QUICK’N DIRTY: LIVE FROM TALLINN
Joan Porcel’s film, which he co-wrote with Pere Anton Sastre and his star Lluís Garau, begins with a low angle-shot from underneath the water of a swimming pool, showing a man, his image and identity distorted by the rippling liquid, as he walks along the edge and tosses in packages of meat, as though feeding the submerged person – whose point of view we share – like a dog. This is one of the more surreal instantiations of the film’s title La Carn, or Catalan for “the meat”, in a scenario where men on-screen are often reduced to their meaty makeup and priapic packages.
Performing as a version of himself, Garau too comes with carnal needs while keeping others at a murky distance. The dance show – also called La Carn that he is sporadically touring is significantly a solo act where he makes himself the object of male gazes and desires. Meanwhile, whenever he is back home in Mallorca, Garau is hooked on, obsessed with and frustrated by a webcam-based gay chat site that he has on most of the time, even as he cooks or sleeps. Here men display their own bodies, admire those of others, sometimes converse and sometimes masturbate, in a virtual zone where males come to play and play to come, where the most intimate of encounters unfold at a remove, where contact never involves actual touch, and where the intervening screen itself invites anonymity and masking.
Garau is particularly drawn to an older man who is literally masked in a balaclava, and who claims to own a swimming pool. The man, evidently also living somewhere in Mallorca, engages in all the website’s usual distanced flirtation, and is definitely interested in Garau. The man is happy enough to expose different parts of his body before the camera, but refuses to reveal his face, and so he becomes that obscure object of desire, onto whose blank slate anything can be projected. He might, for all his reserve, be the perfect man of Garau’s dreams, or he might be the person who has been sending Garau anonymous and increasingly aggressive e-mails threatening exposure or worse, He might even be the homophobic killer who has been setting local gay men on fire. In different ways, all these possibilities thrill Garau, as he longs to get a grip on something – anything – real beyond the protective barrier of the screen.
In this, as in films like William Friedkin’s Cruising (1980) and Alain Guiraudie’s Stranger by the Lake (2013), identity is up for grabs in the meat market of desire, where danger is courted, and where self-love and self-annihilation make strange bedfellows. As Garau exploits his website contacts in his art and seeks a stranger not only in real locales but in their simulacra on Googlemaps, he occupies a liminal space where meaty embodiment and vicarious pleasures cohabit. Garau may be a man of the world with his traveling performances, and he may have a comfortable relationship with his own fleshy physicality, but – like a man looking at the world beyond from under water – he remains lost in the hall of mirrors that is his digital cruising ground. For La Carn is a film as much about online alienation as about gay hookups (even the word ‘carn’ in the title is a pun on ‘cam’) – and its terminally plugged-in protagonist is equally uncertain of who he wants or who wants him in this global bazaar of fantasy, narcissism, longing and loneliness.
La Carn just premiered in the Rebels with a Cause section of the 29th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival.
