Reseñas de la crítica

A dense thicket of sounds, superimpositions, and in-camera effects, shifting between black-and-white and color, The Wild Boys is both liberation and horror, anarchic and highly constructed, brave in its focus on the body as both erogenous and alien zone.

A gender-detonating fantasia that shifts from monochrome to bursts of decadent color—labial pinks, violent violets—and back again, The Wild Boys follows only the imperatives of its writer-director’s glut instinct.

A supremely assured piece of craftsmanship, evincing an active creative engagement and ample imagination in every minute of its nearly two-hour runtime, but for all the maturity of the command on display, there is little about it to suggest it was made by an artist who was trying to put adolescence behind him.

It’s hard to untangle the film’s many bizarre indulgences, which at times seem intended to titillate as much as disturb, and yet somehow do neither. It’s all a bit too ludicrous to be sensuous or unsettling, or ultimately all that insightful.

In turning visual conventions on their head, Mandico forces the viewer to rethink the notion of spectatorship in watching women onscreen. The viewer knows logically that the young men are being portrayed by biological women, yet is denied the visual pleasure of seeing images of ‘women’ onscreen, and therefore unable to impose an erotic fantasy upon them.

Some might be quick to suggest Mandico’s similarities with Guy Maddin due to his new film’s wacked-out narrative. . . . But Mandico is an avid student of Walerian Borowczyk . . . , and a first description of Wild Boys might be Goto, l’île d’amour by way of Hugo Pratt. Mandico himself, by the way, evokes Jules Verne and William S. Burroughs as antecedents, while the Venice catalog suggests a cinematic lineage from Méliès via Cocteau, Anger, Bava, Juran to Fassbinder.

This film represents a particularly elaborate form of snow-globe cinema, creating its own sealed world and inviting you to enter it or just admire it from outside. In literary terms, it's close to the self-enclosed verbal and imagistic universes of Raymond Roussel and Ronald Firbank, and the end credits thank both William Burroughs and Jules Verne: if those two writers had pitched camp together on some faraway shore, this might be the kind of fantasy that might have jointly concocted.

The film's wild boys, whose dicks (literally) fall off across black-and-white tableaux that are deliriously alive in theatricalized detail and innuendo, are played by female actors — all the better to underscore Mandico's belief that gender is as surreal as the high that must have willed this unforgettable whatsit into being.