Pierrot Lunaire

Based on the poetry cycle by Albert Giraud and the Arnold Schoenberg music it inspired, Canadian experimenter Bruce LaBruce created an adaptation for Berlin's Hebbel am Ufer theater and turned it into an unconventional film. A young woman dressed as a man seduces an attractive girl who has no idea that her seducer is actually a seductress. When the deception is revealed, however, the seduced girl's feelings paradoxically do not change. And so the seductress decides to show the girl's father her manhood.... This gutsy, intentionally affected, and eloquently acted movie may seem indebted to the work of foremost queer filmmaker Derek Jarman or to the visuality of creative duo Pierre et Gilles, but above all it relies on its own unique means of expression. By connecting elements of traditional melodrama and atonal music, it to some extent draws on the combination of the established and the novel typical for compositions by Schoenberg, who also placed his work in a cabaret environment. (Karlovy Vary International Film Festival)