King Cobra: "That's it. I love you." Gus Van Sant's ward, a favorite of Sundance's premier section and not inferior in interest in gay aesthetics to her big fan James Franco, director and screenwriter Justin Callie not only adapted a real crime story for the film screen, taking place in publicity under the title "Cobra Killer: Gay Porn, Murder, and the Manhunt to Bring the Killers to Justice", but also found poetry and sublimity in the circumstances leading to the brutal murder along with frank sex scenes with this sweet cries.
After the documentary-based picture “I’m Michael”, which touches on the nuances of applying the “good/bad” scale to sexual orientation, Callie turns to sex as it is, complementing it with pornography, blood, neon lights, Frederick Chopin’s music and absolute creative permissiveness, which can operate without going into licorice vulgarity only authors pursuing goals other than the demonstration of strong hips and strong arms.
For an hour and a half of screen time, executed in accordance with the strict canons of modern indie, which equally oblige the director to follow both ethics in terms of meaning and aesthetics, the film will tell the viewer that at a time when Hurricane Katrina acted as the main newsmaker, in Pennsylvania, porn dealer Brian Kosis was extremely cruelly killed by extremely ambitious workers of the same sphere, because of a misunderstanding about the studio affiliation of the young actor.
However, the formal basis of the plot is also known from news chronicles, and the “Royal Cobra” is interesting because Justin Callie casually talks about the fine line separating true love and madness of vicious passion, voluntary consent and outright blackmail, not forgetting that gay sex, the letter combination of “NAVY” and variations on the theme “Searcher” under the musical accompaniment in the style of Stephen Soderbergh excite much more than summaries of criminal digest.
"Royal Cobra" equally successfully works with the entourage, and with a meaningful space, possibly devoid of axioms and a straightforward declaration of the author's position, but extremely productively offering topics for discussion. For Callie, the question of whether it is “morally gay” is naturally not relevant (although it is difficult to say what in the film conditional people living in the neighborhood are more shocked – by a brutal murder or the fact that their seemingly reliable neighbor takes part in gay porn), but the realization of the impossibility of finding a solution to the “sex/love” ratio, as can be seen from the numerous scenes of the film based on this clinch, is a subject of keen interest for the director.
“Royal Cobra” is based on contrasts – whether it is the striking differences of the bed scenes between Keegan Allen and James Franco, where everything is not only visually beautiful, but also, according to the plot, occurs exclusively for love, and acts of prostitution, as well as mechanistic scenes from the filming of porn, or meaningful sketches, which invite to a dialogue about the morality of selling their own body, then appealing to the audience with a plea to accept the possibility of love so pure, strong and a priori that sperm and saliva become by no means bad, but a divine elixir.
That is, this film is the quintessence of expression, in which the author adopted aesthetics as a constant, which allowed to unobtrusively talk about sex in its various hypostases - from perception as a necessary physiological interaction to the assertion of the secondary nature of it, designed exclusively to externally express the feelings of the central romantic heroes (they are also the heroes of crime) Joe and Harlow. Therefore, you should not try to evaluate the “Royal Cobra” according to the criteria of classical drama. First, Justin Callie breaks the structure of his novella and the formal narrative of the plot-but-not-meaning character logically continues even after the climax, in which he is not involved. And secondly, the author has no formalized theses, except a wild and undisguised delight at how playfully and famously Seth Rogen's best friend pronounces the phrases "Gimme that dick!" and "Who's daddy piggy piggy?"
If we talk about the correspondence of the film rather than the true chronology of real events, but its presentation in the literary primary source from Andrew E. Stoner and Peter A. Conway, then the limited budget expectedly led to the removal from the plot of any coherent implementation of the part under the conditional name “the Manhunt”. While the criticism of the original source for significant gaps in the authors’ understanding of the motivational part of the heroes and often arising questions to the logic of building a literary narrative should be forgotten, since the “Royal Cobra” in its version for the silver screen acquired both over-motivated criminal heroes and a consistently constructed time axis of events.
It is not possible to say whether the scandalous context of porn, escort and prostitution is decisive in The Royal Cobra, or whether it is nothing more than a means to justify scenes marked with high age ratings. Of course, Justin Callie has an author’s vision, relatively speaking, of the philosophy of love, but it is extremely short-sighted to assert that visualization on the verge of porn has somehow distorted or, on the contrary, leveled the author’s message about love as an irresistible force capable of anything, including moving to murder, even if the action takes place not in the possession of the glorious Macbeth.
In summary, we can say that the “Royal Cobra” is a film from the segment of especially piquant psychosexual paintings by Paul Verhoeven, if the latter shot them solely on slightly loose geeks – the target audience of Sundance’s night program. In other words, “Royal Cobra” fully justifies all the potential characteristics of the film, released by IFC Films, specializing in both Giuseppe Thornator and outright thrash, and produced by James Franco’s company, combining a love for naked men with an equally strong sympathy for independent cinema.
Justin Callie found the balance between pornography and high art, which allows you to simultaneously experience almost physical pleasure from being shown on the screen with piety before the content component, I must say masterfully expressed in the language of cinematography, and therefore not subject to wording in a nutshell, and perhaps verbalization in principle. Scissor Sisters are organically replaced in “Royal Cobra” by Franz Schubert, complementing each other and leading the viewer to the idea that true love can hardly end in a happy ending. Should I?