Hess & Pasolini: Naïve, Repellent, Ridiculous, Holy

Over at The New Yorker’s film blog The Front Row, Richard Brody’s audacious observations about (forgive the shorthand) Mormon filmmaker Jared Hess;

“Point by point, Manohla Dargis’s review of Jared Hess’s Gentlemen Broncos (2009) misses what’s going on. She and I were among the few writers who praised Hess’s previous film, Nacho Libre (2006). . . . She saw the film almost exclusively in terms of gender politics, praising its ‘liberating vision of identity as a performance space, an existential wrestling ring, if you will, in which each of us, if only given the opportunity, can cavort freely in the mask and colored tights of our choosing.’ Fine, but not a word about religion. . . .”

Where Dargas sees only “a gross-out comedy,” Brody calls Gentlemen Broncos “a strange and personal religious vision,” its central character “the author of a new gospel,” and director Hess’s filming of his visions “wondrously ingenuous, . . . both as sublime and as crudely carnal as scripture itself.”

He goes on to connect the writer-director of Napoleon Dynamite (2004) with another auteur whose work finds the sacred in the profane. “The grotesque bodily functions, human, animal, and alien, that the movie depicts unflinchingly—as well as the “unpleasant, unattractive characters” Dargis says the film is filled with—are the point. It’s easy to present the beautiful people and the scrubbed world as divine creations; Hess’s vision sacralizes what other filmmakers don’t. The director he’s closest to in this regard is Pier Paolo Pasolini (and Pasolini, too, had an extraordinary sense of the naïve, the repellent, and the ridiculous).”