I’ve said it before on this blog, but the current New Orleans repertory scene really is stronger than it has ever previously been in my lifetime. While the original uptown location of The Prytania has continued its Classic Movies series that used to encompass almost the entirety of local repertory programming, The Broad has massively stepped up its game in recent years to play a wide range of classic arthouse cinema titles I never thought I’d get a chance to see projected in a proper theater, making for a weekly spoil of riches. That recent vibe shift was especially apparent during this year’s Pride Month offerings at The Broad, which included separate programs from both the regular Gap Tooth series and a one-off Pride series sponsored by a self-explanatory social club called Crescent City Leathermen. Together, they combined for an impressively robust month of queer repertory cinema in one convenient venue, including a list of Swampflix-approved classics like Nowhere, The Celluloid Closet, The Queen and, most surprisingly, Codependent Lesbian Space Alien Seeks Same. It was an overwhelming bounty for a single month of programming, so I got to be extremely selective about which screenings to attend and narrowed it down to two titles I had never seen before from directors I love: Pedro Almodóvar & Rainer Werner Fassbinder. The beautiful thing is that I didn’t even have to leave my neighborhood to see them; what a gift.

While Gap Tooth was perfectly astute for programming 1991’s High Heels during Pride Month, it could have just as easily screened a month earlier to celebrate Mother’s Day. Almodóvar’s entire catalog is recursive & accumulative but, even so, High Heels plays like the scrappier, goofier dry run for his later commercial triumph All About My Mother (while still being fabulous on its own terms). Victoria Abril stars as a Madrid TV news broadcaster with a near-psychotic obsession with her lifelong-absent mother, a once-famous actress & pop star played by Marisa Paredes. As a child, she conspired to keep her mother to herself through Rhoda Penmark-level machinations, but she grows up abandoned anyway, inspiring a lifelong fetishistic obsession with a woman who doesn’t think much of her in return. When her mother makes a grand return to Madrid in her adulthood, the details of her obsession become overwhelming. Not only is her TV broadcaster career a pale imitation of her mother’s international fame, but she’s also married to her mother’s former lover & biographer and soon starts a sexual affair with a drag performer who impersonates the famous torch singer for cash tips. The strangely incestuous sexual tension between those four players gets even more complex as the mother resumes a previous affair with the daughter’s husband, who is soon found murdered by a mysterious visitor to his bedroom. As always, Almodóvar has a way of tangling the interpersonal conflicts & romances of all involved so gradually that it takes a long while to realize just how much of a melodramatic mess the plot appears to be when spelled out on paper. Even when introducing this sordid mother-daughter dynamic in childhood flashback, he simplifies the jealousy-and-indifference tensions of their relationship down to a simple symbolic object: an earring. When that earring catches on one of the women’s hairdo in the awkward hug of their adult reunion decades later, it’s carrying enough emotional weight to make you cry. At the same time, he’s clearly having fun with the gaudy tableaux of the melodrama genre in a way that verges on ironic humor, filling the screen with enough drag performances, dance breaks, high heels, and lipstick kisses to make getting imprisoned for murder in Madrid seem like a genuinely fun time for any woman lucky enough to get arrested. It’s just as funny as it is sincerely heartbreaking & sexy, easily ranking among the best of his works.

The Crescent City Leathermen’s screening of 1982’s Querelle landed on the exact opposite extreme of the masc-femme spectrum, staying true to the spirit of the organization’s namesake. Fassbinder’s late-career adaptation of Jean Genet’s novel is a crime story in which the only lawman on hand is a leather-daddy fetishist who operates more as a barfly than a proper detective. The film is a kind of pornographic opera, starring Brad Davis as the titular sailor & murderer who ruins the lives of any poor soul who happens to gaze upon his beefcake beauty. Querelle arrives in the port city of Brest with the dual purpose of following naval orders from his superiors while, why not, orchestrating a massive opium deal with the local barkeep as a side hustle. In that bar, he stumbles directly into an already complex love triangle involving his own estranged brother, the aforementioned barkeep, and the barkeep’s wife. All three players are erotically obsessed with Querelle at first sight—brother inlcuded—but the sailor ends up bottoming for the barkeep first, while constantly protesting that he’s actually straight as an arrow no matter how much pleasure he takes in receiving anal sex. The sex scenes fall just short of pornographic, but they are incredibly lengthy, sweaty, and intense. To make up for the lack of onscreen penetration, the movie purposefully mistakes violence for a sexual act, having Querelle insert knives & bullets into the local citizenry as he gets increasingly greedy in his local, self-serving rise to power at everyone else’s expense. Not having read the novel, the character motivations & plot revelations can be confusing from scene to scene, but just like watching an opera in a foreign language, the overall emotion & eroticism of the piece shines through the fog. Querelle is a primarily visual piece, with Fassbinder bathing the screen in intense washes of orange & blue gel lighting and accentuating the dreamlike quality of the setting by mixing jazz-age speakeasy iconography with 80s-specific props like video game arcades. From Derek Jarman to Todd Haynes to Amanda Kramer, there’s no shortage of sensory comparison points in approximating the film’s visual aesthetic, but by the end I could only see it as the evolutionary link between James Bidgood’s Pink Naricssus & Bertrand Mandico’s The Wild Boys — an unholy trinity of operatic male lust & violence refracted through cinematic artifice.

Both Querelle & High Heels are titles I’ve been meaning to see for years, but I dragged my feet on clearing them from my watchlist due to streaming inaccessibility and the cost of collecting physical media. As has been frequently happening lately, my procrastination was rewarded by local theatrical showings of these historically underrepresented queer classics, something I never would have dreamed possible just a few years ago. Now that Pride Month is over, Halloween Season programming is months away, and Gap Tooth is officially on their Summer Break, that overwhelming flood of once-in-a-lifetime repertory screenings is likely to dry up over the coming weeks, but I’m still feeling incredibly spoiled by what was recently on offer just a few short bus stops away from my house. New Orleans still doesn’t have nearly the breadth of repertory programming as larger cities like New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, or even Austin, but the work that’s being done on the few screens we do have within city limits has been getting exponentially more impressive & adventurous in recent years. The offerings at The Broad alone are worthy of local pride.

-Brandon Ledet