Constanza B. Majluf | Santa Lucia / 2019

at the entrance to the dragon’s mouth

by Douglas Messerli

 

Pablo Simonetti (screenplay), Constanza B. Majluf (director) Santa Lucia / 2019 [10 minutes]

 

Constanza B. Majluf’s film, made in Chile, does not contain any material that hasn’t been treated by dozens of other short and feature movies. The subject here, in fact, represents a fairly common genre, young married men, seemingly happy heterosexuals surrounded by a warm home, good job, beautiful wife, and a young child, who suddenly discover themselves intensely desiring something that they have either so sublimated in themselves that it appears almost as a powerful obsession, or they gradually realize that what they felt they could control and alter, their homosexual desires, are not after all something they can any longer resist.

 

   In either case, acting upon that obsession or desire, so compelling that it seems impossible to control, it ultimately destroys everything they have created to previously protect themselves. And, as I have commented several times when writing on their works, their actions equally emotionally upend the lives of their wives and children, the wounds sometimes taking years to heal for all. Because of their own cowardice or the intense pressure of their societies to resist their sexual desires, lives are destroyed, the lovely fronts that have been created quickly collapse.

     What is remarkable about this ten-minute film is not that it restates this genre, but how beautifully it represents it. No words are spoken, no arguments occur, in fact, at least within the structure of Pablo Simonetti’s short narrative, we do not observe the relationship completely fall apart. What this film portrays with a beautifully rumbling musical score by Ignacio Pérez Marín and gorgeous and powerful images by cinematographers Matías Baeza and Liu Marino is that desire, the pull of the homosexual urge which has to do not only with sexual desire but with the very fact that such desire is defined as forbidden, dangerous, and probably destructive.

 

   The central character of this work, Sebastian (Diego Ruiz), a lovely-looking, doe-eyed young man lives at the very entrance to the dragon’s mouth, at the edge of a beautiful public park on a dark hill, where any young wealthy couple might wish to have an apartment. But what he observes from his nearby balcony are the actions of the good-looking young gay men who enter that park, and knowing what they might be doing there in the dark woods and bramble, watching them as they wait on benches and move off with others into the dark. For a man who has attempted to resist such temptation it is as if they themselves are calling out to him, luring him to join them in the woods.

 

    On this particular night, his wife Camila (Camila Hirane) has a work deadline, asking Sebastian to bed and tuck in their young daughter Adela. The couple have dinner, Camila reporting Adela’s conversations, the fact that she announced only yesterday that she wanted to be an “artist.” Sebastian laughs, perhaps even takes joy in his daughter’s dreams. Camila is amazed that her daughter has so much clarity about her life, Sebastian agreeing, perhaps somewhat less enthusiastically, that children now seem to know what they want in life. What doesn’t get said, of course, that he has not known, or if he has known, he has not been permitted the decisions he might have made. He takes out the dinner dishes into the kitchen.

      Camila argues that she still believes that Adela is more lucid than other children, her husband saying simply that it’s because she is her mother. When Adela mentions another such incident, Sebastien remains silent.

      Dressed still in his white shirt, he suddenly announces that he is going out. When she asks where, he vaguely responds, for a walk in the park. “I have to clear my head.”

      Like the martyred Saint Lucia, dressed in white, who brought food to the Christians hiding under the catacombs in Rome, Sebastian—himself named after a saint who refused to participate in the sexual desires of the male flesh—brings his own body to the men hidden in the park. The candles Lucia was said to have carried are represented here by a brightly lit cigarette, which the men sensuously share. The two men intensely kiss, the stranger, Claudio (Juan Pablo Mirado) jacking Sebastian off before he turns him around to fuck the new visitor to this world of outsiders hiding in the dark.

 

    Sebastien returns home almost in shock, his wife, observing his muddy hands, wondering what has happened. Sebastien can hardly speak, and when he does respond it is hardly believable: “I fell.”

      While the distressed Camila looks on Sebastien takes a long bath. Both look at each other without being able to express their fears, Camila responding only, “Well, tomorrow we have to get up early.”

     When he finally rises from the tub, we notice blood running slowly to the drain. Sebastian is surely no longer a virgin.

      In bed with his wife, their daughter curled up next to her, the couple might as well now be separated by an indeterminable space that will never again be breached.

Los Angeles, February 8, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (February 2024).