I Love You, I'll Kill You

A young, vaguely effete schoolteacher takes a post in a remote village community, which turns out to be an 'ideal' society: the all-but unemployed macho cops administer downers to keep public deviations in check, but anything from whips to sheep-fucking goes in private. Teach meets his butch 'opposite', the hunter of wolves; the two recognise their hidden kinship, and become lovers. But the experience leads our hero off the rails. He starts poaching (the game is reserved for the 'masters' who descend on the village by helicopter once a year), and so his lover has to track him down...Brandner presents all this in short, seemingly oblique fragments (his own metaphor is a kaleidoscope), a method that takes a while to adjust to: it really takes a second viewing to realise how funny the film is, for example. Brandner seems to have aimed at a L'Age d'or for the valium generation, but the result is very close indeed to a rural version of Performance (right down to a similarly unsatisfactory ending).