Here is a beautiful, raw debut from young Chilean director Diego Céspedes, a film that is part queer western, part beguiling fable, with some glorious scenes straight out of a Latin soap opera, magic-realist effects and moments of heartbreakingly tender emotion. It’s set in the early 1980s, in a mining town on the dusty edge of nowhere where a ramshackle establishment, something like a bordello in a spaghetti western, is run by a small LGBTQ+ community. By day, they serve up food to worn-out, dust-covered miners; by night, cabaret is performed in drag.
The club is also raising a child, 11-year-old Lidia (Tamara Cortes), who was abandoned on the doorstep as a baby (possibly by parents who saw how well the club looks after its own). When Lidia is bullied by transphobic local boys, the women of the club come out in force to beat the crap out of the gang. Lidia’s adopted mum is Flamenco (Matías Catalán), a transgender woman in love with a Marlon Brando lookalike miner called Yovani (Pedro Muñoz), a man with an angelic pout and murder in his eyes. They both have a disease that local people are calling “the plague”. Yovani blames Flamenco and shows up with a gun.
The year is 1982, the start of the Aids crisis. The plague serves as an allegorical stand-in for Aids; it has similar symptoms, although it spreads by gazing lovingly into a person’s eyes. There is no cure, “not even in rich countries”. Miners cover their eyes and make the sign of the cross whenever the women of the club walk past them in this barren, spare landscape, which is photographed with desolate beauty by cinematographer Angello Faccini.
What gives the film its distinct flavour is a slightly feverish tone and dream-like logic. In places, it’s hard to see what the magic realism adds, and the script’s ideas about gender and gaze feel underexplored. Perhaps in the end, this sense of unreality opens the door to its characters finding love in this harsh and hopeless place. A touching and moving film.
The Mysterious Gaze of the Flamingo is on Mubi from 15 May.