KT158: BUFF Love Stories
Darla on Desire and Kamikaze Hearts.
Brunswick Underground Film festival has come to a close. Encore screenings continue.
Words by Darla Gabrielle M Tejada
Desire (1999)
dir. Bill Mousoulis
Shot on 16mm with a grainy, subdued and almost washed-out palette, Desire made me nostalgic for a place and time I had never experienced. Cliche, I know... but watching this film gave me access to a memory imprinted with the culture of this city. It’s billed as a “should be classic of 90s queer cinema”, but Desire – that longing it names – transcends sexuality. I’d say it’s more about Melbourne, which I guess (thankfully) is queer? Many a writer, artist, auteur have exalted the beauty of New York or London or Paris. But this city of ours is rarely lauded.
Considered a “saint of underground cinema,”, director and writer Bill Mousoulis is attuned to a Melbourne sensibility. While verging on the ‘sentimental’ when telling the stories of, in and by this city, the subtleties of Desire prove that word too trite. But maybe I’m just sentimental about him. Lingering on the waters off St Kilda pier, container ships treading the horizon; Market Street with glimpses of the Immigration Museum building, Queen’s Bridge and Southbank across the Yarra; even the palm fronds and tame green parks surrounding Alfred Square. Mousoulis painted what he knew, rendered with tangible texture. And Mousoulis loved what he knew.
Desire is a film about yearning. Even in the sunny, gentrifying suburb of St Kilda, characters yearn for someplace else, to escape. They yearn for each other; their lust and love sometimes met but often thwarted. Anna, a writer struggling to follow the success of her debut novel, may be yearning less for another triumph than for another story.
Not much happens really. Or at least nothing dramatic or explosive transpires. Even the film’s tragedies are subdued. Love goes unrequited, the longing continues - admirable but also quite pathetic. And I think part of the film’s charm is the space it gives to the pathetic-ness that attends those feelings of desire. What Mousoulis captured is the glacial passage of the every day. Even the dialogue was sparse, the stories interconnected, driven mostly by the quietness of bodies together.
Kamikaze Hearts (1986)
dir. Juliet Bashore
How can the petite yet formal designation of ‘docu-fiction’ possibly satisfy the violence of Juliet Bashore’s Kamikaze Hearts? Tentatively titled Truth or Fiction, this film explores pornography as a genre, and if there’s any ‘truth’ or ‘reality’ about it. Director of Kamikaze Heart, Juliet Bashmore, said that her intention was never about creating a “straightforward doc” … but this was in contention with Tigr’s (ostensibly the director of this faux-doc) own desire to “[make] an erotic film that showed the truth”. Occupying the fraught space between pleasure and performance, fiction and reality, perhaps Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore would have made this if they were part of the American sex work industry of the 70s and 80s instead of the French surrealists of the 1920s.
We follow the tumultuous lesbian love affair (though that adjective might be redundant because aren’t all lesbian love affairs tumultuous) between Mitch and Tigr. The film is shot in the vein of a behind-the-scenes documentary purportedly on the set of a fictional opera-inspired porn-parody which Mitch is starring in and Tigr is directing. We meet our antagonists for the first time as actresses in the preceding Sulka’s Wedding, a timeless trans porno pared down to a mere 20 minute short by BUFF.
But really, Kamikaze Hearts is a collaboration between Tigr and Bashmore (then fresh out of film school, of course ... if I were given a dollar every time I watched a debut feature-length documentary by a dyke director I’d have two dollars!) And still, I think I prefer Bashmore’s description better. Polysexual. But not in a respectful, utopic way. Rather it casts the viewer as a vanilla voyeur, camping up its grit and sexuality while simultaneously baring a soft white underbelly ... a sharing of the vulnerable experience of Queer women in pornography. It’s also streaming on SBS. Watch if you dare.
Darla D M Tejada is a writer based in Naarm/Melbourne.
The KT Calendar for May was simply impossible. 66% of editors are going to Cannes and we are publishing almost two articles weekly. Here are a few of the important things on this month…
Artist Film Workshop
Albie Thoms’ Marinetti (1969) 26 May @ The Brunswick Green
ACMI:
Cannes Competitors 2026
Focus on Lav Diaz
Spotlight on Hong Kong Horror
German Film Festival May 8-27 at Palace Cinemas
“G’day May”Australian Classics at Cinema Nova