IRFF 2021: Tim Leyendekker’s Feast and Selim Mourad’s Agate Mousse

Premiering at this year’s International Film Festival Rotterdam, visual artist and photographer Tim Leyendekker’s feature-length directorial debut, Feast, is a chimera of a film, one in which every sequence borrows from a different essayistic tradition, from re-enactment to more formally radical methods. These distinct grammars are connected by a sustained detachment as we accompany a group of bareback-loving gay men accused of injecting HIV-infected blood into their chemsex partners without their consent.

The film, based on true events that rocked Holland in 2005, is a welcome reminder that the boundaries between wanting and not wanting are often unclear, that sexual desire’s tacit agreements are generally bound to be misunderstood by systems built on a logic of rationality. In other words, desire makes a different kind of sense, one that’s often antithetical to the demands of the law, an argument that the film seems to be slowly making throughout.

Each of the film’s seven vignettes drops us into a world that appears to exist in a liminal space between aesthetic modes, and the effect is discombobulating. In the process, Feast exposes the impossibility of untangling fact from fiction. This leaves us with only one feeling to nibble on: a sense that these fragments, all of which highlight the complex relationship between consent, sexual practice, and queer kinship, will eventually pay off philosophically, not emotionally.

We aren’t waiting to see if the accused get convicted, or reveling in descriptions of days-long bareback orgies. We know, early on, that the law makes no room for the ambiguities, contradictions, or self-destructive propensities of desire. It makes no room for eroticism or feelings. And the film embodies that stance, as in a scene where a latex gloves-wearing female officer empties a bag belonging to one man and announces its contents—dildos, poppers, anal beads, baggies of drugs—with the clinical disaffection of Martha Rosler in Semiotics of the Kitchen. The only thing Leyendekker eroticizes in the film is coffee, in a sequence where one of the accused makes espresso and froths milk with the most delectable of frothers.

Otherwise, Feast follows a cerebral approach that recalls, in addition to Semiotics of the Kitchen, Doria García’s Segunda Vez, a cryptic essay film supposedly driven by the ideas of Argentinian psychoanalyst Oscar Masotta. In Segunda Vez, we’re forced to experience a succession of sequences like a sleuth searching for a conceptual through line. Both Garcia and Leyendekker’s films revel in the confusion of fact with fiction, enactment and re-enactment, metaphorical dialogue and theoretical diatribe. And while Feast is much more forthcoming about its plot, it ultimately simmers in the abstract concepts that have brought it to life, not in the narrative itself. Yet only rarely does the dialogue feel pedagogical, as the philosophical musing is allocated not only to speech but to the unstable aesthetics of the film itself.

One of the most jarring, and poignant, moments in Feast takes the shape of a traditional documentary sequence that teases out the poetic and life-affirming dimension of viruses. A female scientist working with plants makes the case for the symbiotic relationship between viruses and the bodies that host them, arguing for the many benefits of harboring, and even transmitting, a virus. Most significantly, she addresses the way plants can accept the symptoms caused by light viruses so that by the time the plant is infected with higher viruses it will carry on as normal, working with the pathogen in a sort of collaboration. It’s obviously a commentary on queer ways of understanding the relationship between HIV-positive people and the virus that not just inhabits their bodies but that co-authors their lives.

The allegory becomes a little too literal when an off-camera voice, presumably the filmmaker’s, asks the expert if the infected plants try to infect their neighboring flowers. The sequence quickly retreats into more figurative terrain, though, as the lab worker demonstrates a lab infection using petals, a virus-filled syringe, and a pestle and mortar. She explains that when the plant gets sick it communicates to the others, by air or roots, to let them know that there’s an infection nearby. Then the neighboring plants will start boosting their immune system so they can be prepared for the disease before surrendering to it.

Selim Mourad also plays with ideas around the diseased queer body by weaving divergent visual grammars in Agate Mousse, channeling Guillaume Dustan’s fearless indecency, Hervé Guibert’s radical vulnerability, and Joaquim Pinto’s diaristic essayism. For Mourad, as is often in the work of Dustan, Guibert, and Pinto, the artist is naked and the artist is sick—the price to pay for acknowledging self-implication in the artifacts one creates. And, like the infected flowers in Feast, the artist basks in the philosophical and erotic consequences of illness.

Mourad’s body is shutting down, as he’s discovered a lump in his testicle and an abscess in his mouth. We see him lying on a hospital bed, being told that he needs to lose one testicle in order to save the other, trading necrosis for prosthesis. The film’s video diary aesthetic quickly breaks into a series of melancholy musings as Mourad starts to speak directly to the camera, and eventually trembles naked on the floor in a kind of performance art. “All I do now is love my parents as I wait for them to die and for me to be knocked out by it,” he tells us.

The greatest pleasures in Agate Mousse come from simply watching the film change registers, digging further into or moving refreshingly away from its core concept: the perverse ecstasy of suffering. In many ways, this is a textbook example of an essay film in that it tries out many costumes (“I dress up in screens,” Morad declares in the voiceover at one point), but always goes back to savoring the magnificence of language: words printed on screen or spoken as lamentation. Unspeakable words, useless words. Words for words’ sake. Words that prop up and carry the film, stitching together the usual suspects of essayistic filmmaking in chameleonic fashion: a self-ethnographic gaze, intimacy rendered public, exposure of cinema’s apparatus, aesthetic playfulness, including a Meliès-esque circular framing of images, and a litany of artistic references, from Andrea Mantegna to Chris Marker.

International Film Festival Rotterdam runs from February 1—7.