Sexual desire becomes both contagion and curse in Diego Céspedes’s haunting debut, winner of Un Certain Regard and the Queer Palme at Cannes.
Set in a remote Chilean mining town during the early 1980s, The Mysterious Gaze of the Flamingo unfolds against the creeping panic of a mysterious “plague” spreading among local men. As with Julia Ducournau’s allegorical Alpha, the writer-director doesn’t name the infection, but he leaves little doubt that the spectre spooking the desert is the Aids crisis, albeit refracted through crass jokes, superstition and queer folklore.
The town’s preferred scapegoats are a household of transgender women living on its fringes, led by Paula Dinamarca’s formidable Boa and the charismatic Flamingo (Matías Catalán), performers who are fetishised by the miners at night and reviled by them after dawn.
What makes Céspedes’s film striking is not its allegory but its atmosphere and child-centric perspective. Shot in a dusty, claustrophobic 4:3 frame, the film turns the Atacama into a dreamscape where garish nail polish, cowboy hats and drag shows coexist like relics from a dreamily half-remembered past.
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The visual language borrows lightly from the western – forbidding horizons, sneering vengeance, Morricone echoes in Florencia Di Concilio’s score and Angello Faccini’s framing – but the film ultimately resists genre, drifting instead into something closer to mythology.
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At the heart of the film is 11-year-old Lidia, raised within this fiercely loving queer household. Through her eyes, Céspedes captures the tenderness and volatility of a family under siege. One scene, in which Lidia’s many mommas confront her bullies, is every put-upon kid’s fantasy.
The miners’ paranoia is inseparable from their erotic urges; lust mutates into violence with terrifying speed, particularly in Flamingo’s tragic relationship with a local man unable to reconcile longing with shame. It’s dangerous out there. Even the gun hidden in the kitchen drawer can’t always shield them from infected men lashing out. But they fight their way, against all odds, towards happiness.
On Mubi from Friday, May 15th
