pretending to be who they really are
by Douglas Messerli
Manu Roma (screenwriter and director) Los
vírgenes (The Virgins) / 2022 [13 minutes]
In the middle of the rehearsals for a film, The
Virgins, one actor, Victór (Khalid Guessaid), reports in that he has
just been in an accident while the other, Enzo (Miquel Ventura), attempting to
perform the scene without him, quits in protest.
.png)
The director, Marco Amor (Farran Grau) determines to take over the role
himself, but where can he find the character to play his on-film lover? The
boom operator, Eloi (Ayoub Ouardi) knows the role by heart, holding up his arm
to tell the director when asked, and moves into a position that is far more
than a starring part in the small film they are making.
He continues to serve as the character in the
film and as the sound man as he gets to know, little by little, the director, explaining
his own emotional involvement in the role.
The
script appears to be ridiculous—even writer/director Marco recognizing it’s a
bit over the top—but the two actors, director and sound man, develop a
wonderful rapport that makes them both feel different as actors, lending the
overwrought script something for more exceptional than it originally hinted at.
If the script doesn’t properly say what they feel, the words they speak
as they continue in their virginal experience as actors, says a great deal. And
the questions the script refuses to ask become important issues with them
personally.
As they get ready to shoot the very last scene, no. 19, the love scene
they’re both eager to realize, Victor returns with his arm in a sling and Ana, the
producer whose name Marco has already forgotten, calls in, refusing to shoot
without the original actors.
Marco and Eloi are forced to watch as the two actors create a love scene
enacted perhaps with more convincing passion but which is far less meaningful
and real than the two figures who previously played their roles, now returned
to their original positions as director and boom operator, whispering out the
lines of the film that reveal their real love for one another.
Spanish director Manu Roma’s short film is not totally convincing given
the banality of the film-within-the-film, but the narrative conception is
rather charming, reminding the viewer of a thousand movies wherein the play or
film which is at the center of an otherwise enjoyable work is rather embarrassing
to watch: check out, for example, almost any Broadway-set film of the 1930s
where if you truly listened to the dialogue of the play itself, or even watched
the musical numbers with any sense of seriousness, you’d be out of the theater
in a minute. You stay because the film surrounding it is far more fun that the
drama pretending be theater itself.
Los Angeles, January 18, 2024
Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog
(January 2024).
.png)
No comments:
Post a Comment