TATTOO OF REVENGE by Julian Hernandez https://itunes.apple.com/us/movie/ta...e/id1479277556
Grade: A
Although the most visually sophisticated and spiritually inquiring exploration of image-making since Brian De Palma’s FEMME FATALE, two lines of dialogue express the radical compassion and unexpected social scope of Julián Hernández’s TATTOO OF REVENGE:
“Stupidity knows no limits.”
“You’ll get tired of not trusting people.”
One photographer (gorgeous Irving Pena) recognizes the signature style—the vision—of a dead photographer (intense Diana Leon) in a newspaper crime photo. Thus he embarks on an investigation that synchronizes with her own grief. His desire and her agony reflect in the individuals populating the film’s cross-section of Mexico City. The narrative proves as sociologically broad in milieu as exploitative psychic radio shows to exploitative trans porn and as culturally deep in references as classical opera to classic Mexican cinema.
Hernandez always enthralls with formal daring and even playfulness (here: classic-TV aspect ratio, black-and-white “realism” combined with color tv screens and intercut with color flashbacks, and his magisterial existential tracking shots). And, of course, gay sensuality draws out capacity for physical expression and connection. Now, through cross-cutting, Hernandez achieves both expansive power and poetic poignancy, as when seemingly unconnected characters simultaneously linger over how Leon’s Aida haunts their consciousness.
No wonder. In her own quest to brand/tattoo unpunished rapists, Aida’s androgynous femme fatale slips unnervingly into character to expose the hidden motivations of victims, clients and compatriots. Leon is spectacular, as in her opening scene of hilarious seduction or when with maternal sternness she reveals the lies of a spoiled young woman who seeks revenge, not justice. Aida’s own spiritual tattoo of bitterness will be transformed by the capacity of others to surprise her by their heroism and their love and their own daring mastery of image-making as political and personal statement.
TATTOO OF REVENGE should be heralded as the epic of the #MeToo era, but its humane and necessary balancing of the culture’s “limitless stupidity” with fundamental need for trust, here made unabashedly romantic, makes it as unfashionable as it is essential.