Berlinale 2024: The Visitor
BERLINALEDuring the Q&A for his latest film, The Visitor, Canadian filmmaker Bruce LaBruce talked about the lasting appeal of stories with strangers invading the private lives of a family, more recently seen in Emerald Fennell’s Saltburn (a film he quite disliked). He cites Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 1968 allegorical classic Teorema as the finest of them all, with Terence Stamp’s Visitor acting as an agent of chaos that liberates a rich family from the bounds and expectations of a patriarchal, heteronormative society.
While LaBruce has often referenced Pasolini’s films, The Visitor is the first time he has remade one of them almost scene by scene. The story is turned queer(er) and more political by the director and co-writers Victor Fraga and Alex Babboni, injecting sharp criticism against the United Kingdom and its anti-immigrant stance. The previously white, clean-cut Visitor is now played by Bishop Black, a black, queer adult film performer, who lands on the shores of the River Thames in a suitcase.
The sight of a black body, agile and fluid, walking stark naked through the streets of London, looking to seduce the local populace is the nightmare of the white upper class – not only of the UK but of white Caucasian countries in general. The moment The Visitor arrives at the home of the main family (composed of The Father, The Mother, The Daughter, The Son, and The Maid), the narrative embraces the pornographic potential of Pasolini’s original. The Visitor turns into a provocative, seductive, and often funny statement against a patriarchal society, occasionally recreating some shots to great effect.
From acts of sodomy with religious figures to incestuous group sex, very little is left to the imagination, and all for the better: it is a rarity to experience queer sex on screen, even more so in such a graphic, explicit way. The scenes with The Daughter (played by trans actor Ray Filar) feel particularly important, and LaBruce gives more love and screentime to a character that was otherwise forgotten during the final sequence of Liberation in Teorema.
Black’s The Visitor calls themselves a “pansexual revolutionary”, and the film The Visitor is Bruce LaBruce’s manifesto: during the sex scenes, humorous quotes too shocking for this review flash on screen with the strength of a thousand suns. Witnessing the family’s sexual liberation, all because of the passion that a black queer immigrant instilled in them, is one of the boldest political statements in a film at this year’s Berlinale. With a low budget that is used truly well, an incredible editing job by Judy Landkammer, and a committed cast that rivals the finest productions of John Waters’ Dreamlanders, The Visitor is among the best films by the Canadian pornographers, and it is one of the finest examples of “porn as art” and “porn as revolution”. This was the first narrative film co-produced by a/Political, a radical British art company, that will hopefully support more inventive and fearless films like this in the future. Few will accept The Visitor’s sexual content, but, as the film says, it can change those with open minds and open legs.