Those who have been paying attention to the latest editions of the Bucharest International Experimental Film Festival (BIEFF) have certainly taken note of Yann Gonzales and Bertrand Mandico. The two have been fixtures of the festival circuit for the past decade, and the fact that they’ve recently been recognized by the Cannes Film Festival and by Cahiers du Cinéma, two of the bedrocks of a cinema industry that is constantly and obsessively searching for new enfants terribles, has certainly placed them in a somewhat comfier, warmer spot within its milieu. Warm, yet not hot. Certainly not the right temperature that would make their latest films, Les garçons sauvages (Mandico) and Knife + Heart (Un couteau dans le coeur, Gonzalez), suitable for an opening or closing gala screening at BIEFF. To the festival’s credit, the films can easily be accused of being ascetic, the products of a hardcore cinephilia that wrangles with a playful queer sensibility, which is something that is much easier to pull off in a short film than a feature.

Another such industry that was vying for enfants terribles was the seventies gay porn scene. Enfants terribles that would make films for thirsty adults, a cinema without masterpieces (since it is not the directors who transform a given work in a masterpiece, but rather, that role belongs to the audience) which has but a few followers nowadays, mostly eccentric academics and nostalgics, since this type of film, along with propaganda, is one of the most ephemeral. And this is precisely one of the fascinating paradoxes of pornography from that era, especially the homosexual one – it functioned in accordance with the rules of underground cinema, of certain sects and codes, but was constructed while keeping a short commercial lifespan in mind, which most certainly was already dated in the eighties once the HIV crisis began. Pre-1981 (the year of the first confirmed case of HIV) gay porn films leave a bitter taste behind because everyone knows exactly what followed.

Gonzales sets the plot of Knife + Heart in 1979. It’s doubtlessly a strategic choice since the plot itself could have been set anytime during the seventies. Anne Parèze (Vanessa Paradis), who produces and directs porn movies, is facing the fact that her collaborators are killed off, one-by-one, by an unknown assassin, who is seemingly motivated by a radically homophobic credo. He’s a Freddy Krueger in a more generic outfit, dressed in black leather and donning a mask, dancing the fine line between the gay motorcyclists’ subculture and serial killers. What better backdrop for a giallo movie than the sticky and decadent gay community post-Stonewall, yet pre-HIV? Not just because the clubbing scenes, the occasional drug usage, BDSM practices and so on, are an easy backdrop for murders, but also because (and a fact that, as a connoisseur of queer culture, Gonzales would know) the paranoia of the gay community didn’t simply vanish after the emancipation movement. The horrible spate of hate murders in New York (with film critic Addison Verrill ranking amongst those killed) was, at the time, just the extreme endpoint of a systemic discrimination that kept gay men off the streets during daytime. Derelict buildings, basements, cruising parks, trucks and other such spaces were the loci of exhilarating promiscuity which turned every tryst into an adventure, one that was not lacking major risks. Even more so that, reductively speaking, the plot of Knife + Heart is constructed around the consequences that derive from sexual exposure, which is set at the end of a decade (era, even) in which homosexual intercourse seemed to be exactly what it is, which is lacking repercussion. It’s easy to deduce that it’s a parallel drawn to the tragedy of the mass HIV deaths (but also, and especially, of the systemic homophobia that facilitated it). The level-headedness with which Parèze overcomes these crimes and keeps on working, while also facing the pain of breaking up from Loïs (Kate Moran), an editor working for her production company, on the one hand, and while constantly keeping an always-full liquor flask closeby, her attitude reminds of the ways in which the New Queer Cinema portrayed the pre-81 years: fabulous, drenched in sweat and energy, but also overwhelmingly individualistic.

As I was saying, Gonzales is a connoisseur of queer culture, but also of cinema itself, or, in the very least, of the history of ideas surrounding cinema. This allows him to decorate his film with various samples of queer culture – nightlife, a passing mention about a sex reassignment surgery in Morroco, a recital of a poem by Federico Garcia Lorca, the mise-en-scene of Parèze’s films which is heavily rooted in the stereotypes of the gay porno genre (country boys, biblical and occult imagery, and so on) – alongside various cinephile references, ranging from lightweight (such as a poster of Bresson’s Quatre nuits d’un rêveur on one of the walls) to heavyweight. The latter kinds are absolutely delicious – such as a cross-cut between the scene of the first murder with that of the process of editing a film in which the victim had recently acted, the knife cuts acting as the equivalent of the edit cuts. Another such scene has Parèze enthusiastically speaking about her idea to film “people from the streets [who] will bring out films to life!”, while another criticizes the director after she begins to reenact the crimes in her films: “she’s playing with real-life”.

All the above gives a pretty clear picture of Parèze; she’s a woman of steel, a decadent entrepreneur who is willing to go to the ends of the world. The premise itself sounds jarring – a lesbian gay porn producer. It doesn’t matter who dies, who breaks up with whom, whether or not her own life can go further on: the porno films keep on rolling. And on the topic of her porn flicks, they’re not as much hardcore as they’re emphatic, suggestive yet obscene, abundant in artifice. Gonzales found a way to eulogize porn productions in a way that allowed his own film to enter the festival circuit without any kinds of restrictions – there isn’t even a glimpse of frontal nudity in the film inserts, which resemble a more shameless version of the early homoerotic film production of the fifties. And the tropes of porno film are extended to the entirety of the narration, wherein the characters which declare to be heterosexual can only last for so long.

The patterns onto which the film functions have nothing to do with the minute construction of its script; this would have been the most unseemly mistake that Gonzales could have made. Knife + Heart isn’t milk and honey. It’s giallo and porno, over the top and ahead, a heavy dose of poppers for the nostalgic: it dazzles, it overcomes the senses, it accelerates until it takes the breath out of you. It amuses, it amazes, it disconnects.

The film is available in the MUBI library.

Călin Boto

Film critic and journalist. He is an editor at AARC and writes the ”Screens” features for Art Magazine. He collaborates with many publications and film festivals as a freelancer and he is strangely attached to John Ford's movies.