Renato Turnes | O Amigo do Meu Tio (My Uncle's Friend) / 2021

loving chulé

by Douglas Messerli

 

Renato Turnes (screenwriter and director) O Amigo do Meu Tio (My Uncle's Friend) / 2021 [8 minutes]

 

Based on the fact that as a child, Brazilian director Renato Turnes’ father bought a 1980s state-of-the art cam-recorder, one might have imagined Turnes’ investigation into those films captured when he was a young boy, shot particularly on birthdays, would reveal a world of issues hinted at in his remarkable comment, “Being a gay child is dangerous.”

    But although I waited for the evidence about which we all know, but seldom get the opportunity to see on film, his father’s recordings reveal simply a child disinterested in most of his father’s major joys, football, street-car racing, automotive stunts, and the gatherings of his father’s and uncle’s macho “gang.” 

    Clearly, his son’s disinterest in continuing with the childhood football game he has caught on film, the chubby boy’s disdain of the automotive feats, and his general attempt to hide from his father’s camera was a disappointment to the father, although that is never revealed on the camera itself. The father, instead, seems loving and attentive to his son, trying to bring him out of the cocoon of his own bed-tent, his hiding behind the masks of raised shirts and pajamas in order to bring him out to the attention of his beloved camera.

     But it is only when we watch the recordings of one of his uncle’s congregations of his best friends, all eating around the table as if appearing in a special photographically framed session of half-naked men holding Christ, in this case the “dangerous” young gay boy, by the painter Marsden Hartley. The adult narrator describes the situation: “Do you also feel, as I did, that mixture of attraction, fear and impossibility that a menacing gathering of virile men provokes in a small gay child?”

 

     We don’t see any other boys at the table, but apparently there were others, because afterwards, we are told, the men took the children on motorcycle rides. The young Renato describes his own irresistible attraction to his uncle’s friend Chulé, who determines to take the boy on the motorcycle adventure. “He started his motorcycle engine, and since I wasn’t brave enough to hug him tightly, he turned to me and said, ‘If you don’t hold on tight, you might fall.’” He continues, “I still feel his red Marlboro breath from that sentence, spoken with the assertiveness of an adult who entertains children.” Perhaps reading in just a little to the older man’s comments, but with a nonetheless convincing childhood memory, Turnes asserts, “He didn’t have to speak like that, I wouldn’t have listened to him anyway.” Does that mean, he didn’t hold tight, that his was still afraid to given in to his childhood sexual desires? It doesn’t matter. It was January 10, 1988, and even the young Renato already knew it was dangerous to be a gay child.

    The years pass as the father’s cam-recorder reveals. The boy’s pet dog Dolly has her babies on camera, and the young Renato grows up to be a handsome young man in a tuxedo. As we glimpse a picture of a much older Dolly, the narrator describes that “Chulé was the first person in their life who died of AIDS. He died in 1990. And I followed his departure from a distance, the sad news I heard of in the adults’ conversations.” The most important comment is this short film is the narrator’s penultimate comment, “I love you Chulé,” his father shown in a blackened image of a man photographing the world around him. As we observe the 1993 short clip of the boy in his tuxedo, the narrator comments, “I remember that handsome man, his deep voice, his cliché[ed] rascal ways, the smell of his sweaty beer, and I can’t help feel the presence of the virus, the first sensual experience I remember.”

      What doesn’t get said is that this film was recorded at time in which, although we know Chulé might have been infected by a woman, by a drug transfusion, or any other of several other possibilities, that it is likely, given the year of 1988, the disease was passed on by his sexual relationship with another man. Was it Renato’s uncle? Another of his uncle’s “gang?” We have no answer, but this short film brings up all these issues, and puts us into a world where Renato’s father might never have imagined his cam-recorder might ever take him, into a heart of darkness that included, without his knowledge, his very own son.

 

Los Angeles, December 10, 2023

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (December 2023).