The Mysterious Gaze of the Flamingo review – haunting queer fable burns with love and menace

Diego Céspedes’s striking debut mixes magic realism and melodrama in a tender tale of an LGBTQ+ community facing fear and superstition in 1980s Chile

Here is a beautiful, raw debut from young Chilean director Diego Céspedes, a film that is part queer western, part beguiling fable, with some glorious scenes straight out of a Latin soap opera, magic-realist effects and moments of heartbreakingly tender emotion. It’s set in the early 1980s, in a mining town on the dusty edge of nowhere where a ramshackle establishment, something like a bordello in a spaghetti western, is run by a small LGBTQ+ community. By day, they serve up food to worn-out, dust-covered miners; by night, cabaret is performed in drag.

The club is also raising a child, 11-year-old Lidia (Tamara Cortes), who was abandoned on the doorstep as a baby (possibly by parents who saw how well the club looks after its own). When Lidia is bullied by transphobic local boys, the women of the club come out in force to beat the crap out of the gang. Lidia’s adopted mum is Flamenco (Matías Catalán), a transgender woman in love with a Marlon Brando lookalike miner called Yovani (Pedro Muñoz), a man with an angelic pout and murder in his eyes. They both have a disease that local people are calling “the plague”. Yovani blames Flamenco and shows up with a gun.