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Knife+Heart (Yann Gonzalez, 2018)
🕑 Added 2019-01-06 02:10:16 +0000 UTC
Considerably more structured than You and the Night but no less decadent, Yann Gonzalez's latest ode to being queer, filthy and fabulous is centered around an ultra-low-budget gay porn production house. This allows Gonzalez to exercise his jones for Fassbinderian production design and on-set backbiting, along with the tastefully seedy sensibility he shares with fellow travelers like Bertrand Bonello and, of course, Papa Jacques Nolot, who appears briefly in a cameo. This is a gay cinema of bodies in action, held together with sweat and cum, utterly uninterested in today's fashionable respectability politics.
But to be fair, gays have not had all the fun when it comes to the underbelly of visual culture, and if there's one dominant hetero influence at work in Knife+Heart, it's Brian De Palma. This is a sexualized murder mystery, based in part on who has the power of the gaze, who has been sidelined by desire, and how killing is a perverse sexual substitute. And even as the gravity of life and death are acknowledged, Gonzalez shares with De Palma a taste for the ridiculous, a recognition that movie violence can exorcise psychological demons precisely because it is not real, and the more outlandish the better.
Despite its queer approach to film style, Knife+Heart keeps men and women, not exactly "in their place," but clearly partnered off with one another. The producer-director of the porn films, Anne (Vanessa Paradis), is a lesbian who obsesses over her former girlfriend Loïs (Kate Moran), while the male hook-ups appear to be strictly business, as far as we can tell. By making Anne the central figure in this community of (mostly) men, Knife+Heart places gay femininity at the core of its disquisition on gay male sexuality, and in doing so courts a kind of teasing discomfort.
How did she find her way into gay porn? What's her libidinal investment, apart from the (apparently precarious) financial reward? Where is the lesbian community one might expect Anne to have around her? Are these men invested in her simply as an employer, or does the comradeship run deeper, and if so, why? Gonzalez takes one of the most basic shibboleths of gay life -- we make our own families -- and not only shows its ideological fissures. He turns it into an immediate crisis, since this family is incapable of keeping its members safe from harm, and may in fact result in said harm. Instead of showing the alternate family being made, Knife+Heart shows it under siege, and eventually fighting back.
