The read
It runs a compact 51m.
Synopsis
Invited by the conductor Premil Petrovic to stage Arnold Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire, a musical theater work from 1912 based on the poems of Albert Giraud, LaBruce transposed a strange and tragic episode of true crime onto the composition. Complementing the original atonal score is a narrative about a trans man who is outed by his girlfriend’s father and forbidden from seeing the young woman again. Crestfallen, the protagonist decides to prove the fact of his manhood by castrating a taxi driver and then revealing his newly transplanted member to the two of them. This story, which for LaBruce “serves as a kind of allegory for all gender radicals and outcasts driven to extremes by the disapproval and hostility of the dominant order,” is rendered in a visual style that nods to the era of Schoenberg’s melodrama. LaBruce cheekily appropriates the formal vocabulary of silent cinema with black-and-white photography, irises, and intertitles like “A cock, a cock, my kingdom for a cock!”
Ratings
9 audience votes
Key crew
- Bruce LaBruceDirector
- Arnold SchönbergOriginal Music Composer
- Bruce LaBruceWriter
Cast
- Susanne SachßePierrot Lunaire
- Maria IvanenkoCast
- Paulina BachmannCast
- Luizo VegaCast
- Mehdi BerkoukiCast
- Boris LisowskiCast
- Krishna Kumar KrishnanCast
- Bruce LaBruceCast