Drag is not — or at least need not be — political, let alone radical in its politics. But when such artistry is targeted by politicians and policies that aim to make it disappear from public view altogether (whether in the name of country or church or children or any combination thereof), drag artists are left with little recourse than to make their own bodies and bodies of work stand for something. In Agniia Galdanova’s fabulous, if sobering, documentary “Queendom,” audiences are called to witness the begrudging radicalization of Jenna Marvin. The young queer nonbinary drag artist would rather be designing and showcasing her work with little worry. Yet at every turn, the increasingly violent anti-LGBT policies of Putin’s Russia push her to find some way out and through.
A lithe young Russian with no hair on her head and no eyebrows to speak of has painted her entire head pearl white. She’s also painted on a few clown-like black and white flourishes on her face (teardrop outlines around the eyes, bold black lines around the contour of the mouth). With a frilled white collar, a matching corset, a pair of black leather boots and gloves (and a stylish eggshell coat for warmth), she sets out on her day. That first entails doing an impromptu photoshoot amid the snowy, icy landscapes that surround her and, later, going grocery shopping. Only, as these first scenes in “Queendom” make clear, such a simple and otherwise ordinary day is made anything but when Jenna is asked to leave the grocery store.
The incongruity of such a scene (two officers assert they’re not kicking Jenna out but actually just asking her to leave since her outfit is “disturbing the peace”) forcefully places audiences squarely in the untenable situation Jenna cannot escape. She is just trying to live her life. But such a life is becoming increasingly impossible to sustain, for Jenna is now in rural Russia in the wintry Siberian town of Magadan. 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).
“Whenever I go out in character, I’m on top of the world,” Jenna tells the camera. “No one, even here in Russia, can scare me.” It’s a strong sentiment which feels in line with the creatures Jenna turns into via makeup, wigs and inventive attire. At times, Jenna goes out in public looking like an alien being who befuddles everyone around her, especially when she crawls through the floor of the subway trains or merely saunters down the grocery aisle. At others, all covered in golden foil, she calls up a sense of a void that makes the amusement park around her feel all the more empty and depressing. If the world is to see and treat her as an “other,” Jenna’s public performance art seems intent instead on finding strength in such visibility. That’s the work that’s garnered her close to 200,000 followers on Instagram alone.
But the gritted resilience Jenna’s outfits and performances so exalt (prickly images meant to spook and unsettle) isn’t all there is. Yes, “Queendom” captures striking scenes wherein Jenna (wearing little else but barbed wire or adorned with a coral-like wig) showcases the sheer breadth of her talents. But Galdanova’s gift here lies not just in revealing Jenna’s more vulnerable moments — those painful phone calls with her grandparents, frantic moments before key visa appointments and tearful episodes following hateful physical attacks — but in refusing to see them as detached from the very armored masks Jenna wears on any given day.
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. The more Jenna exhausts herself, the more the moment of sublime beauty becomes one of intense, harrowing pain. It’s tiring to be so resilient. Yet that’s all she can ever do amid a world that would rather silence her.
“Queendom” is both a powerful portrait of a queer artist as well as a sly call to arms. By extension, it also serves as an example of how one and the other aren’t so easily uncoupled. Jenna’s activism is tied to her artistry precisely because her very existence is a political target. In choosing to live defiantly, and to showcase her own journey for the entire world to see, Jenna has paved a way for herself to find in her outré drag art a way to reshape the world so she won’t ever have to keep hiding. Not so that she won’t stand out but so she won’t have to constantly have to stand up.
