I had read much criticisms about Wallin's film. It is certainly a non-conventional, non-linear narration with much of experimentation going on; perhaps even excessively experimental at times.
Nonetheless that does not deny the film's value. Black Sheep Boy is a series of thoughts carefully ordained through a sequence of images focused exclusively on young men. Nakedness and full frontal nudity becomes a metaphor that elicits basic philosophical questions. The nature of Beauty, for example, as Plato's understands it, is the never-ending search of an ideal, thus the narrator of the film never ends his search for that one boy, who can only be grasped or intuited in his multiple encounters with countless nameless boys. The essence is unobtainable. And what is one's relationship to beauty? Beauty is nothing but a veil that we use to cover up the horror of mortality; according to Nietzsche beauty can be found in true art, according to Kant beauty exists because death exists, and beauty is that which reminds us of death while at the same time reaffirms our vital urges. Ultimately, death veils the real, covers and masks the certainty of death. All of this is present in the narrator's observation about life.
Black Sheep Boy however lacks the clarity that most people would look for, it can be very academic at times and this is made obvious through the constant quoting of Baba's book about "The Problem of Sex", a book that owes much of its genesis to Foucault's "Histoire de la sexualité".
