canadian actor
portraits and text by FLORENT ROUTOULP
<img class="wp-image-170445 size-medium" src="https://static.purple.fr/2015/10/PGL_031-199×300.jpg" (New Real Films & 1976 Production, 2014) <img class="wp-image-170449 size-medium" title="Graphic cream wool sweater LACOSTE" src="https://static.purple.fr/2015/10/PGL_04-199×300.jpg" (New Real Films & 1976 Production, 2014)
Bruce LaBruce’s movie Gerontophilia is, surprisingly, just that: a young man’s physical love of an elder. Bruce LaBruce is an undisputed member of the Queercore movement — with the likes of Dennis Cooper, Slava Mogutin, Gio Black Peter — and his punk-porn filmography defines the opposition to normal heterosexual society. LaBruce also retracted from the gay and lesbian community, thus creating a politically violent queer artistic movement in its own right. But with Gerontophilia, there’s no zombie (like in Otto; or, Up with Dead People); there’s no prostitute (as played by Tony Ward in Hustler White); there isn’t a single gay skinhead (as in The Raspberry Reich). For this movie, rupture, or maybe a LaBruce inversion, is on display. Gerontophilia is the story of a very disconcerting young man, played by Pier-Gabriel Lajoie, who falls for an elderly man, played by Walter Borden. The film wavers between violence and pessimism, but instead of the typical LaBruce style of showing unsettlingly provocative intergenerational sexuality, he presents 82 minutes of typical American feel-good cinema. But this is the film’s strength — and its universal appeal.
Gerontophilia follows a different course of action and a different model of sexual liberation from his other movies. Borrowing mainstream codes, LaBruce makes atypical LGBT/queer sex look normal. This could be his way of easing the pressure on his radicalism and smoothing the angles of his style in order to actually enter the mainstream. But having heretofore resisted the moral society’s sexual codes, is using the language of his natural enemies the best way to fight them?
Sexuality takes different forms, and circumscribing differences by category or practice only serves to deny sexual freedom. But Gerontophilia does break one sexual taboo: the consent of an elderly person who supposedly should no longer be sexually active. One of the films leitmotifs is the elderly man’s admission: I can sleep with you as long as I want, even if the rest of the world tells us we should not, or that I cannot or must not. This kind of sexual revolt recalls Hal Ashby’s Harold and Maude from 1971, the love of a young man for an elderly woman, which is what makes the film so different and per- haps even more provocative.
[Table of contents]
Night Pictures
by Olivier Zahm and Stéphane Feugère with a portfolio by Christopher Wool
by Christopher Bollen
by Hans-Ulrich Obrist
by Mehdi Belhaj Kacem
by Karley Sciortino
by John Jefferson Selve
by François Simon
by Sven Schumann
by bob Nickas
by Dike Blair
by Donatien Grau
by Caroline Gaimari
by Simon Liberati
by Olivier Zahm
by Sabine Heller
by Sven Schumann
by Sandy Kim
by Camille Bidault Waddington
by Takashi Homma
by Ola Rindal
by Katja Rahlwes
by Drew Jarrett
by Maxime Ballesteros
by Paul Wetherell
by Giasco Bertoli
by Chikashi Suzuki
by Benjamin Alexander Huseby
by Johan Sandberg
by Michel Compte
by Andreas Larsson
by Benoit Peverelli
by Theo Wenner
by Terry Richardson
by Olivier Zahm
by Patrick Mauriès
by Charles-Edmond Henry
by Giasco Bertoli
by Olivier Zahm
by Max Farago