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Pierrot Lunaire
directed by Bruce LaBruce
201451m★ 5.3
MusicDrama
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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!”
trailer
cast
Susanne Sachße
Pierrot Lunaire
M
Maria Ivanenko
Paulina Bachmann
L
Luizo Vega
M
Mehdi Berkouki
B
Boris Lisowski
K
Krishna Kumar Krishnan
Bruce LaBruce
details
Director
Bruce LaBruce
Language
EN
