‘The mysterious look of flamenco’: a ‘queer’ western about love within the open | Cinema: premieres and evaluations | EUROtoday

The mysterious household of flamenco takes place within the Atacama Desert, in northern Chile, probably the most arid and exquisite landscapes on the planet. There, in essentially the most distant margins of the American nation, solely miners and a group of transvestites and trans ladies who name themselves unique animals reside; therefore, the flamenco of the title.

This atypical household queer She runs a cantina and in the midst of nowhere they take out their feathers, wearing lamé and sequins to carry out for males whereas the illness corners them. It is the early eighties, the last decade following Pinochet’s navy coup, and within the mining city there’s a rumor a few plague that’s unfold by the provocative gaze of the members of the cantina clan. Segregated from a society that expels them, their sentence has change into a weapon of protection.

Diego Céspedes’ debut characteristic (awarded within the Un Certain Regard part on the final Cannes) mixes components of melodrama, naughty comedy and, above all, Western to construct a metaphorical area crossed by loneliness, violence, the weather of the desert and, above all, love. This dreamscape is typically complicated and, like within the desert itself, it’s straightforward to get misplaced; however its visible magnificence and its latent emotion permit us to advance by it.

There is one thing highly effective on this household queer and the adopted daughter of one in every of them, the attractive Flamenco, performer of Rocío Jurado marked by tragedy. Céspedes’ digital camera oscillates between the infinite horizon of the Atacama and its vivid colours (with specific quotes to the ritual of spaghetti western) and the closed area of the cantina, from whose darkness and objects emerge particulars that at occasions recall the collection of pictures of New York within the eighties by Nan Goldin and her The Ballad of Sexual Dependency. Although maybe the whole lot responds to these difficult and fanciful passages, filled with poor loopy and music, by the Chilean poet and artist Pedro Lemebel within the tales of Crazy need: chronicles of sidario.

The duel between exterior and inside, between the impolite males of the mine and their unspeakable wishes, is narrated from the widespread thread of Flamenco’s adopted daughter, a grip within the type of an initiation movie. The child is the devoted witness and its proud gaze infects the pictures of a debut movie that, above all, speaks of a legacy of life.