“Céspedes’ colorful riff on the Western genre has its lulls but manages to engage throughout.”

One notable aspect of this year’s Cannes Competition is that it features not one, but two films set against the ’80s AIDS epidemic: Carla Simón’s Romería and Hafsia Herzi’s La petite dernière. It doesn’t stop there though, as UCR selection The Mysterious Gaze of the Flamingo, the debut feature of Chilean director Diego Céspedes, may be a less straightforward drama, but the mysterious disease that ails the inhabitants of a remote mining town in the Chilean desert in 1982 is clearly the same that runs through the fabric of its Competition brethren. Told with a tinge of humor and a pinch of drama, Céspedes’ colorful riff on the Western genre has its lulls but manages to engage throughout on the back of bright characterization and a set of fun performances.

Under the bright blue sky of Chile’s Atacama Desert a small mining community lives in relative peace. The absence of women is compensated by the presence of a small queer community of transvestites. Outside the occasional burst of homophobia, the town’s gruff men live in harmony with the queers in their midst, and they even form an audience for the drag shows in the local canteen. Cracks start to appear though when a mysterious disease finds its way to town, a disease that is rumored to spread between men when they fall in love and gaze into each other’s eyes. In the midst of all this, 11-year-old Lidia (Tamara Cortes), living with her queer family, tries to find out if there is any truth to this myth. When her ‘mother’ Flamenco Rosa (or ‘Pink Flamingo’, played by Matías Catalán) is murdered by her lover Yuvani after transmitting the disease, Lidia is taken under the wing of Mama Boa (trans actress Paula Dinamarca), the nominal head of the ‘family’, who refuses to tell Lidia where her names come from; not a thing to tell an 11-year-old, clearly. Once she finds out what Yuvani has done, Lidia is out for revenge.

The film’s desert setting and its dusty town of ramshackle houses heightens the Western vibe Céspedes infuses into The Mysterious Gaze of the Flamingo, a vibe he plays up strongly in an apotheosis that sees Lidia turn into a gunslinger straight out of a Spaghetti Western. The canteen that her queer family runs functions as a Western saloon, the ladies of the house mirroring the sex workers that so often hang around such establishments in more straightforward flicks within the genre. Céspedes even manages to weave the 20th century disease into the genre tropes through the situational comedy of a standoff between the miners and the queers. What sets the narrative apart is Lidia’s coming-of-age angle, not only in the ways she becomes wiser to the world, but also in a budding young romance with a boy named Julio. While Lidia is the focal character, after the death of the titular Flamingo the film regularly shifts its gaze to Mama Boa (played with fire in her belly by Dinamarca), who starts a romance of her own with one of the miners.

It is paradoxically in the sequences following Lidia that the film at times falters as a result of some inertia in the girl’s story, which only picks up in the final stretch. Truth be told, the matriarchal Mama Boa with her mix of snarls and empathy is more interesting than the protagonist because there is very little for Lidia to reflect on. She is merely the lens through which we view the members of her adopted family, which shapes The Mysterious Gaze of the Flamingo as a portrait of the forgotten people on the fringes of society, both figuratively and literally. This works best through Boa and Pink Flamingo, with some of the others in the ensemble getting only a scene or two to expand their story a little.

The Mysterious Gaze of the Flamingo‘s mixture of drama and comedy keeps the entertainment level up, but the tonal shifts also lessen the dramatic moments, which results in a film that will not linger long after the credits roll. Dinamarca and Catalán’s performances will hold up, and the cinematography of Angello Faccini, which captures the extraordinary but harsh light of Chile’s high-altitude plains in glorious, saturated splendor, infusing Céspedes’ well-composed frames with warmth, but taken as a whole the film shows a director with promise in search of his own voice. The Mysterious Gaze of the Flamingo is likely the most original film on the Croisette about the AIDS epidemic, but the jury is still out on whether it will be the best.