Otto is, he tells us, a “zombie with an identity crisis”. Is he one of many zombies now become “unextraordinary” on the face of the earth, despite repeated attempts at annihilating them by the still-living? Is he a newly evolved type of zombie, as implied by radical German filmmaker Medea Yarn in her film-within-a-film on the subject? Or is Otto in fact a zombie at all?
Otto; or, Up with Dead People is the latest feature from queer auteur Bruce LaBruce, perhaps the only maker of avantgarde political-satire pornography to cast himself in some of his most sexually explicit scenarios. LaBruce doesn’t star in Otto, though; in fact, it’s his biggest-budget movie to date — it’s practically mainstream-indie.
That means, in part, that it has less shock value than, say, LaBruce’s Skin Flick — no Nazis, neo or otherwise, and certainly none played by Israeli actors singing Hatikva, the Israeli national anthem. In Otto, LaBruce’s quasi-critique of the contemporary world has zombies as a metaphor for mindless consumerism, which, in LaBruce’s view, includes gay men mindlessly and endlessly cruising for sex.
Further, he told The Guardian, there’s a link to Islam. This is not made explicit in the film, but LaBruce told the paper that Otto was partly inspired by an ex-boyfriend of his who was a Shi’ite Muslim. “They are a very lugubrious bunch, the Shia,” said LaBruce. “Very death-obsessed.”
But that’s by the by. Otto the zombie (Jey Crisfar) stumbles through his identity crisis and into the film being made by Medea Yarn (Katharina Klewinghaus) with the assistance of her brother Adolf (Guido Sommer) and her lover Hella Bent (Susanne Sachsse), who comes, literally, from an old black-and-white silent movie — and still lives there. Otto finds that acting as a zombie in a zombie flick is perhaps the best cover for an actual zombie.
Such are the complications of LaBruceworld, which is currently a suburb of outer Berlin. Most of the actors/characters in Otto are German, and Medea in particular is given to long declamations of political theory in an accent one can only find comic. Oddly, though, these people tend to read Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man in English. Like the actors/characters in Jean-Luc Godard’s movies, those in Otto actually read serious books. (In another little Godard echo, LaBruce refers to the famous coffee-cup shot in Two or Three Things I Know about Her — adding to it a lovely, clever cut.)
Naturally, LaBruce would have a film-within-a-film to complicate the layers of “reality”, and naturally he’d be highly self-conscious about his narrative. This adds to the amusement potential of Otto, but it also feels like a riposte to the kind of zonked-youth movies made by the likes of Gus van Sant and Gregg Araki, so it’s also a reflection on queer cinema itself. Just to make sure we know we’re in a Bruce LaBruce movie, though, there are some outrageous sex scenes. Then again, few people can have filmed a gay zombie orgy, involving bloody chunks of flesh, with such wry detachment. Consumerism indeed.
Otto shows on the mini-fest organised by the Out in Africa (OIA) gay and lesbian film festival to coincide with Cape Town Pride. The festival also makes an excursion to Johannesburg next month (see story on right). Wherever you catch it, though, those perhaps jaded palettes who found some of last year’s OIA a little tame will find in Otto some solid, er, meat.