Bodyshop

Ghosts just want to have fun! At least, if they are as horny as the queer phantom who merrily traverses the globe and stalks his past lovers in Bodyshop.

Bodyshop has been announced as one of the final features by Scud (Danny Cheng Wan-Cheung), an underground Hong Kong artist who has provoked and entertained diverse audiences across nine features. Clips from previous works, mainly Adonis (2017), enter the story and blur the ever-so-fragile line between documentary and fiction, the actors and their roles. Scud is interested in the overlap between traditional and modern, spiritual and technological ways. The characters, ghosts and humans alike, carry their stories, and in them, we see a powerful statement about the lingering effects of personal, social and political traumas.

The style of Bodyshop is, on the one hand, defiantly offhand, and its narrative moves are proudly camp. On the other hand, the film exhibits the slickness of a TV commercial, thanks to digital cameras and a syrupy soundtrack. With this disconcerting combination, Scud dares us to think the unthinkable. Bodyshop conjures a type of cinema that intermingles Pier Paolo Pasolini, Peter Greenaway, John Waters and LGBTQ erotica of all kinds of “-core”. A subversive work that takes for its tools scenes of uninhibited sex or musical interludes and points out social issues from intimate relations to a broader political outcry.

– Adrian Martin

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