For decades, filmmakers, critics, and scholars alike have actively grappled with the question of the “gaze” in cinema. Laura Mulvey’s seminal 1975 coinage, the cinematic “male gaze,” — itself indebted to Black scholars like Franz Fanon and W.E.B DuBois as well as other Second Wave feminists like Betty Friedan and even Andrea Dworkin outside the movies — eventually blossomed into debates around the “queer gaze” or what Jack Halberstam called the “transgender gaze” in the late ‘90s and early 2000s. Historically, viewers seeking the “oppositional gaze” — bell hooks’ 1980 coinage for intersectional, nonnormative viewership — have had to struggle against the very framework of cinema’s seductive visual language. It’s something the cinema of women filmmakers like, to choose just a recent example in a long tradition, Coralie Fargeat work to correct.
On screen, meanwhile, the direct act of a character’s looking has always been central and loaded with profound anxiety, from the sliced eye of Un Chien Andalou (1929) to the slicing eye-camera of Peeping Tom (1960). For queer, and particularly genderqueer, characters, this anxiety only compounds as questions of passing for cis (literally) enter the picture, with the more fluid queer gaze often subordinated to the hegemonic, often violently enforced conceptions of gender conformity in the world around them.
The Mysterious Gaze of the Flamingo, Chilean newcomer Diego Céspedes’ debut feature and Chile’s submission for this year’s Best International Film at the Academy Awards, takes the question of queer looking as its central allegorical focus. It delivers an ethereal, magic realist fairytale that plays with the power of the queer gaze on several levels. While the film may ultimately err on the side of unfortunate literality (as my opening a review of a film with the word “gaze” in its title with meditations on cinematic gazing might suggest), this coming-of-age neo-Western still packs a punch, buoyed by its strong ensemble cast and commitment to a light, playful queer utopianism.
When we begin, it’s 1982 in the dusty Chilean mountains. A plague has struck a lonely mining town. The local commune of “travesti” (a period-appropriate Spanish catchall that here seems to encompass both trans women and drag queens, though no other label is ever used) who run the local saloon are blamed. All named for animals by their matriarch, Mama Boa (Paula Dinamarca), this garrulous found family continues to hold their own despite the cloud of superstitious hostility that’s settled around their home and the illness that afflicts them as well as the miners. Flamingo (Matías Catalán), the star of Mama Boa’s variety shows and pageants, finds herself at the heart of the town’s ire. Her titular openly eroticized gaze is said to be the source of the plague, a power/curse soon attributed to her sisters as well. Sick when the film opens, Flamingo is the subject of every character’s scrutiny, monitored for signs of decline by her family and villainy by everyone else. When a former lover, Yovani (an engagingly smarmy Pedro Muñoz) arrives at their talent show with a gun, commanding her to heal his sickened body, she weaponizes her problematized gaze against him, staring into his eyes and promising that nothing can cure what he’s been given; no shared look can ever be taken back.
These exchanged glances are the film’s most interesting intervention, as each woman plays with the power that her looking holds over the ostensibly heterosexual men of this small town. In another early sequence, after a band of young boys teases the group’s adopted foundling daughter, 11-year-old Lidia (Tamara Cortes, whose own commanding eyes hold the film together), the women ambush them, peeling one’s eyelids back and whispering, “¡Peste!”–– “Plague!” Men avoid their eyes with an almost religious fervor; they laugh in response. As transfemmes, these characters are unrelentingly sexualized and exoticized by other characters from the film’s outset, a familiar subject position Céspedes plays like a two-step, a look leveled, but boldly returned, his camera also staunchly refusing to succumb to the easy erotics of the male gaze on feminine characters’ bodies, allowing them to control each act of spectatorship. One character imagines Flamingo’s pestilent eye contact as a sort of ejaculatory laserbeam, holding her victims in thrall as white liquid fills their corneas and dooms them to a painful death. Another character, Lioness (Bruna Ramírez), laughingly describes the sickening look as a sort of superpower, given to these girls after she prayed for protection in the wake of a transphobic attack that left her permanently disfigured, a kind of double-edged sword of vengeance.
“The travesti are like a secret,” Flamingo tells Lidia as her condition worsens, “and I don’t want to leave this fucked up world a secret.” The queer gaze here, then, explodes that secrecy and shame, becomes weaponized, made literally visible in its interchange with men who would prefer to never be caught in the act of looking.
Of course, the temporal setting as well as the characteristics of the incurable illness itself make it completely clear from the outset that this film is an allegory for AIDS and the demonization that accompanied its spread. So it comes as a rather significant letdown when one character explicitly lays this fact out for young Lidia near the conclusion, describing the parable of the gaze as an “excuse” made by “cowards” who won’t face up to their own desires. The fear of seeing eye-to-eye that motivates the film’s actions is such an effective indictment of internalized homophobia and its devastating consequences that the “revelation” takes much of the wind out of the movie’s sails.
But, for a particular kind of viewer, Céspedes’ sweetly optimistic script will likely overcome some of that disappointment with its third-act turn, the introduction of a love story that hinges on a literal unveiling (blindfolds become a central motif) and the exchange of honestly loving looks. If this sounds trite, for some, it likely will be. But the ensemble cast brings a naturalism and low-key timbre to the proceedings that belies (most) of the potential clichés at hand. That, and the film’s wry affection for the bloody revenge tradition of the Westerns it draws on for its imagery and tone in equal measure with the magic realist works of Gabriel García Márquez or Isabel Allende. There are no purely happy endings here — the story hinges on mass queer tragedy, after all — but this melding of trans self-fabulation makes for a surprisingly optimistic watch.
The Mysterious Gaze of the Flamingo is Chile’s official Oscars submission and has received a limited theatrical release in the U.S. Check to see if it’s playing in your city or rent to stream via Letterboxd’s Video Store.
