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‘Queendom’ Review: Fabulous Doc Spotlights the Beauty and Cost of Queer Artistry in Putin’s Russia
Agniia Galdanova’s Oscar-shortlisted doc on a Russian drag artist and activist Jenna Marvin is a heartbreaking portrait of strength and resilience.
She’s not in Moscow, anymore, a city that had at first seemed more open to Jenna’s drag and yet which proved just as inhospitable when her political activism — public, defiant, unabashedly queer and avant-garde — made it so she had to move back in with her grandparents (who cannot help but further enrage their beloved grandkid by asking her to tamp down their very assured sense of self). That’s why arguably one of the most affecting scenes in the film comes when one of those singular shoots meant to make a spectacle of one of Jenna’s outfits (a dark bodysuit with long spindly fingers and a matching insectile headpiece) all but breaks apart. Toke Brorson Odin and Damien Vandesande’s eerie electronic music scores the soundless screams Jenna expels in agony as she writhes around the sandy desolate ground and violently frolics in a nearby puddle.
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