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Pierrot Lunaire (2014)

Name: Pierrot Lunaire
Director: Bruce LaBruce
Genre: Music, Drama
Released: 2014-02-09
Duration: 51 min
Rating: 5.3
Cast: Susanne Sachße, Maria Ivanenko, Paulina Bachmann, Luizo Vega, Mehdi Berkouki

IMDb 5.30h 51mMusic Drama

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Plot Summary

Invited by the conductor Premil Petrovic to stage Arnold Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire, a musical theater work from 1912 based on the poems of Albert Giraud, LaBruce transposed a strange and tragic episode of true crime onto the composition. Complementing the original atonal score is a narrative about a trans man who is outed by his girlfriend’s father and forbidden from seeing the young woman again. Crestfallen, the protagonist decides to prove the fact of his manhood by castrating a taxi driver and then revealing his newly transplanted member to the two of them. This story, which for LaBruce “serves as a kind of allegory for all gender radicals and outcasts driven to extremes by the disapproval and hostility of the dominant order,” is rendered in a visual style that nods to the era of Schoenberg’s melodrama. LaBruce cheekily appropriates the formal vocabulary of silent cinema with black-and-white photography, irises, and intertitles like “A cock, a cock, my kingdom for a cock!”