James Bidgood's experimental homoerotic reverie Pink Narcissus has been reissued in a restored form. The film was shot primarily in Bidgood's own New York apartment throughout the 1960s and finally released in 1971. Due to an opaque dispute with his backers, Bidgood's name was removed from the credits, and his authorship was only revealed 20 years later.
A Dreamlike Visual Feast
Pink Narcissus is a movie of garish colour, mute melodrama, and dreamlike imagery that mimics early cinema, perhaps simply because the resources for recording lip-sync dialogue were not available. The director has cited Powell and Pressburger's Red Shoes as an inspiration, although the title alludes more to their nun melodrama Black Narcissus. The film interestingly merges pastoral fantasies with the urban circumstances where these would be consumed—the city's movie theatres, outside which poverty and alienation were commonplace. Some of the most successful parts of the piece are the radio soundscapes and the modelled neon skylines.
Erotic Fantasies and Satirical Touches
A beautiful rent boy, played by Bobby Kendall, stretches and languorously reclines. He appears as a matador engaging in a bizarre corrida in a men's lavatory, then as a slave boy in Roman times, and finally as a harem dancer. In the end, he seems to succumb to a conformist bowler-hatted persona, instantly cancelled by a mysterious gunshot. These setpieces drift in and out of a cavalcade of erotic imagery; they are fantasies, but surely the fantasies of the boy's customers rather than the boy himself.
A kind of comedy is intended, especially in the matador scenes, although comedy works against eroticism. Bidgood saves his biggest coup for his recipient-POV money shot 42 minutes in. For me, the most interesting sequence is his closeup of a nipple, which after a moment has a blade of grass drawn back and forth across it: a tiny, ticklish abrasion of sensuality.
Pink Narcissus is in UK and Irish cinemas from 12 June.
