J Paul Johnson
A subversive and occasionally surrealist neo-Western from first-time feature filmmaker Diego Céspedes, The Mysterious Gaze of the Flamingo reimagines the early AIDS era through a uniquely queer, Chilean lens. It debuts theatrically in North America this week, having won the Un Certain Regard Award at Cannes earlier this year. Exploiting imagery and its aural soundscape from sources as diverse as John Ford, Nicholas Ray, Sergio Leone, Ennio Morricone, and Pedro Almodóvar, Céspedes’ vibrant, innovative debut film tells a coming-of-age story of a young girl whose quest to find her own identity can be earned through a violent revenge wrought on her oppressors—or through an embrace of the communal love her family has embraced.
The Mysterious Gaze of the Flamingo‘s narrative is set in a remote Chilean mining town in 1982, where a young girl, eleven-year-old Lidia (Tamara Cortes), lives with a loving queer household of drag performers and trans women in the middle of the harsh, unforgiving desert. There’s a cantina/cabaret, where Lidia’s extended family performs, entertaining the local men. The locals are both besotten with and repulsed by the queers, led by Lidia’s adopted mother, Flamingo (Matías Catalán), and grandmother, Mama Boa (Paula Dinamarca). Life there is rife with tension between the two groups, full of taunting and bullying, but Lidia’s extended family is undaunted.
The most pressing concern is Flamingo’s sickness, a mysterious illness that begins with a cough that turns consumptive and is followed by debilitating lesions that spread across the body. Céspedes dreams up a stunning conceit for AIDS here, as the disease is rumored to spread through the gaze between men when one falls in love with another. As it did in its historical actuality decades ago, the disease—or more accurately, the rumors surrounding it—sow a hysteria that targets the queer community as super-spreaders. Lidia’s family and friends, those she loves dearest, are now the target of suspicion and violence.
This notion of the male gaze being itself the vehicle of contagion works both literally, to achieve the above ends, and metaphorically, reminding audiences subtly of the problematic notion of the gaze in cinema and even alluding to classical mythology, where to gaze is to suffer a horrendous fate. Yet even as Lidia is witness to the spread of the plague, The Mysterious Gaze of the Flamingo depicts the true loving gaze—say, between Lidia and her loving mother Flamingo or her grandmother and her suitor (Luis Dubó), even between herself and her young friend Julio—as a beautiful thing. Lidia’s is a coming of an age at which she can love and see love.
What else works equally stupendously in The Mysterious Gaze of the Flamingo is Céspedes’ brilliant visual design, highlighting the brilliant Kodachrome skies and dusty olive deserts of the exteriors (several shots echo The Searchers directly) with close-ups echoing Leone’s dirty, grimy Spaghetti Westerns. Saturated in brilliant detail, even the interiors are stunningly lit and full of chiaroscuro patterns of shadow and brightness. All of these are choreographed and stagged with the deliberation of a master melodramatist—think, for instance, of Joan Crawford descending a staircase in Ray’s Johnny Guitar, and you’ll have a sense of the film’s visual allusions.
As the plague spreads to victims both inside and outside Lidia’s extended family, she and her loved ones become even more viciously the targets of suspicion and violence. There are several scenes that imagine, through Lidia’s eyes, a deliciously violent revenge upon those who oppress. These are deserved and delightful, but the film’s foray into narrative surrealism causes it to lose some of its verve in its second half. As good as the scenes are, they simply mean little, and what actually happens as Lidia seeks her revenge is subordinated to a romance between Mama Boa and her suitor that, while depicting a healthy loving relationship, seems far less urgent and is certainly less dramatic. Perhaps Céspedes is toying a bit with audience expectation and genre tropes in foregrounding a quiet mature love drama over some violent gunplay, but if so that doesn’t necessarily make the film more interesting.
Even despite the film’s lack of narrative urgency in its second half, The Mysterious Gaze of the Flamingo makes for a creative, quirky, and decidedly queer take on the Western mythos, remaking its imagery in an early AIDS-era setting where a community of trans women and queer performers love and protect each other. Intimate, poetic, and innovative, Céspedes’ debut film eschews the genre’s violence and subverts its revenge for something more profound and important: love.
