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Wednesday, May 14, 2003
7:30
BODY DOUBLE X
Drag is a form of acting, of assuming identities, of mastering the behavioral disguise and the radical makeover. French artist Brice Dellsperger restages feature films as a way of exploring drag as the masquerade of everyday life. Dellsperger's outrageous acts of restaging are themselves acts of drag. He slips not so neatly inside pre-existing narratives, brazenly discarding the picture track, then leading his actors through a grand Milli Vanilli lip-sync session over his newly formed images. Dellsperger's dizzily ambitious undertaking Body Double X reclaims a 1975 French romance, then starring Romy Schneider as an aging porn star. Schneider as well as every other character is replaced by the singular Jean-Luc Verna, a performance artist of slippery gender, who is keyed into the scene, sometimes six or seven times. A cacophony of clones builds as Jean-Luc turns each bent role into a raunchy aspect of narcissistic splendor. Body Double X is a fever dream of cross-dressing in someone else's closet.
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