[Reporter Xu Shiying/Comprehensive Report] If one day, "heterosexuality" turns out to be a contagious terminal disease, what will the gay world look like? The French adult queer animation "Jim Queen: Muscles" directly uses the imagination to the maximum, fictionalizing the terrifying "Straight Man Virus", in which gay men who are infected will gradually become heterosexuals, instantly raising the highest alarm in the queer world where muscles, desires and parties are all at once.
"Jim Queen: Muscles" is as imaginative as it gets. (Provided by Original Entertainment)
The film was selected to premiere in the "Midnight Screening" section of the 79th Cannes Film Festival, and was nominated for the Camera d'Or and the Queer Palm Award. With its unabashed adult dimensions, black humor and queer culture, the film created a path full of "muscles" at the film festival. Such a ridiculous "straight male virus" actually comes from director Marco Nunn's long-term experience in Paris's LGBTQIA+ nightlife. He has always hoped to bring the queer world he is familiar with to the big screen, but when the creative team thought about "what crisis would be enough to turn the entire gay community upside down," an answer full of fun was born - that is, let all gay men start to "become straight."
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The movie went in the opposite direction. In the past, homosexuality was absurdly regarded as needing to be "corrected." This time the movie completely flipped the table and made "becoming heterosexual" a frightening disease. As the virus spreads, not only do the characters' sexual orientations change, but their originally familiar communities, desires, and lifestyles are also shaken.
Screenwriter Simon Barreto insists that jokes must not be "sterilized" and hopes to produce a work that truly has a flavor of queer culture, rather than polishing off all the sharp edges to cater to everyone. He revealed that the exaggerated, ridiculous and even jokes in the movie that make people wonder, "Can this really be told?" are actually the normal chats between friends.
Marco Nunn emphasized that the most important weapon in a movie is "self-deprecation." "We don't laugh at others, but laugh at ourselves first." For the creative team, the real difficulty is not even the adult scale, but how to keep the satire funny without becoming preachy; as long as one joke goes wrong, the audience may mistakenly think that the movie is criticizing a certain ethnic group, so they always place the work firmly in the position of "satirical comedy."
In "Jim Queen: Muscles", a gymnast named Lucien and a delicate young man embark on a journey to find an antidote to the "straight male virus". (Provided by Original Entertainment)
What is severely criticized by the movie is not "heterosexuality" itself, but the long-standing "heterosexual norm." Marco Nunn pointed out that society always has a seemingly natural formula for life: "Father, mother, children, house, car..." It seems that only by living according to a fixed script can we have a so-called "normal life".
"Jim Queen: Hardcore" simply turns this whole set of rules upside down. When "heterosexuality" suddenly becomes a "disease" that a few people avoid, it also makes the audience rethink who defines "normal" in the most absurd way.
Full of muscles, sexual innuendos, parties and out-of-control jokes, "Jim Queen: Muscles" is also regarded by its creators as a love letter to the queer community. At the end of the laugh, the movie still wants to talk about tolerance, coexistence and acceptance - but rather than sit down and teach a lesson, it chooses to turn the world upside down first, and then invites everyone to be themselves with a smile. The movie will also be released simultaneously in Chinese and French versions across Taiwan on October 23.
