Release Date: May 25, 2018
Director: Bruce La Bruce
MPAA Rating: NR
Runtime: 91 Minutes
There are few things more dependable in cinema than Bruce LaBruce’s transgressive sexual politics and his aesthetic fixation with that enticing grey area between independent cinema and hardcore gay pornography. If his latest, The Misandrists, can confirm anything about him as filmmaker, it should cement his reliability as a provocateur whose confrontational, absurdist sensibilities have equally endeared and repulsed him to audiences.
Even as he glibly dresses down the boundaries of “good taste,” as he does here with his lesbian-anarchist take on The Beguiled (which Sofia Coppola would be premiering at Cannes mere months after LaBruce had his way with the premise), one cannot help but respect his political body of work for continually pushing an envelope. In terms of artistry and satirical skill, he commands much less respect with his ideologically messy and visually dull tale of militant-feminist separatists conspiring to overthrow the patriarchy through “male eradication.”
The Misandrists concerns itself with the day-to-day dealings of the Female Liberation Army (FLA), an anarchist, feminine freedom force whose aim at dismantling the patriarchy in Germany through female camaraderie, societal dissonance, sexual sedition and resistance to the male dominant society has made its members outcasts. Assembled under the tutelage of the group’s matriarch, affectionately known as BIG MOTHER (frequent collaborator and absolute delight Susanne Sachsse), eight wayward youths receive lessons in radical feminist discourse while preparing themselves for the forceful woman’s revolution where the German phallocracy will be replaced once and for all.
Throwing a wrench into this separatist stronghold is a page out of Thomas P. Cullinan’s novel in the form of Volker (Til Schindler), a wounded male revolutionary who preaches the ills of a capitalist society even while bleeding out at the stronghold’s entranceway who is taken in and hidden by the individualist Isolde (Kita Updike), who proves the least susceptible to BIG MOTHER’S teachings. The film straddles this as a point of dramatic tension, but the bulk of the film is spent getting absorbed into the absurdity through which LaBruce renders his fictional radical feminists.
A clear ideological extension from The Raspberry Reich (2004), LaBruce’s other film about the juncture between sexual identity and socialist revolutionary politics, The Misandrists aims for a campy tone that carries through much of the film through the “strength” of his cast. An obvious collection of amateur actors, erotic artists and German natives whose second language is English, The Misandrists adheres to the LaBrucian directorial trademark of sub-porn-level acting in terms of emotional investment that is deftly balanced with voracious consumption of scenery.
One cannot blame the actors because their (technically bad) acting contributes to the air of ludicrousness that The Misandrists genuinely thrives on as a comedy of errors, nor can they be blamed because – as a scriptwriter – LaBruce has an issue when it comes to writing dialogue where he cannot distinguish between a character and a vessel to spout the film’s ideologies and talking points ad nauseum.
What drags The Misandrists away from being an enjoyably inane romp through radical feminist rhetoric is his script’s tendency to pile on the politics with little effort to integrate them naturally into the story. For the majority of the film, we are stuck in stasis in this compound listening to these characters poorly recite their ideologies and hit the necessary talking points like he is lecturing us with the same ideas he is attempting to satirize and make enjoyably palatable.
Speaking of, the FLA’s ultimate plan to pivot Germany away from a patriarchal society is by making political lesbian pornography to inspire the masses to overthrow their male oppressors. Absurd, yes, but this narrative idea is once again LaBruce rehashing his previously filmed ideas and repackaging them with a new ideology underpinning the intentions. His previous films – such as Raspberry Reich and Otto; or, Up with Dead People (2008) – paid lip service to the idea that pornographic cinema is indeed a political weapon, and by this point in his career, it seems more like a self-serving compliment than a cogent thesis any longer.
Even his initial interest in spoofing The Beguiled seems to wane by the end of the film and only really leads to an unnecessary excuse to inflict graphic sexual reassignment surgery footage on his captive audience. Narratively his film comes apart through his divested interest in follow-through for any of his ideas, and unlike his previous films, his radical visual language is notably absent from The Misandrists.
All this and a muddied satirical bend where his humor isn’t barbed or campy enough to really stick a flag in, and you’ve got a lackluster effort, which will assuredly enjoy cult status soon enough. Deciphering the director’s intent is frustrating at times, but I gathered his thesis for his satire was to show how the Women’s Revolution is too preoccupied with itself to realize it is inadvertently sabotaging the greater People’s Revolution in the form of the radical Volkner and his forced “conversion” to their ways?
Perhaps I’m too ignorant in terms of feminist and leftist discourse to suss out his targets, but what I do know is that he has a field day trying and failing to make these things digestible. At the very least, LaBruce and The Misandrists offers a fantastic basis for a feminist-film-theory paper that I would enjoy reading much more than I would ever want to watch The Misandrists again.
