Riding the Reich

The Raspberry Reich is my first Bruce LaBruce film. LaBruce takes a flimsy story about extreme-left terrorists and adds hardcore porn and historical propaganda. He covers a whole wall with a black & white image of Che Guevara, for example, and gets a young man of ambiguous ethnic background to lean against it and masturbate; or he films two men kissing half-naked in a busy German thoroughfare, catching the insults and shocked looks of unsuspecting passerbys. It's an hour & a half of bad dialogue, slogans left, right & centre ("The Homosexual Intifada", "Revolution is My Boyfriend"), and plenty of situations where the characters put to good use their experience in the gay porn industry.

We watched the softporn version so, while a terrorist gave the rich capitalist kid a blow job, a photo of Tony Blair appeared above the offending genitalia with the slogan "Bliar"; or, as the female leader of the terrorist group rode her boyfriend - "like a horny pony" - one of many George Bush's quotes scrolled over the exposed bits. I wanted to be annoyed but I couldn't get away from its juvenile humour.

Andy Warhol and John Water's influences are there, and Stereo Total's latest album has one song inspired by it, which is why I'm undecided as to the film's merits. On the one hand, it's tame (as tame can be when it comes to porn) and almost sentimental. But it's also playful when it comes to "queer politics", and genuinely funny at times. Plus, it's pornographic, which I should find bad, right? I wish I was able to talk more about it, but I feel like I don't know enough about the history of queer cinema to truly make sense of it. According to LaBruce, Germans are so blasé about porn that many celebrities dabble with it without the press getting hysterical. By portraying porn as a side-effect of a political comedy, and by filming it in a progressive society like Germany, he's dispelling porn of its "scary" status and making it seem like a genuine source of humour. It's not anything new to the porn world (as many film titles can attest - e.g. "Forest Hump", "Tranny and Susannah"), but it's thought-provoking when you think of its implications (and applications) to mainstream cinema.