‘The Mysterious Gaze of the Flamingo’ Review: A Chilean AIDS Allegory

At the Cannes Film Festival last year, there were not one but two genre-bending, metaphorical movies that revisited the deadly AIDS crisis of the 1980s.

The first was Palme d’Or laureate Julia Ducournau’s explosive and overzealous body horror flick, Alpha, in which the infected became living and breathing human sculptures, their skin hardening into marble that looked real enough to cut into a fabulous kitchen countertop.

The second and less buzzy feature was debuting Chilean director Diego Céspedes’ The Mysterious Gaze of the Flamingo (La misteriosa mirada del flamenco), which walked away with the top prize in the fest’s Un Certain Regard sidebar. In this touchingly surreal story, AIDS is an unknown plague transmitted by looking too lovingly into the eyes of the infected, causing turmoil among the inhabitants of a remote mining town in the desert.

Céspedes captures this strange phenomenon through the viewpoint of a preteen girl, Lidia (Tamara Cortés), who lives with her trans mother, the titular Flamenco (Matías Catalán), in a ramshackle bordello populated by a rowdy gang of sex workers. The place is run by Mama Boa (Paula Dinamarca), a tough-loving madam who doesn’t mind giving a difficult client a good kick in the nuts from time to time.

It’s certainly a unique setting, and some of what happens in Flamingo seems too outlandish to be true. But things suddenly turn tragic in the last act, and what felt frivolous or folkloric becomes deadly serious when Lidia is forced to face what’s happening around her.

Until then, the story follows the pugnacious 11-year-old as she’s harassed by boys at the local swimming hole while witnessing her mom’s declining health at home. Their lives are soon at risk when one of Flamenco’s clients, Yovani (Pedro Muñoz), shows up with symptoms of the disease and blames her for his sickness, threatening to take revenge.

The gunslinging miner belongs to a band of angry men who show up at the bordello and surround it like a posse from the Wild West. But instead of delivering the usual shootout at that point, Céspedes transforms what could have been a nasty brawl into a gentle snuggle-fest between the sex workers and their unlikely lovers.

In the world of Flamingo, macho attitudes and transphobia give way to tenderness, especially during a bittersweet wedding sequence in which Mama Boa marries the bearded old prospector, Clemente (Luis Dubó). Another memorable scene involves an annual talent contest in which Flamenco lip-syncs a Latino ballad in full drag, mesmerizing all the hardened miners who’ve come to watch her perform.

Despite its bleak subject, there’s plenty of joy and warmth on display in Céspedes’ first feature, which is reminiscent of other recent Chilean fare like Sebastián Silva’s Rotting in the Sun and Sebastián Lelio’s A Fantastic Woman, both of which inventively combined genre plots with LGBTQ themes. Flamingo goes overboard on the surrealism at times, but by ultimately focusing on how Lidia comes to terms with the reality of the AIDS epidemic, it delivers a solid emotional blow by the end.

Shot in a pared-down but colorful style by Angello Faccini, Flamingo makes the most out of its limited budget and picturesque locations, which include an arid mountain range straight out of a spaghetti Western. Most of the action takes place in a dusty one-horse town whose residents have chosen to open themselves up both sexually and spiritually, paying the ultimate price for their tolerance.