Bruce LaBruce’s new film Gerontophilia is about an 18-year-old with a fetish for the elderly who falls in love with an 81-year-old nursery patient and breaks him out. It’s his biggest budget to date ($2 million). See the trailer above, with soundtracking by Oneohtrix Point Never.
Gerontophilia is still LaBruce transgressive (inspired by his friend Marcus Ewert, the teenage lover of Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs), but not as LaBruce pornographic (No Skin Off My Ass, The Raspberry Reich, L.A. Zombie, and, of course, the blood-gushing explicit gay zombie sex of Otto; Or Up With Dead People). Bruce LaBruce tells Vocativ:
It’s very trendy now to make sexually explicit films, but I’ve been doing it since the late 80s… I have already, of course, been slaughtered by Variety, which complained after Gerontophilia debuted at the Venice Film Festival to a standing ovation and much buzz that I had gone ‘soft’ and ‘limp’ by trying to go mainstream. This is rich, considering that Variety has never given me a good review because they always complain that my films are too pornographic and underground. But in my circles, a bad review in Variety is a badge of honor.
At the core of the Gerontophilia fetish is a deeply romantic, empathetic impulse. LaBruce hopes to expose that, along with the fact that old people are sexual beings, no matter how much nursery homes try to neuter them by deliberate overmedication. And…
I am now middle-aged, and I hope I will run into gerontophiles in the near or distant future who will appreciate me as a sexy, stimulating and fascinating sexual object. It’s also a good metaphor for any sort of taboo or transgressive sexual peccadillo, a celebration of anyone who goes against the grain of society or nature. Young is fun, but old is bold.
Gerontophilia is still on the festival circuit and has just opened in France with MK2 as an international distributor, US release date pending.
LaBruce has already filmed his next project — a film adaptation of his version of Arnold Schoenberg’s opera Pierrot Lunaire, with some added narrative elements of “gender diversity, castration scenes and dildos, as well as a female to male transgender Pierrot.”
