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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Sexual Dithyramb of Shocking Yet Probing Value, but Also Humourous, Sexy, and Sensitively Evocative, 17 Oct 2008
This viewer, long immersed in alternative films (and by that use of this label, not referring only to purely porno cinema that too often usurps this rubric), finds so many of the other Amazon users' comments about "Hustler White" truly beside the point. Bruce LaBruce's aesthetic in his films always is high in originality, deeply confrontational to the values of the film industry and to society at large. One either loves it or hates it. This viewer thrives on such films! While not so completely satisfying a work as his "Raspberry Reich", Bruce LaBruce's "Hustler White" is a masterwork of its kind.
What perplexes is how the humanity of LaBruce's films seems so under-appreciated. In "Hustler White", for example, the utter passivity of the young gay hustler who gives himself over to the increasingly obvious murderous intentions of the kinky undertaker, is disturbing; how can any young man have so little concern about maintaining his existence, to live so much in the present, accepting whatever it brings him, that he lets himself, so uncaringly indifferent to his fate, so lacking in any emotions whatever, to approach closer and closer to the ultimate suffocation that kills him? This is existential despair depicted at its most heartbreaking!
Another example is near the very end of the film when the hardened academic, so immune to others' feelings, so pseudo-intellectually presumptuous, so uncaringly arrogant until this point, is on the beach with the body of the beautiful male hustler for whom he has longed (and who for perhaps the first time has awakened love in all of its vulnerability in the scholar) and whom he thinks to be dead (from an accident much earlier in the film). When the lad awakens, the sheer joy of finding his idealised lover to be alive, and the latter's realisation that, for once, a stalker and client truly loves him, leads to a sort of tender dance of acrobatic turns that express genuine joy in, and recognition of, love reciprocated. This scene alone would make this film an essential for anyone who cherishes art that expresses a gay sensibility! The fact that immediately after this a closing scene of utterly perverse, degrading urination-as-sexual-kick follows (which has nothing to do with the hustler and the man who has sought him) makes the impact of what has preceded all the more forceful!
Bruce LaBruce does have an utterly aberrent way of portraying men and human love, lust, and sexuality, in this movie and in others, but his films do stir the viewer to ponder these and other "ultimate concerns", to which his art gives rise, while so paradoxically conveyed with the most sublime, cheekily mischievous playfulness. Bruce LaBruce is far from being some kind of shallow votary of decadence, for all the mordant and weird humour (grim and/or ludicrous) which make his films so enjoyable to experience. What seems to be in his films for mere shock effect, as many viewers experience it, surely Bruce LaBruce intends as a wake-up-call, sexual and otherwise, to examine the human condition anew, physically and in every other way, whether one is a committed and reflective Christian or supposedly hostile to any spirituality, orthodox or otherwise. Just in doing so accounts for the revolutionary label that LaBruce and his commentators so frequently affirm and recognise. As in all "alternative" film, the lack of glossy, high-cost production values simply is irrelevant in assessing the worth of LaBruce's strange and hauntingly evocative productions.
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