Ìý A Brazilian transsexual prostitute living in Paris gets abducted and imprisoned by a mysterious loner, who's obsessed by his captive's beauty. It's an interesting enough premise, but sadly writer/director Bertrand Bonello's third feature turns out to be an irritatingly ponderous reworking of the Greek myth of the soothsaying Tiresia. In a puzzling casting decision Laurent Lucas is given a pair of roles - that of kidnapper and parish priest - whilst the character of Tiresia is incarnated by Clara Choveaux and Thiago Telès.
Tiresia is split into two distinct halves, both of which unfold at the same funereal pace and end in tragedy. In the first Terranova (Lucas) abducts Tiresia (Choveaux) from the Bois de Boulogne only to see the streetwalker's beauty wither without 'her' regular hormone pills. Later the story switches to the countryside, where the now blinded Tiresia (played in this section by Teles) is cared for by a devout Catholic girl Anna (Célia Catalifo), who is angelically beautiful and conveniently mute. And it's in this rural milieu that Tiresia discovers 'his' own premonitory gifts.
"SEEMS TO BE STRIVING FOR PROFUNDITY"
There are plenty of ideas here: our obsessive pursuit of perfection, the artifice of gender, the conflict between individual belief and organised faith. Yet Tiresia always seems to be striving for profundity, with its excerpts from Beethoven's 7th Symphony on the soundtrack, the repeated footage of molten lava, and the blurring of fantasy and memory. Bonello seems to have little interest in the psychology of his characters, and the combination of the unwieldy symbolism and the oppressive mood help drain the life out of the film.
In French and Portuguese with English subtitles.
