(2015, 93 min)
Country: Canada, France, Germany
Director: Dennis Cooper, Zac Farley
Studio: TLA Releasing
Language: English
SYNOPSIS: Dennis Cooper and Zac Farley's Like Cattle Towards Glow is a 93 minute film consisting of five independent, thematically and emotionally interconnected scenes. The film is a complex, intimate, strangely serene, wide-ranging and always challenging exploration of sexual desire as a hiding place. In these unique, stylistically and temperamentally diverse scenes, each one featuring its own set of characters and storyline, sex makes a promise of something so intense and untenable to the characters that they feel they must enter it in secret - through an act of violence, or under the guise of an unrelated transaction, or by rationalizing its dangers away with the help of politics, or through utilizing it remotely as material for a purely aesthetic project. Like these characters, and like sex itself, Like Cattle Towards Glow is as deep, knowing, and unknowable as it is raucous, original, and explicit on the surface.
REVIEW:
Like Cattle Towards Glow is the first film essay by American writer Dennis Cooper and visual artist Zac Farley. It takes us (or better said, plunges us through five different segments, in a parallel world where morbid fantasies, violent impulses, repressed desires, depressed and lonely lovers, intellectualism are mixed together. This is quite a strange film about jaded teenagers – who are aware of the minimalism and absurdity of human relationships and because of the nature of what we see is certain not to be for everyone.
The five stories are seemingly disconnected thoughts, desires and fantasies of the young. Dennis Cooper is the author of many books of subversive, highly poetic content that explores the complexity of desire in young boys in search of identity in a violent, instinctual and morbid environment. Set in an erotic and terrifying at the universe they are driven and depression seems to be a way of life. Zac Farley uses a mainly French cast to give the story of five segments, five meetings of youngsters looking to fulfill a desire and a marginal sexuality. The film incorporates more humor and strangeness gradually as it moves forward.
In the first segment which is surely the most emblematic of the universe Cooper and aesthetics of the film try to capture a cold world by looking at facial expressions. It is a fantasy directed by teenagers about whom we know nothing. Excitement is reduced to a complete contrast in language with traditional representations of eroticism in cinema. The sequences were dictated by the usual format of gay porn films. Movements are slow and there is no sense of expectation. No one seems to care about pain evoked and in the unspoken, the movie has its best moments.
Farley and Cooper use a very personal visual language that provides moments of pure emotion. Like Cattle Towards Glow is a reflection on loneliness. The five stories are linked tenuously with rape and the young actors share their erect penises and bottom with the viewers. It starts with a rent boy who is required to play dead. Then we have a performance artist raped live on stage with a rather apathetic audience watching (the sound/music is grotesque). Then a boy offers his behind in exchange for some heroin and a couple in gorilla suits rape a boy in the snow. In the fifth and last segment, a surveillance drone zooms about the place while focusing in on a young man who doesn’t do much. Neither the acting nor the writing is memorable.
The film is a complex, intimate look at sexual desire as a hiding place. In these unique, stylistically and temperamentally diverse scenes, each one featuring its own set of characters and storyline, sex is seen as a promise of something so intense and untenable to the characters that they feel they must enter it in secret be that through “an act of violence, or under the guise of an unrelated transaction, or by rationalizing its dangers away with the help of politics, or through utilizing it remotely as material for a purely aesthetic project”. Like these characters, and like sex itself, the film is deep and knowing, and unknowable at the same time.
-- Reviewed by Amos Lassen (http://reviewsbyamoslassen.com/)
