If you’ve followed Bruce LaBruce from the beginning, you can probably predict one of a few things right off the bat: there’s going to be a fetish element, male nudity, queerness, and a shaved head. And if you’re really been paying attention, you’ll be watching for references to classic film, punk, mythology and music.

Sainte-Narcisse opens with our protagonist, Dominic (Félix-Antoine Duval) at a laundromat, dozing, alternately having erotic dreams and foreboding, premonitory visions of a dark, hooded figure in the mist.

Dominic is an attractive young man, prone to being naked and taking Polaroid selfies. Narcissus, ya dig? In love with his own reflection.  Yet he is warned by a passing blind prostitute, “Don’t try to know yourself too much.”

On his grandmother’s death he learns that his mother Beatrice (Tania Kontoyanni) is still alive and living in the woods on the edge of the town of Sainte-Narcisse with her mysterious young companion, Irene (Alexandra Petrachuk). He tracks her down — bizarrely choosing to take a shower in her front yard so he winds up meeting her naked. Irene is suspicious, but Beatrice recognizes and welcomes him on sight. Which is weird, since she’d never actually seen him, as she’d been told by the nuns that he’d died in childbirth.

As the reunion continues, Dominic keeps spotting a weirdly-familiar figure among the robed monks from a nearby abbey. It looks just like him without hair or beard. In at almost exactly the one-hour mark the two meet, and indeed they are twins. Who immediately bang.

Otto; or Up With Dead People and L.A. Zombie were about necrophilia, Gerontophilia was what it said on the tin, Raspberry Reich had some sexual political fixations, and this movie: what else would a tale about a modern Narcissus chose as its fetish but twincest?

And shaved heads. Always the shaved heads.

I had the pleasure of talking with Bruce LaBruce (or BLAB as he signs himself) recently, and we talked about this fetishistic theme running through his films.

“It almost seems as if you have a checklist of fetishes that you’re working your way through.  I also noticed that the shaved head is a recurring theme for you. I suggest you have a type, perhaps.”

“Let’s say it’s an aesthetic, and yeah, a fetish type, yeah. … I find it fascinating that you can come up with so many different kinds of skinheads. I mean, you can have a neo-Nazi skinhead [No Skin Off My Ass], you can have a zombie skinhead [L.A. Zombie], you can have a Benedictine monk skinhead [Sainte-Narcisse]. So the aesthetic, the politics change, and the context changes, but the skinhead remains the same.”

For those new to BLAB, you may find it challenging to dig up some of these titles. Most are fully pornographic arthouse films, though lately the trend has been more toward non-porn erotic “industry films,” as he calls them.

“Are you concerned that there are people that will find you from your newer works and then go looking for your old works and be horrified?”

“It’s a problem with financing, you know, or casting sometimes. I think people google me and then they’re like, oh, no, this is not going to work. Because usually when I go into finance meetings with governmental agencies I really spend the first five or ten minutes reassuring them it’s not a porno.”

But has he gone mainstream? He assures me not. He’ll still be out there doing guerilla film with friends and obscure porno with his own feet if need be. He enjoys what comes with a budget and unions, but he still has depths to plumb.

Check out the rest of the interview when it goes up on the HorrorBuzz YouTube channel, and check out Sainte-Narcisse, which opens today at NYC’s Quad and via Virtual Cinema. It has more polish than the John Waters-style guerilla pornos that he made 30 years ago, but it still has that wry, multi-layered, literary and erotic sensibility he brings to all his work.

10 out of 10 Naked Skinheads