Prince of Sodom vs. skinhead The famous curse of the august Bavarian Wittelsbach - before Meyerling - and the fall of the steel magnates' house, the luxurious end of the northern Italian aristocracy and the decline of the rich Jewish family of Finzi-Contini received from Visconti, Tessari and De Sica the most vivid and painful expression in the game of Helmut Berger. Tinto Brass cast him as the brutal and cold ruler of a Nazi brothel. He played Dorian Gray in the best film adaptation of an aesthetic novel and the ruthless plastic surgeon Flaman in the sequel to The Terrible Doctor Orlof by the pathetic Jesus Franco. On the screen, passion was always criminal and morbid, he despised and shunned women and reached out to men, in a more or less explicit impulse, if corruption or incest did not distract him from this entertaining inclination. He was and remains not just a gay icon, he was and remains the Prince of Sodom.
Because even the elderly owner of dry cleaning Gustav retains the features of the gransenor born “under the jagiellons”. But the director does not embellish either his hero or his entourage. The “thematic” environment is just such a vulgar, uncouth-obscene and motley-undemanding, as it is in any major city. And Dorian turned into his own portrait and instead of secular parties is content with this rabble on the outskirts. But the opposing company of “repair workers” – neo-Nazis, obsessed with a paranoid mania to cleanse Austria of Muslims, pederasts, vagrants and other outcasts, – portrays the director Peter Kern with sharp candor. The lawyer-puppet master of the youth group is himself a “vicious” orientation, the relationship of the breakaway puberty Nazis is permeated with latent homosexuality, as always happens in a closed community of young men, flavored with alcohol and smelling of a shoal. Actually, it is on the mirror correspondence between the alienated world of homosexual relations and the equally alienated brawling “brotherhood” of skins that the film is built. The rite of blood mixing binds two boys from the Hitler Youth - Gustav and his friend, the same rite completes the initiation of a xenophobic fighter. Gustav’s occupation of removing stains from clothing reflects the opposite side’s desire for ethnic and other genetic cleansing. Clothing is the social face of man. And the removal of spots emblems the second and third chance, the absence of fatality, irreversibility, just as confession not only symbolizes the forgiveness of sins, but also erases them like never before. Sin is not tragic in Christianity, from which charity is not without an unpleasant simplification and has passed into the ethic of indefinite humanism characteristic of any normal civilized person. The crude-biological, primitive ethics of brown bull terriers, on the contrary, is an ethics of barbarism and does not operate with the concept of forgiveness, all “spots” are incorrigible defects, any defect is fault.
But the tragedy of the film is that Gustav himself has a Hitler-Jugend streak of intolerance, inflated severity towards himself and others. So the guy he's sheltering gets slaps on both sides. Therefore, the action moves in the key of fatal doom, not melodrama. And only "Christina", a young man who dares to undergo a sex change operation, seems to appear at the will of the director as a sign of triumph over determinism, over predestination, whatever it may be - natural, historical, moral. And it is significant that for this operation Christina is sent to Casablanca. Not Ingrid Bergman, but still.