Diaba, a mysterious apparition
“I guess this is the last party I throw in here”, says Diaba, wearing her crown and several necklaces, with a green eye shadow that highlights the sadness in her gaze. However, what she didn't imagine, and probably neither did director Antonio Carlos da Fontoura, is that 50 years after its release, The Devil Queen (1973) would be out ‘partying’ all over the world, with a scanned copy and the typical vitality of an anarchical film, captivating a new audience with its kitsch aesthetic, its excessive, comic, and brilliant performativity, and its impressive bloodbath worthy of a story full of tricks and betrayals.
From inside her bedroom, Diaba (Milton Gonçalves) runs a marijuana trafficking network on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro. Her first apparition is ruled by suspense. A group of men is visiting, waiting to get into her place. The camera drifts across the hall of Diaba's house, where we can see the faces of all her guests, but we cannot see her yet. Their expectation is also the spectators' expectation. Finally, a black body appears on camera shaving their leg with a pocket knife. It is with this combined image that the film constructs its main character: a mix of violence, femininity, and mystery.
In The Devil Queen, there are two intriguing moments of collectivity conducted by Milton Gonçalves: the first one showing Diaba being sad at a party in her house, when her ‘disciples’ show up at the Queen's side to find out who is ‘messing up her bandstand’; The second one during the torture scene of Isa (Odete Lara), a female character who is dragged into a beauty salon by a group of non-binary people and travesties, and ends up betraying her lover Bereco (Stephan Necessian). The latter is messing with Diaba's marijuana after being tricked by Robertinho (Edgar Rugel Aranha), a trusted ex-partner of Diaba, who wants to be the head of the drug traffic in her place.
The body of the black Brazilian actor is a defiant and inescapable presence, which uses violence to break up the conventional imaginaries of criminality associated with the black body. Furthermore, the queer performativity of Diaba's body provokes a break in the idea of criminality exclusively as male-dominated. The black body gains ambivalence in its gender dissidence, its performative excess, and its extension through the collectiveness that surrounds her figure.
Even if she is not always being seen by us, scene objects, clothes, and bright colours spread throughout the film, making Diaba an omnipresent presence. The purple, orange, or red of the costumes of her partners in crime radiate as much vitality as the energy emanated by the Queen. Everyone involved in this story mentions her, either out of adoration or with the intention of taking her place on the throne. This omnipresent figure invites us to feel her without necessarily seeing her.