James Bidgood’s experimental homoerotic reverie is now reissued in restored form. The film was shot mostly in Bidgood’s own New York apartment throughout the 1960s; it was finally released in 1971 with Bidgood’s name removed from the credits after an opaque dispute with his backers and his authorship only revealed 20 years later.
Pink Narcissus is a movie of garish colour, mute melodrama and dreamlike imagery which mimics early cinema, perhaps simply because the resources for recording lip-sync dialogue were not available. (The director says that Powell and Pressburger’s Red Shoes was an inspiration although the title alludes more to their nun melodrama Black Narcissus.) It interestingly merges its rather 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 interesting and successful parts of the piece are the radio soundscapes and the modelled neon skylines.
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 then as a harem dancer. (Finally he appears to have succumbed, albeit in a satirical spirit, to some kind of 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 though, 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.
