Review by Tom Gunning, Film Historian

Mystery’s Choir is the first feature film by an exciting and daring young filmmaker, Loan Do. Few first films have been as formally innovative so frankly honest. Mystery’s Choir manages to be simultaneously touching and sensual as well as disturbing and painful. At one point Daena, the film’s adolescent protagonist, speaks in voice-over as she walks down a crowded New York City street, musing about reality being what takes place on the inside: “There are two worlds…interior, exterior; in the interior is really where your experience is real. But in the exterior, nothing seems real.” Never has this typically adolescent thought and experience been made so palpable by a filmmaker. Do alternates in the film between extremely stylized sequence of Daena’s home life and starkly realistic and unflinching scenes of her passionate lovemaking with Chelsea, her older lesbian lover.

		“Do presents passion and preserves mystery”

The scenes of home life use disruptive techniques of lighting, setting and casting to portray an adolescent’s nightmare of being trapped by adults that don’t understand her and that she can not experience as “real”: a mother played by a young man in drag, a father played by a very old man (who is constantly searching for the bathroom, or asking if his daughter loves him in a querulous and unsettling voice). Sets, lighting, performance and costume all capture an entrapping and threatening world. In contrast, the scenes of love making seem to dissolve the space around the lovers with an explosively sexual heat and intimacy. Although very explicit, these scenes avoid being either coy or pornographic. They are firmly embedded in the physical, but the women’s bodies are neither glamorized nor mocked. Instead, the rhythms of desire flow freely (and are not confined by cliches of acted-out phony sexual climaxes) and the camera itself seems to caress the flesh before it.

Bodies are awkward in their desire, fervent in their passion, but never made inhuman in the way they often are in pornographic images. Likewise a scene of a phone call from Chelsea to Daena at home captures the way hearing her lover’s voice changes her sense of reality, the intimate presence of the lover actually on the other end of the line, seemingly right there, blowing in her ear, embracing her body. Do has an uncanny sense of imagery. The spastic rhythms of a mobile fan, the fluttering of papers under a glass paper weight, the way a hand releases the paper sheets into this mechanical breeze - all these images perfectly express Daena’s feeling of dealing with a relationship she can’t be sure of holding on to. Nothing here is simplified and the long lasting takes where the characters stare into the camera seem to emphasize their enigmas and the ambiguity of their feelings, rather than define them for us. Do presents passion and preserves mystery.

The final scenes around the break up the lovers deliver a true sense of abandonment and betrayal without judging either of the characters. We don’t always know all the aspects of what is happening in this film, but Do brilliantly lets us in on how it feels, on the pain and bewilderment involved. This feeling touches you in a way few films do, not with sentimental cliches, but with sensual passionate scenes and a brilliant original portrayal of an adolescent’s world — from the inside.

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About: Tom Gunning

Tom Gunning is Professor of Art History and Cinema and Media at the University of Chicago. He has published over a hundred articles on film history, especially early cinema and the Avant Garde film, and lectured around the world. His writings have been translated into over a dozen languages. He is author of D.W. Griffith and the Origins of American Narrative Film (University of Illinois Press) and of a forthcoming book on the films of Fritz Lang, to be published by the British Film Institute.