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On VOD: Pick Yourself the Pink Punk Dystopia of 'La Pietà'

By Jason Adams | Film | January 18, 2025 |

La Pietà.jpg
Image sources (in order of posting): Film Movement,

Rising up from the uncanny valley between Todd Solondz and Pedro Almodóvar—the earlier, filthier brand of Almodovar, that is—has appears Spanish director Eduardo Casanova. A former child actor turned Drag Race judge and film-maker, the now 34-year-old Casanova has made several shorts and three feature-length films to date, with his second film, 2022’s La Pietà (Piety), finally getting a digital release here in the U.S. this weekend. Not for the faint of heart or belly, this tale of true smother-love is a cotton-candied labial dystopia you won’t, you can’t, you shan’t soon forget.

Casanova’s works seem especially focused on setting mental or physical deformities against a sea of Shelby’s signature colors “blush and bashful” (that’s a Steel Magnolias reference for the heteros out there). This juxtaposition of recognizable marketable beauty standards slammed against their repressed opposites is a frisson the director mines delight from. Think The Elephant Man meets Willy Wonka; think Wes Anderson’s Titticut Follies. More than one of Casanova’s works document the travails of a woman with a butthole where her mouth should be—including his first feature called Pieles (Skins) which is (rather unbelievably) right now streaming on Netflix, so go experience that for yourself!

La Pietà, bluntly named after the iconic Michaelangelo sculpture displaying the mother Mary cradling her dead boy Jesus in her arms, is its own toxic pink cloud of Oedipal anxiety. Acting legend Ángela Molina (who’s appeared in everything from Luis Bunuel’s That Obscure Object of Desire up through Almodóvar’s Broken Embraces) plays Libertad, whose name (translating to “freedom”) is meant in the fully ironic sense here. Mother to Mateo (Manel Llunell, a Latin Timothée if ever there was one), Libertad makes Norma Bates seem downright restrained. It’s as if the umbilical cord throttling mother to son never got cut and instead grew gargantuan-like, so the twosome built their Pepto-pink apartment right there in its cradle.

A slight and sickly teenager, Mateo knows no world outside his mother’s shadow—she’s there to scrub his back in the tub and cuddle up to his back as he sleeps, with not a moment nor breath severed between. But Mateo’s delayed coming-of-age seems to be getting a hold of him as the film kicks off, with the news his doctor’s just delivered—Mateo’s got a great big tumor burting upward and outward in the center of his brain, and surgery with a long, long recovery is on the imminent menu. In a panic the teenager attempts to flee, making it just to the hospital doors before collapsing—the first of numerous such bungled attempts; bildungsroman is desperate slapstick in Casanova’s hands.

Around this same time Mateo also happens to learn that his father Roberto (Antonio Durán Morris) didn’t die when he was a child—that was just a story his mother concocted when they were abandoned by him, and Roberto actually lives just a couple of houses down the street with his new wife Marta (Ana Polvorosa). Ashamed at his abandonment, it appears that Roberto has tried to kill himself, so Marta has come to plead to Libertad for a father-son reunion—and I should add that every one of these characters is miles more fucked up than the one before them; this is Almodóvarian Melodrama with a stiff meth chaser.

And I should also add that all of this outrageousness is occasionally interrupted by a sweeping side-story about a soldier in North Korea and his family? Desperate to escape their Dear Leader’s nefarious daughter-murdering schemes while simultaneously struggling with a country-wide cult of personality, this is a truly wild WTF juxtaposition of plots that swings big, that’s for certain.

Thunderously obvious in its mirrored symbolism of cult-like brainwashing tearing apart family structures while also being wickedly and hilariously audacious in its full and total embrace of camp bad taste, I can’t imagine anyone will walk away from all of this without an appropriately outsized opinion. Probably one fully at odds from the person sitting right beside them. Casanova is taking no prisoners— get it, cuz North Korea—in La Pietà. And personally speaking, good god I loved to see it. Sexy, bratty, one-of-a-kind queer punk bullshit—it makes me feel alive! I’ll be lining up for whatever Casanova drops on us next—hopefully there’s enough butthole-mouths for everybody!