Dishonored Bodies

Spanish writer/director Juanma Carrillo has worked in both Madrid and Paris as a film-maker. "Dishonored Bodies" is a collection of nine of his short films, delivering a good view of this artist's oeuvre, but unless you're into the surreal, you're probably not going to understand very much of it.

The nine shorts -- some only a few minutes long -- are disparate in their subject matter, but most deal with men in sexualized moments. Number 2 has two men in a small car, one trying to anally penetrate the other. Unsuccessful, they both admit to be straight, with families, and don't actually know what they're attempting to do. It's amusing, in an unstructured way.

The opening is a tedious view of men/women, men/men kissing, or attempting to, or trying to deflect. Presumably, Carrillo is attempting to explore many of the permutations of adult relationships - your guess is as good as mine; few of these films have any kind of a narrative theme. The most promising was the one with two male neighbors bonding on their next-to-each-other balconies, as scaffolding is put up and taken down while fixing the leaking roof. The last short, #9, in a daytime cruising park somewhere, the voyeur with a camera captures various states of looking sexy, being sexy and being rejected. It's shot in black and white; over and above that, it's dull.

The shorts are gorgeously shot and edited. There's little "acting" as such, and few of the men are attractive in the Hollywood sense, but if one is attuned to the kind of film Carillo makes, you'll find it engrossing or, at any rate, potentially interesting. But for most of us, I suspect it will be a chore.

And in keeping with this new "queer" (as opposed to "gay" or "homophile") film-theory, genitalia are kept very much off camera. Most of his characters do not connect, which may be his point, but frankly it bored the bejesus out of me. You might have a better reaction to it.

"Dishonored Bodies"
DVD
Tla Releasing
$24.99
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