The story of The Mysterious Gaze of the Flamingo begins when a character readjusts their blindfold. Not their own. Your hand moves with exactness which matches the way you would adjust a collar or remove shoulder lint. Except the blindfold is mandatory.
Except the hands doing the adjusting belong to the people being blindfolded. Chilean director Diego Céspedes builds his debut feature from such small, devastating inversions, each one a quiet thesis on who gets to see and who gets to be seen, and what happens when the powerless start looking back.
Set in a north Chilean mining town in 1982, the film follows a commune of trans women, or travesti as they call themselves, who run a cabaret in the desert. The miners arrive during the evening hours. They watch the shows. They observe the lifeless human forms. And then a plague arrives, or rather, a rumour of one: that prolonged eye contact with these women can infect you, can doom you. The statement functions as a false explanation which attempts to justify male sexual urges that they choose to deny. The film reveals its AIDS parallels through its entire narrative until Céspedes shows them explicitly during the last part of the movie which disrupts the film's understated storytelling method. The reveal which comes later makes the story lose its impact but the story contains both unusual elements and strong elements.
What struck me most, though, and this is probably the economics degree talking, or maybe just the part of my brain that can't stop noticing who carries what, is how precisely Céspedes maps out labour and exchange. The women perform. The miners extract. The two groups work in the desert while one group extracts copper from the ground and the other group extracts money from people who claim to be there for the drinks. "The travesti are like a secret," Flamingo tells her adopted daughter Lidia, "and I don't want to leave this fucked up world a secret."But secrets have value. The women's labour is their visibility, their desirability, and the plague myth is just another form of wage theft, another way to consume what these workers produce while denying them any claim to it.
Flamingo, played with devastating restraint by Matías Catalán, is already sick when we meet her. She navigates through the entire movie by controlling her remaining strength which you can sense through all her decisions about energy distribution. Her ex-lover Yovani arrives with a gun and a demand: take the sickness back, reverse the gaze, undo whatever she did to him. Pedro Muñoz acts out the character who shows both dangerous and pitiful aspects because he seeks forgiveness without needing to face any consequences. The main part of the movie occurred when Flamingo refused to heal him while she maintained that any mutual glance becomes impossible to retrieve.
Not the folklore. Not the surrealism. A woman maintains her decision to refuse forgiveness to the man who has not asked for her forgiveness.
The blindfolds stay in my mind as I think about them. The miners eventually force them on the women, a kind of soft occupation, and the women accept it, subvert it, wear their subjugation like costume. The 4:3 cinematography of Angello Faccini creates a feeling of tightness in every scene because the frames appear both small and without any breath of air. Bodies huddle. Doorways loom. The film uses Western visual elements but presents them in a small space which creates an enclosed atmosphere.
Tamara Cortés, as young Lidia, holds the film together with her watchfulness. She learns about the actual process of watching the women who delivered her into existence. The queer community scenes in recent times show the most genuine found family dynamics which display casual affection between members who protect each other like a group of hens watching over their chick. It earns its tenderness.
The film meanders. The extended duration of Céspedes' work diminishes his main idea because it would have worked better in a seventy-minute structure yet his dialogue scenes preserve a strict tone which stands apart from his more creative sequences.
The surrealistic elements in folklore achieve their best effect through perfect matches which show how the protagonist uses her visual abilities to strike her target while his eyes become illuminated. The story reveals appearance through observation which enables readers to view their physical appearance while they consider their own looks.
I walked out wondering about the men in the audience. The audience consisted of viewers who wanted to watch either a queer movie or a foreign film or something which stood out from typical cinema. Did they feel watched?Did they flinch?The women on screen certainly weren't looking away.
