The Misandrists
THE MISANDRISTS, satire, not rated, Jean Cocteau Cinema, 3 chiles
Once there were many midnight movies. They bubbled up from the underground, assured and angry, weird and untamed, offering alternative viewpoints that found whole communities who responded to them. Now there are fewer such films; they often trickle through small distribution and settle in some obscure dustbin on Amazon Prime.
The latest movie by Canadian filmmaker Bruce LaBruce — a star of contemporary queer cinema — fits the midnight movie mold. In the #MeToo era of renewed visibility for feminist concerns, LaBruce passes feminism by and heads straight to misandry — the outright hatred of men — in his proudly campy satire about an all-female school designed to eradicate masculinity. The story is ridiculous; the acting is stilted. It’s odd and imperfect, and that’s the point.
Volker (Til Schindler) is a soldier fighting capitalism. He’s wounded in an attack on the stock exchange and finds his way to the school. Men are forbidden, so he is hidden away by a student named Isolde (Kita Updike), and the two develop feelings for one another. It’s only a matter of time before the school’s strict headmistress (Susanne Sachsse) finds out; secrets are spilled, and the school’s big plot is hatched. Along the way, we slyly explore what it means to be a woman, and what it means to be an ally.
As storytelling goes, the plot lazily winds its way around the ensemble cast, stopping where it pleases to linger on a particularly delectable point or image. Viewers can still get a charge from watching a director who prizes visual stylization above narration, and LaBruce loves holding these scenes for several minutes longer than most would. He’ll indulge in showing a pillow fight among the women at the school, if only to savor the vibrant colors and the snow-globe-like tableaux of feathers falling in slow motion.
If such a scene seems aimed at male fantasies, that’s because it is part of the director’s master plan. The weapon in the women’s fight against men is pornography, and all of the sex they engage in with one another builds to the filming of an epic skin f lick. To ask how, exactly, this would take down the patriarchy is to miss the point. The audience of the film isn’t the hypothetical male population of this world; it’s you. While keeping affairs mostly in the NC-17 zone and operating with the twin goals of titillation and celebration, LaBruce throws female bodies together; stirs in surreal, symbolic touches; and even works in footage of cis-male homosexual pornography (including some acts that may be intense for some viewers).
We’re in a highly politicized era, yet what counts as political filmmaking often plays safely within the rules of the system that it is ostensibly trying to challenge. Think about something like that film, which earned more than $100 million and won awards, criticizes capitalism yet also follows conventional storytelling norms. It’s increasingly rare to find movies that are subversive in the sense that they toss out all political and artistic rules and show you a new lens on life. By doing so, they offer a different way to live. — Robert Ker