review for Hustler White on AllMovie

Bookended by swipes from Sunset Boulevard and From Here to Eternity, and littered with in-jokes about such directors as Kenneth Anger and Roger Vadim, Hustler White documents filmmaker Bruce LaBruce's quest to subsume art cinema, Euro-kitsch, and high Hollywood gloss underneath his own punk aesthetic. Strangely enough -- it works, transforming the primitivist stance of No Skin Off My Ass into a playful and entertaining yet subversive narrative style. Although it was co-written and co-directed by Rick Castro, the film contains all those transgressive LaBruce mainstays: explicit gay sex, ritual violence, copious nudity, and playful humor about all three. More importantly, though, Hustler White solidifies LaBruce's formal tics -- mannered acting, choppy audiovisual editing, and asynchronous dubbing of the dialogue -- into a coherent critique of naturalist filmmaking techniques. Both technically and thematically this film is about artifice: the artifice of masculinity and the longing underneath. Ironically undercutting every earnest message with layers of stylization, LaBruce and Castro come as close to actual sincerity as any postmodernist can. Where contemporaries such as Gregg Araki retreat into the very genre conventions that they seem to critique, these filmmakers achieve something far more unsettling -- closer to David Lynch than to John Waters or John Hughes.