Тирезия (Tiresia)

Christina Dokou: Gendering Globalized Flows in Bertrand Bonello’s Tiresia

Even enthusiastic film critiques couldn’t oversee its “constant balancing between the pathetic and the sublime”. Nevertheless, it can serve as an intriguing study on the potential myth-informed deconstruction of our contemporary cultural conflict-lines in the context of a globalized capitalism that is unsettling and inescapable: immigrants vs. citizens, men vs. women, religion vs. natural ethics, normativity vs. oddity, economic oppression and trafficking vs. multiculturalism and the glocal. The film uses content and form to reveal how the performative gender of “Tiresia” exacerbates the effects of cultural globalization flows and gender violence, serving as an activist case-study. Still, at the same time, it slips through the gender trenches towards alternative peaceful intimations of Europe’s globalization-informed future.

The structure of the film is cleft in two halves, with Tiresia being played in the first part by a female (Clara Choveaux), in the second by a male Brazilian actor (Thiago Telas), and his opponents in each part, the psycho “poet” Terranova and the priest Francois, played by the same French actor (Laurent Lucas). The two halves are one, yet not the same. The setting of the story is similarly split: Terranova’s house, where he imprisons Tiresia, is an ugly, dilapidated, bare cement structure, with a few graceless pictures on the walls (including one with a twisting snake, symbol of divination and transformation) and chipped kitchenware. Terranova lives alone and has no visitors; even his tiny garden, where he keeps a pet hedgehog that is invariably afraid of him, is choked with weeds and walled up in reinforced concrete, suggesting—prophetically?—the walls thrown up by a phobic Europe against immigrant flows.

 

Brazilian transsexual friends, are recalled in her memories as warm, earthy, full of vibrant colors and decorative mementos, the loci of sensuous sexual menages. The contrast, along with the name Terranova, “New Land,” suggests the inhospitable and deceptive nature of the adoptive land where the foreigner is forced, fleeing or lured away from his/her original home by the forces of globalized flows, to become the pet, the exploited worker, the jailed housewife. One must even literally bleed, besides offering up his/her rich and colorful culture and labor figuratively as the new blood that the old and tired Europe needs pumped into its veins. What leads Terranova to kidnap Tiresia specifically, after all, is a Brazilian children’s song he overhears

her sing one night in the Bois the Boulogne, and which he later forces her to sing and translate for him, in a travesty of intercultural exchange. The Boulogne forest, where all the foreign prostitutes work, stands between Paris and the country, allowing them contact yet also demarcating the barrier between the foreigner and the Parisian, the transgressor and the exploiter. It is what Gloria Anzaldua would call a “borderland” or “frontera” zone, a gray no-man’s land of conflict, hard negotiations, but also potentially life-generating cultural miscegenation.

Terranova in his obsession calls transsexuals “roses with thorns,” for two reasons: like cultivated roses, transsexuals are artificial and therefore satisfy his twisted sense of perfectionist aestheticism; alternatively, unlike immigrants, roses have “no past,” which he considers “vulgar.” The rose symbol recalls Dante’s vision of heavenly order in La Divina Commedia, but the Western paradise the sociopath offers is false, dead, and more like Inferno or Purgatorio.

 

As Bonello notes in an interview, “For Terranova, Tiresia represents an idea of perfection. Better than a man, better than a woman. His fascination is intellectual, philosophical and aesthetic” (Rachael Scott). We see him in a museum gazing at the classical statues of Hermaphroditus and the gods: he has less trouble with them as representatives of a past, fixed, and static cultural heritage than with real humans with real bodies, pains, needs. This could be viewed as a wider comment on the uses of myth in contemporary society, not as something dusty to be placed inside a glass case or pedestal and venerated from afar, but as something to be felt and experienced organically, even when it unsettles by revealing dimensions alien to us.

 

Instead, when Tiresia screams in despair to let her go, Terranova leaves the house for days and gets drunk not to hear her; when, at the end, she offers him her love and fidelity, in exchange of a proper home she, like all immigrants, tries to make out of her hardships, he betrays and blinds her, subjecting her to what is, according to the ancient myth’s semantics, “a cultural sublimation of castration” (MacInnes 76).

Terranova is a voyeur, and sexually impotent, “pruned” by his dusty culture like the roses he loves, and therefore the opposite of Teiresias and Tiresia, who’ve had experience of love as both male and female, and whose blindness (or marginality) allow them a deeper understanding into the best and the worst of the human soul. Terranova, like the privileged European he is, thinks of himself as a god, aloof and artistic, needing no one, despising the natural and the frail in the form of “the poor, the huddled” bodies “yearning to be free,” yet washed up by the globalized forces of Ananke, a force stronger than even the gods, at the walls of his house. No wonder he, along with Zeus and Hera in the first version of the Teiresias myth, first kidnap a human to teach them about love, then punish him when they discovers in him “extra” aspects they can’t handle.

Terranova sees the naked truth about Tiresia: that in her “superfluous” bodily signification she is neither an abomination, as the dominant bourgeois culture would label the transsexual, the sex worker, the illegal immigrant, nor the house ornament Terranova fantasizes about, but an autonomous human being with feelings. Nevertheless, he is tragically blinded by his systematic refusal to understand this. He, the dominant element in the gender and globalization game, is blinder than the blind, deafer than the deaf, dimmer than the dim—exactly what Teiresias calls the “clever” Oedipus Tyrannus when the latter mocks him (Sophocles, Oedipus Tyrannus l.371).

It is notable that the girl who rescues him (Tiresia is now male, and played by one) and falls in love with him is mute, serving as his anima now, while her aged father is of foreign descent (probably a gypsy). Again, it is the minority, the marginal and the dispossessed who are the richest in compassion and wisdom, who first ask the stranger his name (so that the audience learns it, acknowledging at last a subjectivity long denied by Terranova) and offer hope of integration in the host culture. As Edward Said has noted, the intellectual gift is sharpened with the experience of exile, or exile is what every intellectual feels, even at home, since their offbeat insightful perspective also damns them as perpetual misfits (47-50). In that sense Tiresia’s spontaneous new gift of prophecy in the film, a magic realist element, can be seen as a metaphor for the experience of foreignness, femininity, and human darkness he carries now.

Terranova’s double in this part is another man made impotent by cultural constraints, father Francois, the local priest, whose name also recalls France, the troublesome host country of Tiresia. He also has a fetish for roses (real ones), and is also a “hypocrite lecteur, mon semblamble, mon frere” (to use T. S. Eliot’s condemnation in The Waste Land, 39), preaching but not believing. In him we see another way in which ancient myth has degenerated in a modern globalized context, that is, in becoming dead letter and rigid dogma instead of a lived, inspirational reality guide. One wonders at this point why Bonello chose the same actor to play both roles: some viewers might think the priest is living a double life as a psycho. However, I believe the intention is rather to show through this visual metaphor the duplicity of the hegemonic host culture, whose institutions of power and control include the church, the art world, and global capital.

Bonello’s aestheticism, in other words, follows the Teiresian gender-bending paradigm in the matter of form as well, blending creatively together the mythic universe with its paradoxes and archetypes, its quest cycles and eternal returns, with the medium of film, whose flowing images counteract the fixity of “museum-oriented” approaches to Europe’s classical past.

много получилось, но это просто шикарный текст, ничего подобного про фильм нигде больше не нашлось. если хоть один человек прочтет хотя бы выделенное (желательно после просмотра фильма), то не зря принес. ну и вообще бонелло стоит смотреть любого, не откладывайте.