After a softer-than-expected box office weekend for big-budget franchise extenders The Garfield Movie and Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, my podcast playlist was flooded with mournful reports that movie theaters are dying and there’s nothing we can do to save them. Spending a couple of days listening to these endless eulogies around the house had me grieving the loss of the only social & artistic outlet I can routinely afford, so I decided to say goodbye to my old friend by going to The Movies one final time. At my neighborhood cinema that night, I was surprised to find that The Movies are still very much alive. The Broad was playing three all-time classics on three separate screens—Tongues Untied, A Woman Under the Influence, and Pee-wee’s Big Adventure—while also hosting a pop-up sushi restaurant and a weekly pinball club. Meanwhile, I and a few dozen other movie nerds showed up to watch a documentary about a queer Russian street performer who weaponizes drag as high-fashion political activism under the constant threat of arrest. Despite reports to the contrary, I think we’re going to be alright.
Queendom & Tongues Untied played as a double bill in New Orleans Film Society’s inaugural LGBTQ+ Film Showcase (with the other half of the program filled out by The Watermelon Woman & Desire Lines). It was a great pairing not only because of their shared themes of confrontational queer activism in the face of fascist governments, but also because of their low-budget D.I.Y. production values. While Marlon Riggs made Tongues Untied with contemporary video-art equipment, a significant portion of Queendom was filmed on its modern equivalent: smartphones. The documentary is a portrait of nonbinary Russian drag queen Gena Marvin, roughly in the stretch of time between Moscow street protests over the arrest of Alexei Navalny and Moscow street protests over the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Marvin was a silent participant in both spontaneous rallies, appearing in genderfucked space-alien drag to both highlight the political topic at hand and to defy the Russian state’s hostility toward any public queer life. For her participation in the Navalny protests, she was expelled from beauty school. For her participation in the Russo-Ukrainian War protests, She was arrested off the street. We were told in the pre-film intro that the documentary’s cinematographer had to wear roller-skates for most of the shoot so they wouldn’t also get arrested and lose that day’s footage, but there would’ve been surviving documentation of Marvin’s protests regardless, given that any time she steps out of the house in her fetishistic high heels, she’s constantly recorded by gawking smartphones (and threatened with vigilante beatings for her supposed transgressions against decency).
Outside those protests, most of Marvin’s activism is in her refusal to dampen her visibly queer characteristics while existing in public. If anything, she intentionally amplifies her gender nonconformity both for aesthetic beauty and for easy visual provocation – maintaining an entirely bald, eyebrowless head while modeling stripper boots and ripped lingerie, even when grocery shopping. Her photoshoots documenting her various “costumes” are all fashion magazine editorials done on spec, primarily posted on Instagram when they should be in legitimate publication. In the film’s most satisfying sequence, we’re treated to a montage of Marvin’s Insta stories, getting a taste of both how great her artistry is and just how much of it is confined to a phone screen. Meanwhile, in her rural hometown of Magadan, her loving but queerphobic grandparents push her to drop the act, butch up, and get a formal education (or at least demand to be paid for her labor, since publications like Vogue Russia will only “compensate” her with exposure). Much of the film follows Marvin’s frustrated attempts to get her grandfather to not just love her but accept her on her own terms. He obviously wants the best for his grandchild, but he’s also a brutish old-schooler who will say unforgivably cruel things to her in the heat an argument in a way that betrays just how bigoted he is at heart, with no sign of softening. As a result, just as much of the runtime is spent with Marvin rolling her eyes on speakerphone with her semi-estranged grandfather grumbling on the other end as it is spent inside that phone, submerged in her otherworldly artistry.
Gena Marvin’s art is a gorgeous, emotional fuck-you to the state that would rather she be dead than click-clacking down a public sidewalk. As a documentary, Queendom can’t help but feel a little safe & formulaic when compared to the striking visuals of its subject’s artistry, which wasn’t helped by having to share a double bill with the confrontational, idiosyncratic genius of Marlon Riggs. It’s still risky filmmaking, though, and there’s a violent tension to even its most mundane, everyday public scenes. It’s incredible that this footage not only exists but was exported to an excited audience half a world away, proving to me that there’s always going to be a place for cinema as a public, communal ritual (while also putting the petty capitalism of box-office handwringing into a larger perspective of what’s happening in the world right now). Maybe it’ll be tough for $200mil popcorn-bucket sellers to get funded by corporate investors in the near future, but those were never the heart of the artform anyway.
-Brandon Ledet
Swampflix 