By Dennis Hartley
(Originally posted on Digby’s Hullabaloo on June 30, 2018)
If you were to stuff Clint Eastwood’s The Beguiled, Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s The Third Generation, and John Waters’ Cecil B. Demented in a blender, the result would be along the lines of Bruce La Bruce’s “best seen through your fingers” sociopolitical satire.
Truth be told, a quick insert or two of genital surgery footage and hard-core gay porno clips aside (“Not that there is anything wrong with that!” to paraphrase Seinfeld), I was able to get though most of The Misandrists without having to watch through my fingers (I feel it my duty as a film critic to caution sensitive and/or squeamish viewers up front).
La Bruce’s film opens playfully enough (in the year 1999), with two young women amorously frolicking in a field. It’s all fun and games until they stumble upon a grievously wounded anti-corporatist leftist who is fleeing from the law. He begs for help. The young man’s unexpected appearance not only disrupts the couple’s rapturous state of Sapphic bliss but ignites hotly contentious debate over whether they should help him out.
Compassion wins out, and the pair surreptitiously squirrel the young man away in the cellar of their rambling, somewhat gothic girl’s school. This isn’t just any girl’s school; it is the “stronghold” of The Female Liberation Army, lorded over by a Strangelovian headmistress addressed as Big Mother. Big Mother has big plans-namely, to snip the “man” from “mankind” and establish a dominant female world order. She demands her girls stay focused and in peak shape and does not suffer “laggards” gladly (is she strict!).
Big Mother’s Doomsday Machine? A camera, some lights, and some hot girl-on-girl action. If all goes as planned, she and her girls will produce, direct and distribute lesbian porno movies that are so autonomously beautiful and liberating that the world will come to its senses and realize how superfluous men are, after all. But you know what they say about the best-laid plans of mice and radical feminist terrorist cells. Obviously, the potential discovery of the young man convalescing in their midst is a ticking time bomb.
La Bruce’s mélange of retro radical chic, feminist revenge fantasy, broad political satire and in-your-face campiness has flashes of inspiration; however much of it seems ladled on purely for shock value, or as a patch-over for lazy screenwriting. Still, I would not necessarily discourage dedicated fans of outsider cinema, nor open-minded filmgoers seeking out a true alternative to standard summer blockbuster fare from giving it a peek.