This one falls into that darker corner of gay cinema. There was real potential buried in here, but the execution feels so flat that at points it plays out more like a filmed stage play than an actual movie. It's a dark psychological drama built around a street hustler confessing to a brutal, confusing murder of his own lover. Black and white flashback sequences do a solid job laying out the details of what happened, but the real focus stays on the dialogue and the writing itself. Right at the start, a young hustler has already killed his male lover Claude. Three days go by before he calls the police to turn himself in for the murder. But instead of just reporting it somewhere ordinary, he actually summons the police and the local press directly into a judge's private chambers. Yves has keys to the place, which tracks given what he does for a living, but having the press waiting right outside makes the whole scene look like some elaborate blackmail scheme against the judge. The ...
This documentary shows the everyday experiences of the “muxes,” a group of homosexual, cross-dressing, and transsexual persons, who live their identities through a series of performative acts in the town of Juchitán. In doing so, they transgress the traditional roles and expectations that a patriarchal society has for both their men and women. Furthermore, their actions are presented in the film as everyday acts of defiance towards heteronormative patterns—that is, manners of interpreting the sexed body that have come to be considered acceptable by patriarchal societies. On the sun-baked Isthmus of Tehuantepec in Mexico lies the town of Juchitan, whose population of indigenous Zapotecs have for centuries warded off numerous invasions to preserve their identity. Today, Juchitan has an additional, more notorious, identity, as a "queer paradise" famous for its Muxes, effeminate homosexual men whose socially defined role within the Zapotec culture pre-dates the advent of gay libe...