If you ever find yourself suffering through a dinner party with some amateur film aficionado – probably wearing tortoiseshell glasses and an air of private education – who is complaining about how ‘no one makes transgressive films anymore,’ you can shut them up by asking if they’ve seen Bruce LaBruce’s The Visitor.
Known for provocative filmmaking that treads the line between pornography and arthouse cinema, the 61-year-old Canadian director has recently unveiled his most shocking offering yet.
Released late last year but recently making the rounds among cinephiles, The Visitor is about a Black refugee who washes up on the shore of the River Thames and soon begins cohabitating with an upper-class white family.
While it offers a scathing dissection of regressive immigration policies in the UK, The Visitor isn’t memorable for its politics but rather the high percentage of scenes that feature actors having real, unsimulated sex.
In fact, the film had a special premiere screening in London recently that culminated in 700 attendees participating in a sex party in a basement.
The project is in conversation with Italian filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini’s sexually provocative 1968 film Teorema. However, LaBruce’s interpretation takes things to a new level mostly via the character of the unnamed naked man (the titular visitor) played by performance artist Bishop Black.
Black’s character ultimately seduces each member of the family he’s staying with, sometimes in one-on-one interactions, other times in incestual threesomes and group sex.
Essentially every member of the cast – consisting of the Father (Macklin Kowal), the Mother (Amy Kingsmill), the Son (Kurtis Lincoln), the Daughter (Ray Filar) and the Maid (Luca Federici) – has sex on screen at some point in the movie, with a Christ-shaped dildo memorably making more than one appearance.
The rise of intimacy coordinators in film and TV
As defined by the Screen Actors Guild – American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA), an Intimacy Coordinator is ‘an advocate, a liaison between actors and production…in regard to nudity and simulated sex and other intimate and hyper-exposed scenes.’
More than anything, the role of an intimacy coordinator is to protect actors and crew members from feeling uncomfortable, endangered, and exploited – something that has been all too common in the history of show business.
In the wake of the #MeToo movement, intimacy coordinators have become an increasingly common part of making films like The Visitor or, more often, films that feature simulated sex or moments of physical intimacy.
In fact, there are plenty of sacrosanct elements to the film, which is to be expected given that it opens with the words JOIN THE NEW WORLD SEXUAL ORDER playing across the screen, flanked by two long red banners depicting Jesus on the cross with his torso blending into the image of a hyperrealistic phallus.
Online users have been as scandalised by the film as you might guess, with Reddit user Odd-Collection-2575 writing: ‘Who thinks of this kinda stuff?’
Meanwhile otherdog25 posted: ‘The stuff that goes on in this movie is absolutely unspeakable.’
BunyipPouch added: ‘No one knows what it means, but it’s provocative, it gets the people goin’.’
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As for LaBruce’s creative motivation, the artist genuinely believes sex is a radical tool of transformation. He pointed out in an interview with Document Journal that his art is about: ‘How violence is much more acceptable in the media or pop culture than explicit sex. Ten or 15 years ago, you’d rarely see someone getting murdered on the news. Now, we see it not just on the news, but on Instagram.’
The ending of the film – which we won’t spoil for you here – is, in LaBruce’s own words in an interview with Vulture, a tribute to the ideas of French philosopher and poet Jean Genet.
‘He would find a revolution going on in the world, whether it be the Palestinians or the Black Panthers, and go and support it, but the minute it showed any sign of being co-opted or institutionalized, he would not only abandon it, but turn against it,’ LaBruce said. ‘Once you unleash that, then you just go on to the next revolution somewhere. So, in that way, revolution is perpetual.’
Is real sex on screen the future of revolutionary cinema, or just another shocking gimmick to earn the fleeting attention of desensitised audiences?
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