I was drawn to Ulrike Ottinger’s Dorian Gray in the Mirror of the Yellow Press purely out of my interest in Oscar Wilde’s original novel, expecting something more in line with a traditional adaptation, something satisfying for the literature student in me. This film is decidedly not that. Released in 1984 and most recently shown during the Melbourne International Film Festival, Yellow Press is the third film in Ottinger’s Berlin Trilogy (completely unrelated to David Bowie’s more well-known but similarly extravagant Berlin Trilogy), a trio of surrealist, avant-garde explorations of camp, literary adaptation, queerness and the blending of “high” and “low” art. It’s visually stunning and chaotic, often to the point of my own confusion and frustration.

The film stars Veruschka von Lehndorff—a German supermodel in drag—as wealthy playboy Dorian Gray, who is introduced to us absent-mindedly rowing a boat suspended in mid-air, completely careless with his uncomfortably blue eyes and bright yellow shorts, immediately susceptible to being manipulated for corporate gain. This manipulation comes in the form of the villainous Dr. Mabuse (Delphine Seyrig), the head of a massive media institution. There’s a real campy villain quality that Seyrig embodies—her character is introduced walking through a sewer into a top-secret board meeting, dressed in a blazer with hilariously pointy shoulder pads, pearl earrings, an extravagant matching necklace and some particularly angular eye makeup. With three similarly intimidating women marching single-file behind her, all dressed in gold jumpsuits, and an ominous (yet hilariously jarring) score that mixes harpsichords and synthesisers, the film’s over-the-top drag-show aesthetic makes itself incredibly obvious, positively screaming satire as the agenda of the meeting commences. Said agenda, of course, is an outline for “Operation Mirror”, a cartoonishly evil scheme to manipulate the public by constructing the perfect celebrity figure. 

Dr. Mabuse finds the perfect victim to construct her celebrity drama narrative in the “beautiful and somewhat dull and inexperienced” Dorian. Lehndorff’s performance is comedic gold, characterising him as charmingly clueless and hopelessly vain—you can fully believe that the only interaction with the outside world he’s ever had is watching the news with his unsubtly named caretaker, Hollywood. Almost instantly, he falls into the world of constructed celebrity scandal, oblivious to the teams of photographers who sneakily capture his every move.

Ottinger somehow makes this chaotic world of scandal and manipulation look stunning. There are some meticulously crafted set pieces, such as a celebrity gala, designed for Dorian to have a preconstructed “chance encounter” with his love interest, opera singer Andamana. For the gala, the walls and tables are plastered from floor to ceiling with newspapers, a fun reminder of the inescapable eye of the media and the artificial nature of Dorian’s relationships. Another stunning, very meta set piece is the hallway which Dr. Mabuse uses to surveil him, complete with a shockingly high ceiling, intricate staircases, and rows of televisions wrapped up in a mess of barbed wire. Trapped within the building, much to my own shock, are the “three virtues of journalism”, three older men named Independence, Impartiality and Objectivity, completely naked save for their giant, flower-adorned hats. Similarly meticulous and bizarre are some of the other, more nonsensical scenes: a punk show in which Dorian and Andamana delicately slow dance amidst a sea of ‘80s mohawks in a mosh pit, a series of breakfasts served in extravagant triangular boxes, and a chicken-themed funeral. Ottinger undeniably has a world of fun constructing every ridiculous spectacle that pops into her mind, and it almost always left me perplexed and grinning from ear to ear.

There are a few times, however, when the high-camp aesthetic occasionally leads into cultural appropriation and an insensitive obsession with the oriental. Andamana is initially introduced as part of an opera about the colonisation of the fictional Happy Islands, in which she appears as the “queen of the local women”: half naked, wearing little other than a feathered headpiece, furs around her waist and elaborate, angular eye makeup. She appears before the opera’s main character, Don Luis de la Cerda, the Lucky Prince of Spain, who declares the islands his and immediately demands that Andamana’s character accept him as king, before moving into a rather contrived romance narrative. It’s seemingly offered as a parallel to Dorian’s own plight—the media takes the form of the demanding coloniser, taking the poor, inexperienced Dorian and sweeping him up into a fantastical love story. However, I don’t think it needs much explaining why I take issue with this, using the exploitation of a fictional colonised people as a parable for the struggles of a wealthy, conventionally attractive white man.

This bad taste in my mouth was further set off by a later sequence, in which Dr. Mabuse takes Dorian for a walk through Berlin’s “underworld”, which serves exclusively to construct a narrative that will drive Dorian and Andamana apart. This trip is arranged to implicate Dorian in an affair—namely, with a pair of women wearing gold headdresses, falsely described as “Siamese twins” for no other reason than to sound vaguely exotic, who are photographed sensually waving their hands around his face. This “underworld” sequence is focused on confusing and disorienting Dorian as much as possible, such that he remains unaware of the scandal he’s being written into, but much of that confusion comes from this idea of the exotic, from the caricatures of foreignness and queerness that he wanders past.

This focus almost exclusively on the film’s visuals also, unfortunately, comes as a result of it having very little to say about its premise. The actual purpose of the media’s manipulation is vague, if alluded to at all, seeming like the entirety of “Operation Mirror” is simply focused on tormenting Dorian. The film’s concept doesn’t end up offering much conceptually, leading to an occasional feeling that the two-and-a-half-hour runtime isn’t entirely justified—there’s only so many times you can hear Dr. Mabuse offer some vague commentary about the media (“art is an anachronism”, “a ridiculous relic”, “entertainment is what counts”) before it feels aimless and shallow, hiding its own lack of depth behind surrealist sets and opera singers. 

But who knows? Maybe the shallowness of celebrity culture is the point, and the vagueness is an intentional tool for satire. If nothing else, Ottinger’s film has got me thinking about the ways the press takes and distorts information (who’s to say Farrago isn’t constructing some evil scheme right as you’re reading this?), using some absolutely bizarre imagery and hilarious performances from Lehndorff and Seyrig. But my thoughts are trapped beneath layers of frustration towards the ways the film relies on colonial imagery and caricatures of the “foreign” to construct its campy ‘80s aesthetic. It’s an undeniably impressive film, fun and dazzling at times—it’s just that the spectacle often feels a little tasteless.