Daniel Castilhos | Fedra (Phaedra) / 2020

vortex of guilt

by Douglas Messerli

 

Daniel Castilhos (screenwriter and director) Fedra (Phaedra) / 2020 [25 minutes]

 

In all the original myths, plays, and commentaries about the beautiful young second wife of Theseus, Phaedra falls in love with her stepson Hippolytus. She attempts to seduce him into her bed, but he refuses, either because of the fact that she is his stepmother, and more commonly in the myths, because he has pledged a commitment of chastity to his favorite goddess, Artemis, the goddess of the hunt as well as chastity.

 

     Either because of Phaedra’s own sense of betrayal or in some versions became of Aphrodite’s jealousy, Phaedra tells her husband that her son by his first wife attempted to rape her. In all versions, whether through the hands of Aphrodite or through Theseus’ revenge, Poseidon or some other god or goddess frightens Hippolytus’ chariot, sending them into such a frenzy that the young beautiful boy is dragged and torn apart by his own horses.

       In most versions Theseus discovers Phaedra’s lie, she killing herself over her treachery.

      In Brazilian director Daniel Castilhos’ uncut version from 2020, Hipolito (Marlon Schuck), called Lito by his mother Fedra (Mariana Boni), is a gay boy in love with Angelo (Thomas Ghelen).

       As in the original, Lito’s father and Fedra’s husband is away concerning his shipping business for long periods of time. He has married the 19-year-old college student after his wife, Fedra’s sister, died in an unspecified accident. The poor beauty, accordingly, is not only new to marriage but locked into a relationship with an older man who doesn’t spend much time with her. In that sense, it is the worst situation imaginable for a young teenager at the very age when she should be out exploring life. Teseu has tried to encourage her to join him, but she argues that she must continue her college studies.

     Equally frustrating is that with his father away, her son-in-law is busy parading his boyfriend Angelo through the house, kissing him openly, and having passionate sex with him in his bedroom—all of which Fedra not only observes but purposely listens to through the doorway.

      Even worse for her is the fact that her aunt Enone (Anita Dal Moro) comes for an apparently open-ended visit. Enone is an outspoken woman, quite free-thinking who openly comments on Lito’s beauty, suggesting even she would go to be with him were it possible. Surely her niece should take up with Lito and leave an old man like Teseu to herself. Enone, may be heterosexually open-minded, but when Fedra tells her that Lito is not interested in women, and that he is having an affair with Angelo, the aunt is quite taken aback, suggesting that surely this is just a passing phase since it would be a shame to waste all that beauty on sex with a man.

      Angelo, himself, is quite outspoken about Fedra’s beauty and at one moment when the boys are playing in the swimming pool even flirts with Fedra. Actually, he simply treats her like the attractive young woman she truly is, suggesting she attend the swimming meet in which Lito is competing. But it is Hipolito seems jealous of his lover’s attentions to the girl, and we realize in his discomfort about his young mother that there are obviously other feelings about her that he is hiding, whether they be a kind of disgust over the choice of his mother’s sister or, as we soon discover, his own heterosexual urges is not made clear.

 

     But in the very next scenes, as Fedra watches her step-son step naked out of the shower, turning to leave, he grabs her and brings her into his bed for sex which she clearly enjoys.

      Guilt almost immediately sweeps up these two individuals into a vortex not entirely of their own making. Lito refuses to answer Angelo on his cellphone, while Fedra breaks down into tears in the shower.

      In a kind of antiphon, the two central characters admit their “crimes,” Lito confessing his acts to his lover Angelo, who at first his shocked by his acts but when, for the first time his friend insists that he loves him and they he had sex for the first time ever with a woman out of a sense of the forbidden, finally suggests he leave the house and move in with him. If Hipolito may feel that he does not deserve Angelo’s offer given what he just admitted to, it doesn’t take him but a few moments to agree, soon after pulling a suitcase down the stairs and jumping into Angelo’s waiting car.

     Fedra meanwhile, admits to her auntie that something terrible has happened, an event which Enone quickly intuits when she sees Lito moving out. Unlike Angelo’s expressions of continued love, she demands her niece immediately deny the whole thing, that if something comes up, she should put the blame on him.

     Something, so to speak, does come up, as Teseu returns home that very evening to find his young wife, having taken drugs, dead in the bathtub.

      If we have long felt the unsettling chords of José Florēncio’s music track throughout this teleplay, we now feel a different kind of nauseating feeling. If as Vito Russo long-ago taught us most queer individuals have had to die for their sexual acts in the end, so too through cinema history have women been forced to die for the sins of the male hero. To replace the pattern of homophobia with a somewhat misogynistic ending does not resolve the problem—although we all know that if Enone tells what she knows to her brother they may be further vengeance.

      Perhaps Castilhos felt that in killing off his Fedra he was evening the balance for all those centuries in which the innocent Hipolito had to die for his young mother’s mendacity. If nothing else, the gay man’s acceptance of his lover’s failures, shows at a way out from all those centuries of macho reaction in response to sexual infractions other than overpowering guilt, vengeance, and suicide. Queer people have always suggested to heterosexual beings that sex is nothing more than what it is, not something that enslaves one to another.

 

Los Angeles, December 20, 2023

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (December 2023).