Jordi Estrada | Como en Arcadia (Just Like Arcadia) / 2015

come back

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jordi Estrada (screenwriter and director) Como en Arcadia (Just Like Arcadia) / 2015 [7 minutes]

 

Using a simple weekend gathering of beautiful Spanish youths as his metaphor, director Jordi Estrada attempts to retell the story of the Golden Age in his short film Just Like Arcadia. It was a time when even immortals came down from Olympus to live with mortals, in which there was no jealousy, no punishment, no anger, no hate.

      We watch these older teens enjoying the day, sharing a picnic, swimming, simply showing of, quite unselfconsciously, they beautiful bodies, a time in which mortals lived like gods. Among the actors, given no character names, are Marc Lerch, Albert Martínez, Alberto Rosás, Alejandro Rosás, Kevin Ríos, Samuel Savage, and Mamadou Sow.       

     Only one in their midst, however, has eternal life, and he clearly stands out among the others. One day we see the immortal beauty going off with another boy to a private place in the forest where they spoke and get stoned, talking about their dreams and nightmares, the immortal boy obviously having no nightmares, while other is haunted by them. What happens in that cave is made purposely unclear, but when the mortal boy cries out for the other to “come here, don’t leave me alone please,” his plea can only remind us of the call of one lover to another to “come back,” so common in literary history, * a cry to return to his side in bed.

 

      At that very moment, the other boys return, as the immortal youth sits on a nearby rock naked.

The winds come, so we are told, and the mortals must move inside to the caves to live far less enchanted lives, while the special youth, robbed now in white moves back to Olympus.

       The narrator, clearly the boy who called out to his lover suggests that even now he cannot forget him.  

       Perhaps all gay men and even many heterosexuals recall such golden days of youth, surrounded by the beauty of their peers and one special boy to whom they were especially attracted.

But to attempt to characterize it as a special Arcadian-like moment seems tenuous at best, since the very same moments are always filled in the minds of youths with angst and fear, with jealousy and envy. The idea of an Edenic childhood is always popular, but I suggest those who write of such moments have forgotten their own youthful difficulties, their feelings of awkwardness of alienation. The vision Estrada presents seemed only possible, in my mind as child, for the handsome heterosexual boys who hung out together without feeling any sexual pulls for the others, without the embarrassment of being different, without the fear of being seen as an outsider.

       I know now, however, that that too was a myth. There is no time in youth when one does not fully feel like an outsider, even in escapes on a sunny weekend to an all-male get-together. They had girls to worry about, the fulfillment of bodily images, the challenges of seeking dominance. But it’s nice to imagine such a time, and those wonderful feelings when you wanted simply to call a beautiful friend back to you to stay a while longer in the heaven of your arms.

 

*Among the hundreds of such works is C. P. Cavafy’s poem, “Come Back,” which I translated below:

 

Come Back

 

Come back and lay your hands on me,

the sensate feelings of a shiver. Come back

when the body is both open and on edge—

 

when desire is driven through the blood

that the lips and skin did yet forget

what our hands reached out to grab.

 

Come quickly, return me to love.

Come back and hold me tight into night

still lingering in kisses and our touch.

 

Los Angeles, December 19, 2023

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (December 2023).