Set during the dawn of the AIDS epidemic, Diego Céspedes’ gentle, funny, passionate, and occasionally absurdist debut drama packs an enormous emotional punch. Following a commune of transgender women in a north Chilean desert in 1982, “The Mysterious Gaze of the Flamingo” binds real-world oppression and superstition with hints of grace verging on magical realism, in a film about the capacity for love and violence contained within every human being.
As a new plague begins taking hold, rumors run wild about how prolonged eye-contact — or a loving gaze — shared with a gay man or transgender woman can lead to infection. Eleven-year-old girl Lidia (Tamara Cortés) is bullied about this by her male friends, since her mother Flamingo (Matías Catalán) is a trans woman belonging to a close-knit community of “transvestites” — one of the era-appropriate terms used by the women themselves, among several reclaimed slurs.
The women — a lively, fun-loving group with colorful adopted names like Piranha, Lioness and Star — take gentle revenge on Lidia’s behalf by holding the young boys’ eyelids open and forcing them to stare into their eyes, portending a meaningful symbolism. These rumored mechanics of HIV transmission, while reflective of real-world beliefs about touch, were invented wholesale by Céspedes, and they open the movie and its characters up to potent forms of drama rooted in the cinematic gaze. For Flamingo and her sisters to playfully demand the boys look at them is equally a demand to be seen and to have their humanity recognized at a time when the default response to rampant fear is equally rampant dehumanization.
Despite its 1980s setting, it’s something that feels ripped from contemporary headlines, given recent efforts the world over to curtail transgender rights. In that vein, centering a parent-child relationship like Flamingo and Lidia’s (and having several transgender aunts look out for a cisgender child by encircling her like a lion’s pride) is a stern rebuke of bigoted narratives about trans predation. However, while the easy catharsis of this premise is a key part of the movie’s structure, “The Mysterious Gaze of the Flamingo” is far from didactic.
Its plot, by and large, concerns Flamingo’s romance with a local miner, a man named Yovani (Pedro Muñoz), who enters the story in heroic fashion at the women’s makeshift cabaret, interrupting Flamingo’s drag performance to stare deep into her eyes. However, Yovani’s adoration quickly curdles, when he reveals he’s taken ill, aggressively blaming the woman he loves. For Flamingo, and for several of the movie’s trans women, men’s love and violent hatred exist in close proximity. They’re made to live as subjects of revulsion by day and secret objects of desire by night, all while risking sudden turns toward brutality born from vulnerable self-loathing.
These paradoxical romances — accompanied by the stirring horns of Florencia Di Concilio’s musical score — are entwined with the persistent possibility of tragedy, especially when the local miners decide to impose restrictions on the women’s movement, to the point of entering their home and forcibly blindfolding them. It’s a turn that gradually nudges the film into surreal symbolic territory, as the women both accept and subvert this occupation in unexpected ways. Despite this ostensible colonization of trans bodies, Céspedes trains his camera on the inherent humanity of all his subjects, including his most bigoted aggressors.
If there’s redemption or forgiveness to be found, it’s neither easily attained nor equally applied. There’s no perfect response to being victimized, which is why characters like Flamingo and her guardian Boa (Paula Dinamarca), the commune’s rankled matriarch, end up with such wildly divergent stories. Flamingo’s romance with Yovani takes difficult and tragic turns, leaving Lidia with the weight of unfulfilled vengeance on her shoulders. Boa, meanwhile, finds unexpected happiness with Clemente (Luis Dubó), one of the older miners spearheading the strange operation to oppress her family — albeit while the risk of their romance souring continues to loom.
Although the movie meanders on occasion, and never quite finds the right rhythm for its more traditional dialogue coverage — these scenes have a more stilted quality — “The Mysterious Gaze of the Flamingo” bursts to life in its isolated, wide-shot tableaus of individuals and couples in motion, embodied by a committed cast of trans and genderqueer performers in leading roles. Whether the love it features on screen is simple or complex, and whether it’s romantic, platonic or maternal, the film lands on tremendously moving moments that stir the soul by scrutinizing the dueling cruelty and tenderness found within its characters. It meets hatred head-on with empathy, forcing it to soften, but without letting its guard down when it comes to the uncompromising need for community in the face of severe injustice.
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