Skin Flicks: The Films of Bruce LaBruce: The Raspberry Reich Review

The Raspberry Reich (2004)

Cast: Susanne Sachße, Daniel Bätscher, Andreas Rupprecht
Director: Bruce LaBruce
Country: Germany | Canada
Genre: Comedy
Official Site: Here

Editor’s Notes: The following review is part of our coverage for TIFF’s Skin Flicks: The Films of Bruce LaBruce at TIFF Bell Lightbox. For more information on upcoming TIFF film series visit http://tiff.net and follow TIFF on Twitter at @TIFF_NET.

As part of the Queer Outlaw exhibit, TIFF Bell Lightbox are giving filmgoer’s a treat with a Bruce LaBruce film retrospective. LaBruce’s films encompass a rebellious element that tests cinematic techniques and distorts its pornographic and experimental foundations. In Raspberry Reich, LaBruce infuses his unique methods with political satire and clever terrorist chic.

  In Raspberry Reich, LaBruce infuses his unique methods with political satire and clever terrorist chic.

In pure LaBruce boldness, the first scene reveals a man giving an enthusiastic blowjob to a gun while a couple fucks with abandon in an adjoining room. Somewhere in Berlin, dominatrix terrorist, Gudrun (played by Susanne Sachße), and her clan, The Raspberry Reich, kidnap the son of a wealthy German businessman. Utilizing revolutionary rhetoric through dialogue and images (the icon picture of Ché Guevara looms over a great deal of the sets), Gudrun raises a call for her cause: a sexual rebellion.

“I don’t care about what’s going on in Tibet, Chechnya, or Afghanistan! I care about my orgasm!” or “Heterosexuality is the opiate of the masses!” Gudrun exclaims. Revolutionary ideology becomes a parody in her power, but the unbridled sex she inspires becomes the major source of orgastic treats in the film.

Her sexual revolution blooms in the dialectic her minions have with their weapons and each other. As her followers question her methods she calls upon them to test the bourgeois ideology they’ve been ingrained in. All and all the film is very tongue and cheek with this aesthetic. Anchored by explicit pornography and sensational left wing oration, the plot preaches more to a slick subversiveness rather than a trashy excuse for gay porn.

Consider that Bruce LaBruce pokes fun at pop culture’s fascination with left wing revolutions and the way teenagers subvert those images in the name of fashion.

The actors’ accents are forced while the awkward dubbing adds to the satiric nature of their basic performances. At times a text scrolls or flashes across the screen, unfolding speech borrowed from Situationist philosopher Vaneigem’s The Revolution of Everyday Life. The plot drives each of the explicit scenes in the film (and there are many). However, among the onscreen oral, anal, and vigorous sex acts in the film, there’s an interesting manifesto that threads it all together.

If we consider sex as a revolutionary action, the types of sex become all the more propulsive to that action. Consider that Bruce LaBruce pokes fun at pop culture’s fascination with left wing revolutions and the way teenagers subvert those images in the name of fashion. LaBruce takes those elements back and uses them back presenting that fashion with ultimate tabooed aesthetic: gay sex.

Raspberry Reich is a social criticism that turns it’s subject in and out of itself while revealing an interesting truth: if our modern society is willing to play coy with the idea of change, using it purely as a fashion, then we can refashion it as we see fit.

While prurient scenes are arousing, they’re a hilarious provocation in a socio-political lampooning backdrop.

It’s been a full ten years since The Raspberry Reich and pornography remains a mutinous genre. Shocking in its masturbatory sections, the experimental nature in this film’s rendering is a celebration in the truculent hands of Bruce LaBruce. The Raspberry Reich continues to be a daring work with artistic guts.