In strik­ing open­ing cred­its, boil­ing cop­per pours from atop a grey moun­tain like lava, a slug­gish, pow­er­ful cur­rent that exists as a dichoto­my: the light it pow­ers shines over the lands it’s made bar­ren. This mes­mer­iz­ing sequence is how we are intro­duced to Diego Céspedes’s atmos­pher­ic fea­ture debut, The Mys­te­ri­ous Gaze of the Flamin­go, where sex is also a pow­er­ful cur­rent and, in that, a dichoto­my of its own.

It’s 1982 in a small min­ing vil­lage in Chile, where the men have two options for enter­tain­ment: vio­lence or sex. More often than not, the two inter­twine, aggra­vat­ed by a lin­ger­ing sense of shame asso­ci­at­ed with iso­lat­ed cor­ners of the world that were once unpop­u­lat­ed and sud­den­ly filled to the brim with male labour­ers — adult women are scarce. There­in comes the cabaret run by Mama Boa, home to a live­ly, love­ly group of cross­dressers with bed­rooms filled with a rota­tion of hun­gry chasers.

When enter­ing Mama Boa’s house, all her daugh­ters are reborn, bap­tized with a new name after an ani­mal. Boa bestows the name Flamin­go to one of her most beau­ti­ful girls, tak­en by her ever-long, gra­cious legs. Flamin­gos, the strik­ing­ly pink birds, begin to lose their colour in the nest­ing peri­od, hor­mones tak­ing away their one sin­gu­lar fea­ture. But Flamin­go the per­former is the oppo­site: when baby Lydia turns up on her doorstep, she imme­di­ate­ly steps into moth­er­hood, becom­ing even more sin­gu­lar, fuller. Flamin­go is a moth­er, but a bird, too, and to the men in the vil­lage, she is one to hunt.

Céspedes’s labyrinthine dra­ma flirts with absur­dism in build­ing a real­i­ty where the dark sores that mark the skin of the men who cross paths with Flamin­go are not a virus eat­ing away at the body, but the evil con­se­quence of a mys­te­ri­ous plague, trans­mit­ted through look­ing into each other’s eyes. Inter­est­ing­ly, the Chilean direc­tor also nests his debut with­in the lines of a clas­sic West­ern, the min­ers fash­ioned as gun­sling­ing bad­dies kick­ing at the creak­ing wood­en doors of Mama Boa to wreak hav­oc in search of revenge — and a cure they know won’t come.

It’s a cap­ti­vat­ing exer­cise in cap­tur­ing a spe­cif­ic social malaise, more specif­i­cal­ly, how the AIDS epi­dem­ic was felt out­side the bustling metrop­o­lis where con­ver­sa­tions around queer­ness hap­pened in still hos­tile but much more open forums by com­par­i­son. Seen most­ly through the eyes of 12-year-old Lydia as she grap­ples with her mother’s curse, this often ten­der dra­ma does not shy away from the bru­tal­i­ty queer bod­ies are often sub­ject­ed to but rebels against mak­ing it its grav­i­ta­tion­al cen­tre. Despite the blood that stains dirt and skin alike, this earnest debut is quick to jump back to com­pas­sion, arms that hold one anoth­er with ease, laugh­ter that echoes through shal­low quar­ries, beau­ty that refus­es to dim under the weight of ostracisation.

In its ambi­tion to grab many things at once — both for­mal­ly and the­mat­i­cal­ly — The Mys­te­ri­ous Gaze of the Flamin­go stands as if on the legs of its tit­u­lar bird, a tad wob­bly and unsure. But its wob­bli­ness also makes it deeply inter­est­ing to look at. Angel­lo Faccini’s stun­ning cin­e­matog­ra­phy plays with depth to expand small crowd­ed rooms as if entire uni­vers­es and con­strict the vast­ness of the desert to ampli­fy its inescapa­bil­i­ty, and Cés­pedes pop­u­lates these spaces with a mix of pro­fes­sion­al actors and first-timers. This assured deci­sion allows not only for the raw­ness required from such an aching tale of found love and fam­i­ly, but that also turns this con­fi­dent debut into a dis­play for fresh tal­ent — none more so than its promis­ing young director.

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