard is revealed to be Joe--literally or only figuratively alive, I'm unsure. The boy wants to run off with his father and leave momma behind after Joe is seen mounting her with his leotard pulled halfway down his backside. After he dismounts, he shakes a generous supply of gymnast's powder inside his leotard crotch. Joe decides to abandon the boy, too, leaving him with his partner, so that he can now go off and truly be free.
"Freedom" means wearing feathers on one arm, spangles on the other, a pair of sequined bikini briefs, kissing a stuffed bird, and then pulling a pistol from his shorts and blowing a hole through the center of one of his rubbery hands. Oh, did I mention that all of this takes place while he's standing out on the bow of a sailboat?
Queen Lear has the funk of a hippie movie about it. It's a personal vision that plays like a home movie made by a headcase friend back in the 70s. As to what Joe Dallesandro is doing in it, I can only refer you to Bela Lugosi's participation in Glen or Glenda, I Changed My Sex (1953).
I wonder whether this one is OT or not...
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0218537/