The second installment of Louise Weard’s Castration Movie Anthology is subtitled The Best of Both Worlds. In the 5-hour handicam epic, this fairly pedestrian phrase takes on a greater meaning and, by the film’s conclusion, leaves the viewer to wonder if they’ve witnessed a happy or tragic end. Moving from Vancouver to New York for Part ii, the film is largely set in a Brooklyn basement and various apartments where long, naturalistic, seemingly improvised conversations that are often captured in freewheeling, unbroken takes explore trans life. Most notably, characters debate the merits of group identity—the love and safety it might provide—and the desire for individuality.
Unlike its multi-part predecessor, Part ii consists of a single chapter in which a group of young trans women are living in what amounts to a cult in the aforementioned basement. They spend their days practicing yoga, eating hot dogs, snorting ketamine, resolving interpersonal issues in group discussions, and interacting with a grotesque, glitchy AI-face that speaks in riddles. One of the cult members, Circle (a captivating Lex Walton), is growing restless; she’s tired of hot dogs and longs for the outside world. While out on a recruiting mission, Circle escapes and finds herself at a party where she befriends Keller (Ivy Wolk), an obnoxious young woman who is dubious of Circle’s gender identity. Circle then returns to the basement to pick up her belongings, but leaving the cult isn’t that easy, and things turn dangerous and shockingly cruel.
Part ii begins with a transgressive bang, throwing the viewer into an extended ketamine orgy that feels pulled straight from a Gaspar Noé film. It’s here that the camera’s lingering, floating presence is established as it explores the people and the space, sometimes keeping its distance and sometimes careening wildly close. In Weard’s new film, the camera dramatizes the complexity of the world and her characters’ place in it with a new formal panache, including a chaotic split-screen sequence that is one of the film’s highlights. The extended sequence that details Circle and Keller’s meeting perfectly distills what Weard does so well: a balance of unpredictable naturalism and semiotic precision. Do all of the scenes and improvisations work? No. But that’s part of what Part ii has going for it. It’s a warts and all work of maximalism that achieves impressive highs while never losing sight of its ramshackle, alternative ethos.
More caustic than the first Castration Movie, this new installment seems to know that extreme times call for extreme measures. The political and social reality of the Trump administration’s war on trans lives—invoked in the film’s opening credits, which roll over footage of Trump in the Oval Office—undergirds the film’s action and ideas. Because of this, the film wades into darker waters, jettisoning some of Part i’s chosen family charm for conflict. Circle is looking for the best of both worlds: the acceptance and safety of the basement cult, and the freedom of the outside world. But there’s no shortage of people who want to manipulate Circle for their own purposes, and when she finally does make her choice, the audience is served a haunting, unforgettable finale.
Castration Movie Anthology ii. The Best of Both Worlds screens this Saturday, December 6, at the Balboa Theatre as part of the “Get Off the Internet Film Festival.”
