Directed by
Bruce LaBruce.
A flamboyant hairdresser falls in love with a handsome, seemingly mute young skinhead in Bruce LaBruce's stylized, sexually explicit look at young punks in love. The Hairdresser (LaBruce), clad in gothic attire and copious adornments, spies The Skinhead (Klaus von Brucker) one day in the park near his home. He brings the seemingly heterosexual, enticingly dangerous-looking boy home, bathes him, goes swimming with him, and eventually imprisons him. After the detainee makes a surreptitious run for it and willingly returns, he eventually engages in extremely inventive gay sex with his captor. Through it all, The Hairdresser remains unaware that the object of his obsession is actually capable of speaking -- and quite willingly homosexual himself. It's only through the intercession of The Skinhead's sister Jonesy (G.B. Jones), a kooky lesbian filmmaker, that the young lovers move past their ritualized, symbolic sexual roles and settle into happy domesticity, uniforms and all. The debut feature from Canadian filmmaker and artist Bruce LaBruce, No Skin off My Ass reunited the filmmaker with G.B. Jones, his collaborator on the early "homocore" 'zine J.D.s, which helped fuel the late-'80s collision of gay and punk subcultures. ~ Brian J. Dillard, All Movie Guide
Review by All Movie Guide
All Movie Guide
lost interest.
A knowing meditation on the performative nature of sexual identity, No Skin off My Ass marks the emergence of Bruce LaBruce as a witty provocateur, if not as a polished filmmaker. Brimming with ideas about the importance of costume, stance, and attitude in the eternal dance of male desire, the film explores its themes through a narrative as fractured by financial limitations and inexperience as it is by formal experimentation and punk aesthetics. Every frame of this disjointed black-and-white feature gives the impression that LaBruce -- despite several previous Super 8 outings -- is teaching himself the art of filmmaking on a shoestring budget as he goes along. It's a testament to his nascent talent, then, that the writer/director packs so much sexual heat and intellectual weight into his often unashamedly manipulative juvenilia. As a performer and narrator, LaBruce is delightfully arch, his bejeweled hairdresser character a studied contrast in exterior placidity and inner sexual obsession. The affectless and beautiful Klaus von Brucker, meanwhile, serves as the perfect blank canvas for LaBruce/The Hairdresser's overintellectualized desires. As The Skinhead's wonderfully wise and matter-of-factly bohemian sister, G.B. Jones gives the most fluid and compelling performance; she's also quite funny, lending a strung-out vigor to proceedings that otherwise teeter between earnest and tongue-in-cheek. In the end, however, this is a film less about characters and actors than about ideas. Viewers seeking a coherent story or high production values should look elsewhere. But postmodern cineastes with an interest in the subject matter should take a look at the messier, less socially redeeming side of New Queer Cinema. ~ Brian J. Dillard, All Movie Guide