Film as “Cutopia”: The queer creative act in Tattoo

Abstract

Thinking of a queer cinema means to reflect on how film can contribute to antinormative standards of gender and sexuality. Based on the notion that a series of contemporary movies have achieved this purpose through the staging of a queer creative act (Silva 2021), this article seeks to identify this act in the Brazilian feature Tattoo (Hilton Lacerda 2013). Through the theatricality of the musical, comedic, and melodramatic performances staged by the characters from a peripheral and marginal point of view, the film destabilizes and resignifies the historical, political, and geographic context that surrounds it, queering the resistance to the Brazilian civil-military dictatorship. Based on this perspective, the analysis examines how filmmaker Hilton Lacerda uses the theatrical to destabilize the cinematic mise-en-scène –highlighting film as a historically heteronormative language, which can also be queered. To this end, the article seeks to understand how this use of theatricality might be close, or not, to camp – and to what extent Tattoo comes up with its own geographically and historically localized version of the term. Based on a literature review of some of the main scholars who have studied camp, contrasted with statements collected in an interview with the director, the investigation questions to what extent the movie appropriates the strategies pointed out by these authors, or reinvents and deconstructs them, offering as an alternative mockery, a procedure closer to the Brazilian artistic and film tradition.