The back room is not simply a back room. It is a jungle of colour with a bar covered in stickers and painting whose exoticism doubles the exotic interior. It will go on to become a party room, full of garlands, balloons and streamers, where a garishly dolled-up group of people flaunt their stuff. Furthermore, the back room is the room leading to the bedroom, which in turn is not just a bedroom, but a hell in which the devil lolls in a pink bathrobe on a leopard skin-covered bed. Hell is full of colours and bodies.
The devil, referred to by most of the characters simply as “Queen”, is Black, queer and the heart of this one-of-a-kind 1974 film by Antonio Carlos da Fontoura, A RAINHA DIABA (The Devil Queen). The devilish Queen rules over a drug ring and loves razors, with which she likes to fidget at the throats of her equally queer henchwomen or even cut their pretty faces. She is played with an energy that oscillates between madness and vulnerability by Milton Gonçalves, who passed away last year. With its main character alone, the film demonstrates that the future of cinema, especially as the art form ages, increasingly lies in the restored treasures of its past. This holds in particular when the cinematic cultural heritage is, as it is here, a sub- and counter-cultural archive of marginal figures transforming their social inferiority into a shrill aesthetic extreme.
The diabolical Queen is inspired by the historical figure of Madame Satã (Satan), the stage name of João Francisco dos Santos (1900—1976), a drag performer and capoeira martial artist from Rio de Janeiro. The name itself harks back to a film, Cécil B. DeMille’s MADAME SATAN from 1930. Thus dos Santos’ Madame Satã is a persona combining history and legend, one that became an expression of resistance for those without a place in white Brazilian dominant society: for queer people; for the Black descendants of the (formerly) enslaved; for junkies, pimps and prostitutes; for gangsters and martial artists. These are also the characters in A RAINHA DIABA, who live in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro.
Unlike Karim Aïnouz, whose MADAME SATÃ (2012) was the “official” film about dos Santos’ story, da Fontoura synthesised aspects of the great lady’s personality with other elements into a wild mix in 1974, when she was still alive. A RAINHA DIABAis a queerploitation film with set pieces from B-movie gangster films and sexploitation. There are elements from John Waters’ queer trash cinema, there is kitsch and camp, and the colour scheme evokes Italian giallo. Above all, there are aspects of Tropicália, the Brazilian movement in art and music that flourished during the military dictatorship, present in the film not only in the blending of poverty and colours—a satiric take on the cliché of the tropical paradise—but also in the almost omnipresent music.
Colour here becomes the medium of a queering of the gangster genre.
In pop art fashion, the logos of brands like Esso and Pepsi take on a life of their own, the blue of a tanker or the purple of a car catching the eye. Again and again there are these art-for-art’s-sake moments, this enjoyment of meaninglessness beyond plot and narration, the flare-up of pure spectacle that ignites in the most mundane, commercial objects—mostly cars, in fact, that move just as do images on the screen.
If capoeira, which the real Madame Satã had so brilliantly mastered, is a blending of combat and dance, the violence of the gangsters in A RAINHA DIABA blends with an aesthetic visual regime that never denies its social and political function. Colour here becomes the medium of a queering of the gangster genre. Especially in the first part of the film, the genre-driven narrative is overlayed by colours, laughter, suggestive glances—and thereby rendered absurd. The story concerns a trap being set for a young gangster so that he goes to jail instead of one of the Queen’s protégés. The narrative is thus reduced to the sheer substitution of gangsters among themselves, switching bodies around on a bloody—as well as pointless and entirely unsuccessful—path to the top of the narcotics ring.
Despite its queer overlay and the failure towards which it is heading, the narration is never neutralised, never bogged down in succession moments of mere spectacle as in other exploitation films. Homophobia has in no way disappeared from the Queen’s entourage and there are stirrings of resistance: it is the straight gangsters in the Queen’s team who want to expel and eliminate the “faggot.” Queerploitation and B-movie gangster films remain two political forces reflecting the homophobic climate of the time, and continue to work against each other.
Alongside the queering of the genre and the resistance this gives rise to, a third way in which queerness and violence come together or collide here is ecstasy. Especially at the end, in a crazy torture scene, the separation between violence and pleasure is transgressed in a mad scream before the film ends where it began: in the antechamber to hell, where the bodies—all bodies—are disposed of in a big pile. As if all along they had only been agents of an intoxicating carnival of colours, now over. As if, when all the power struggles are over, it is only the intoxication of death that triumphs, and even the devil cannot escape.
Philipp Stadelmaier holds a doctorate in film studies from Goethe University, Frankfurt and, Paris 8 University. He is a writer and film critic (“Süddeutsche Zeitung”, “Filmbulletin”, “Sissymag”, “Zeit Online”).
Translation: Millay Hyatt
