If Pink Narcissus were remade for the nineties, here's what it would look like: sexier, more self-conscious, a riper kind of camp. Director Eric de Kuyper previ­ously made an impression on San Fran­cisco audiences with Casta Diva, Naughty Boys, and A Strange Love Affair — all movies in which the stories are drowned beneath operatic tableaux of irresistible, unattainable men.

Pink Ulysses is a step in the direction of a tangy and intoxicating new gay style. Eric de Kuyper is a bit like Homer's Penelope, who weaved by day and undid the same work each night. Pink Ulysses is a patchwork of ideas and heavenly bodies, gingerly held together by the thread of Ulysses' 20-year-Iong return from Troy. There's the narrative — some nonsense about Penel­ope fancying her son more than her long­ gone Homeric hubby — which is shot in the style of those Italian Steve Reeves pictures, all saturated color and anachronistic historical detail — Penelope carries a patent leather clutchbag!

The other part of the film works like footnotes which explore fantasies: an extended black-and­-white jerk-off scene involving a boy and his mirror, a long anecdote about a hus­band and his inebriate wife, and pop-video inserts to CJ giddy mix of music, from Zarah Leander to Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring. Give Ulysses all your attention — not just for the loin-clothed beefcake and caustic camp, but for the sleepy, slow passages and intellectual pirouettes. Whichever way you look at it, Pink Ulysses is clearly going to be one of the year's cultiest gay movies.