Lucas Santa Ana | Las Ilaves (The Keys) / 2011

unfinished business

by Douglas Messerli

 

Lucas Santa Ana (screenwriter and director) Las Ilaves (The Keys) / 2011 [10 minutes]

 

A handsome gay couple enter an apartment hardly able to control their sexual feelings for one another as they kiss, with the apartment door open, before finally Matías (Luciano Prieto) slowly closes it, depositing the key by the entrance, one of an entire collection of such keys, as his new lover Lucho (Francisco Amaya) suddenly realizes.

 

     They proceed in their sexual lust, until finally Lucho cannot resist in enquiring why his new lover, Matías has all those keys beside his door, one hook of which belongs still to his former lover, Pedro (Hernán Morán).

      In comic suspension of belief, Matías pauses to explain the many different key hooks. It seems everyone has a key to Matías apartment, his brother, mother, a neighbor, a friend in Spain, and, most significantly, his former lover. Each are given a place in which to display and protect it their entry into the house.

      But as they move in, still kissing, to the living room Lucho cannot be but rather taken aback, as he engages his new lover to a tight sexual lock-hold, that all the walls are covered with pictures of him and his former lover Pedro. As one might expect, he asks his new lover “How long has it been since you’re broken up?” “A few months,” declares Matías, “but I don’t want to talk about him.”

      As Lucho points out, however, it’s not just one photo but dozens lining his walls of the two of them. In Argentinian director Lucas Santa Ana’s film, it’s hard to for new lover to even concentrate. Clearly, as Lucho insists, Matías has some “unfinished business” with his former lover that makes it difficult for him to commit himself to their new sexual engagements.

      To prove him wrong, Matías grabs up the keys on Pedro’s hook and is ready to toss them off his high-rise apartment building to prove the relationship is over; but he cannot. He’s frozen in space, revealing that something about his past is still there which he can’t escape.

      To further prove to his would-be new lover that he’s serious, he calls up Pedro demanding he come to retrieve his keys. But the indolent former lover—a man hard to imagine that the handsome

Matías might ever find someone he loved—tells him he’s had another set of keys made, and there is no closing down of their former relationship. A telephone fight intrudes upon what might have been a romantic adventure with Lucho, the newcomer attempt to find the right keys to escape the apartment in which he is now locked.

      Finally, as Lucho finds the right keys that might lead to his escape, Matías hangs up, admitting what his former lover has insisted nothing is ever “finished.”

      Together he and Lucho bury the old set of keys in a potted plant, symbolizing that at least they’re ready to move on from the never-ending past that exists in everyone’s life. We can only presume that the sexually attractive new couple find their way into the bedroom to spend the night without all the reminders of the past Matías has not yet bothered to remove from his walls. In the light of a new day, they certainly might cull that collection into a kind of scrapbook of simple memories instead of leaving them to serve as a shrine. And just maybe, Lucho can help his new lover rid himself of the endless keys we all unintentionally collect to enter worlds which we have long since abandoned with friends who no longer have meaning to us.

 

Los Angeles, January 30, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (January 2024).