GLR July-August 2023

FILM

A Star Turn for The Golden Boy

O FFICIALLY CHRISTENED Eternal Youth but generally known to natives of Winnipeg by its nickname “The Golden Boy,” the statue high above the dome of the Manitoba Legislative Building seems to have been inspired by Giambologna’s Flying Mercury in Florence’s Bargello. Visible for miles around, shining gold from miered in March at Montréal’s inter national film festival and is now making the rounds of film festivals around the continent. The queer film makers Noam Gonick and Michael Walker—who also stars as the Golden Boy incarnate—and he does live up to it!—live in a rent-controlled apart ment across the grounds from the statue. They say the idea for the film came to them on their first date, after watching James Bidgood’s Pink Nar cissus and going out to an exhibit of pieces from Berlin’s Pergamon Mu seum. Noam noted the similarity in build between his potential new boyfriend and a Dionysus in the ex hibit. Before they left, and while the guards weren’t looking, they gave a 2,500-year-old stone Zeus a full kiss on the lips. Beauty is truth, truth beauty—the Keatsian credo finds resonance in this film. Nature is art, the film boldly claims. Nature is queer. The film’s title Purple City refers to a teenage acid ritual. Kids would stare into the orange klieg lights illuminating the Golden Boy until the retina burned and the city turned a psychedelic mauve. In the film, three characters drop acid and embark us on a magical mystery tour, into an underworld of

ward to a meadow in the heat of summer with rustic Anatolian goat herders in straw hats. As patron of the gymnasia and the art of cunning stealth, the Golden Boy pre sides over a boxing ring near the legisla tive steps, a neat choreography of eight young boxers clad, as it happens, only in shiny boxers. Pan out to a young Black bound to a tree in a sacrificial rite. In a dream within the dream, the French sculptor of La jeunesse éternelle , Georges Gardet, appears as building manager of the rent-controlled apart ment, the flat transforming into his workshop. All the while, the voice-over nar rator speaks in solemn tones, as if reading from a sacred text, comment ing on The Golden Boy ’s mythical di mension. Gardet meant his statue to represent Hermes (or the Roman Mer cury), messenger to the gods. Hermes was a lot of things in Greek mythol ogy—god of shepherds, of athletes, of commerce (hence the sheath of wheat he bears). He was also known as the god of magic, the supreme Trickster. It is significant that Gardet worked from live models that he found on the street—liverymen, pickpockets, and so on. Gardet seemed to go in for curly hair, bulging biceps and legs, an angelic face. The film illustrates the tie between Paris and the middle western Canadian city, originally a French outpost, having the models do a cute little can-can. The voice-over also provides in formation on the historical circum stances of the statue’s creation and transportation. The Golden Boy re

D AVID T ACIUM

PURPLE CITY Directed by Noam Gonick and

Michael Walker Video Vindaloo

angel of light who knocks on the door of the filmmaker for an afternoon tryst. The sequence continues in a birch forest where an oracle who calls herself Hermaphroditus sits by a fire chanting a Sioux war cry. In the same woods, a youth is

having been recently taken down for a cleaning, it would surely freak out the folks of Republican Florida. DeSantis would have it banned or burned. A new short documentary on the statue and its site pre

cently celebrated its 100th anniversary. It was forged in Paris, often coated in explosive dust from World War I bombs that kept hitting the foundry. Completed in 1918—hence the music of Erik Satie playing in the background—it was lowered into the hold of a merchant marine vessel and shipped across the Atlantic while German torpedo boats were still scouring the deep, as the film illustrates via animation. It was dragged by

lost souls, an oneiric journey charged with secret wisdom and sacred ecstasy. The montage of scenes follows the logic of rap turous trance. It begins in snowy winter, the legislative grounds festooned in a Milky Way of Christmas lights. For David Tacium, PhD, based in Montréal, is the author of the novel Tak ing Down the Golden Boy (2018). 46

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