This film from Lithuania promises great things: A gay man infiltrates a Neo-Nazi organisation to track down the killer of his politician boyfriend.
However, it ends up like a gritty urban episode of Midsomer Murders with backhand dealing between local dignitaries overshadowing a film that wants to focus on LGBTQIA+ rights in the Eastern European country, News.Az reports, citing The Reviews Hub.
Just before a planned Pride march is due to take place in Kaunas, Lithuania’s second largest city, the leader of gay rights movement Rainbow is killed in his home, the same day that he was pelted with missiles while announcing the march on the steps of the town hall.
His boyfriend Andrius becomes convinced that the group of black-clothed men who protested the announcement has something to do with Deividas’ death. While the remaining members of Rainbow are unwilling to push the police for more answers lest the march be cancelled, Andrius, who was never much of an activist himself, decides to join the right-wing group. He clippers his hair down to a skinhead and goes to the gym in order to look the part.
It’s not an entirely original idea for a movie; in 2016, Daniel Radcliffe played an undercover FBI agent in a white supremacist militia in Imperium, and American History X of 1998 still casts a long shadow. However, with his shaven head, black t-shirt and bomber jacket, Robertas Petraitis looks convincing as Andrius, the reluctant covert activist who must convince his new ‘friends’ that he believes that queer people are an affront to Lithuanian nationhood.
But there are other plots too, involving the Rainbow team that complicate the idea of queer solidarity. We discover that Jonas, played by Simas Kuliešius, is a trans man and that his ex-girlfriend, the lesbian Laima, doesn’t accept his transition. Creepy Bernardas, the new interim Rainbow leader, has designs on the bereaved Andrius, while it seems that Deividas wasn’t the perfect boyfriend after all. Too often, these stories eclipse the thriller element of the film.
Of these other characters, it is Jonas who is most interesting. It is Jonas, who ironically teaches Andrius how to “man up” by taking him to the gym, but this idea of masculinity as performance is wasted in a montage section straight out of a romcom and then forgotten about as Andrius begins his subterfuge. Meanwhile, the folk at Rainbow prepare for the Pride march amidst rising hostility from the media.
With the London and Manchester Pride events being recently plagued by scandals, Romas Zabarauskas’s film could be an interesting examination of the tensions within the LGBTQ+ movement, but The Activist leans towards the melodramatic with an end that is unsatisfying and which appears to sidestep the threat of the rising right-wing in Europe.
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