Marçal Forés | Amor eterno (Everlasting Love) / 2014

refusing to learn a foreign language

by Douglas Messerli

 

Marçal Forés and Vicente de la Torre (screenplay), Marçal Forés (director) Amor eterno (Everlasting Love) / 2014

 

As a university professor for several years, I basically succeeded in separating my personal sexual actions from my interaction with students, although that is terribly difficult being an openly gay professor where sometimes desperately confused and sexual needy young male students go out of their way to make clear they are searching for an adult sexual partner through their language, gestures, and attire.

     Even teenage college students often can be quite successful in their seductions, a fact I know from my own behavior at 17 and 18 when I willingly had sex with at least two and perhaps more teachers—sometimes the boundaries, when they were graduate assistants teaching courses being hard to determine. At least on one occasion, after a few weeks of sexual activity with one full professor, he felt it necessary to remind me that we was not seeking a relationship, I quickly putting his mind to rest by responding that neither was I. We became fast friends and continued over the years to have occasional sex.

    But in Spanish director’s Marçal Forés 2014 film Everlasting Love, the middle-aged professor of Chinese, Carlos (Joan Bentallé) evidently has few qualms as he nightly cruises the local woods of Barcelona about hooking up with one of his students, in this case a seemingly very shy teen from his class, Toni (Aimar Vega).

      One of my favorite critics, Justin Chang, at the time writing for Variety, nicely sets up the situation: 

 

“As he wanders through the shadowy undergrowth — which, as we see, is frequented by not only gay men, but also lesbian couples, suspicious-looking teenagers and the occasional innocent passerby — Carlos is recognized from afar by shy teenager Toni (Aimar Vega), who happens to be a student in the language class he teaches. Emboldened and aroused, Toni pays his stern, grizzled professor a visit after hours, and a hot-and-heavy tryst ensues in Carlos’ car, framed in a lengthy single take that prioritizes real-time duration over nighttime visibility.”

     Like the professor of my early youth, Carlos clearly regrets his sexual encounter with his student, and attempts to immediately cut him off. But 2014 is clearly a very different time from the late 1960s of my own youth. Toni does not see the break in their relationship with the clear eye of a desirous, sexually active teen I was, but rather, as Letterboxd commentator Patricio Cámara Rubio suggested, is a member of a gang of “lovesick hooligans that revenge on their own terms.” For today’s youth, the desperately seeking Carlos is simply a “predatory older man who had it coming.”

    What “is coming” is made clear earlier when another predator, this of a woman, is found dead in the park, leaving it rather empty for a few days, despite the fact that Carlos returns only to find the young Toni still there to seek him out. Now, of course, we have to question who is the actual predator, and is Toni involved, as he seems to be, with the gang behind the other death. And if so, to what extent? His love with Carlos seems to be quite genuine as the two, despite Carlos’ previous rejection, meet up again.

    All of this is presented, as Chang and other critics argue, in a stylish horror film style that might remind one of Alain Guiraudie’s 2013 far more powerful flick, Stranger by the Lake, which punishes a man simply because he is seeking out gay sex in the woods around a French nude beach.

     If I am horrified by the stranger’s horrific attacks on the basically innocent beachgoer just seeking sexual satisfaction, I can still accept it an open subject for a horror film; even as a youth I was warned of homophobic responses, being locked up by anonymous sexual partners, and even told stories of young men who “never came back” from where they ventured to fulfill their sexual desires.  

      And while we’re on the subject, I could even comprehend the far more terrifying behavior of the Mexican street boys who year after year were lured in by the female flesh flashed before them, even by a older, child-devouring mother, only to be paid off to suck the lovely Sebastien Venable’s cock or being sodomized in Suddenly Last Summer (1959).

     Yet I truly found it morally reprehensible for a bunch of disappointed love crazy college kids to slice up and sup on the blood and marrow of their professors and others simply because they couldn’t get the sexual attention they thought they deserved. Frankly, it reminds me of what I hear today happening in the classroom itself.

      A lonely gay professor seeking sex in a forest doesn’t deserve such a fate. Yes, he should have left the boy alone and gone after the other unattractive bears roaming the woods; but can you blame him for trying out a cute sensitive boy who doesn’t want to be bothered learning the language which he has been trying to teach?

 

Los Angeles, January 18, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (January 2024).