Bruce LaBruce's The Raspberry Reich: Revolutionary Corn, Revolutionary Flakes - Page 5

LaBruce even holds repugnant views, such as this bizarrely unconvincing rationalization from an interview with Kultureflash:

The misguided notion that homosexuality is forbidden in Middle Eastern and Arab cultures is a really good example of how the west completely misinterprets Muslim attitudes and practices. Only when homosexuality becomes overt or organised is it severely punished.

But although you pick up on LaBruce's commitment to oppositional ideology in The Raspberry Reich, it doesn't kill the movie, as it killed Godard's work after 1968. LaBruce himself says in the Filmmaker interview:

I was starting to get too ideological, and I was trying to make very specific ideological points about sexual representation and the objectification of women, and I realized, as a filmmaker and as an artist--because I had a background as a critic, from film theory--I had to just drop all of that theory and just go more by instinct and not try to figure out where these images or the impetus of my work was coming from, and to just let it come out without thinking about it so much.

Well, in The Raspberry Reich out it comes and no one can stop it. LaBruce has an anarchic, pleasure-seeking instinct that jargon and theories can't hold out against. (Pleasure and dogma occur in almost the reverse proportions from Alfonso Cuarón's punitively moralistic escapade Y tu mamá también.) I'm pretty sensitive to left-wing censoriousness, to revolutionaries' indifference to practical experience and individuality, and I can say unequivocally that it's possible both to laugh like a hyena at the satire in The Raspberry Reich and to get off on the dirty bits, sometimes simultaneously.

With Sachsse's Gudrun LaBruce captures that naked-bulb glare and buzz of personality you used to get in underground movies, but overall The Raspberry Reich doesn't feel druggy or aimless or desperate or even inwardly obsessional. LaBruce leans towards the wordy-critical perspective of Godard (with phrases flashing on, and scrolling across, the screen) but his method plays more like the camp carelessness of John Waters. In the opening, for instance, Gudrun forces Holger to have sex with her in the elevator of their apartment building; an older couple threatens to call the police but once back in their own apartment the infection hits them and they have wild sex on their kitchen table. Later, Holger and Che, who really take to this gay sex thing, are all over each other in public while German matrons, candidly caught on film, glare and mutter. For all his ideological commitment, LaBruce seems to have as much fun stealing footage in public as Mack Sennett and his Keystone jokers did in the 1910s with their totally unambitious comedy shorts.

Article Author: Alan Dale

Alan Dale earned a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Princeton University and a J.D. from Yale Law School. He currently works as a corporate tax attorney in Portland, Oregon.

He is the author of What We Do Best: American Movie Comedies …

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