Daniel Nolasco | Sr. Raposo (Mr. Fox) / 2018

performing death

by Douglas Messerli

 

Daniel Nolasco (screenwriter and director) Sr. Raposo (Mr. Fox) / 2018 [23 minutes]

 

Brazilian director Daniel Nolasco recounts the life of his partner Acácio (Geovaldo Souza) from day he discovers that he was HIV positive in 1995 in this work which he describes as a “staged documentary.”

  

   One shouldn’t, however, imagine a coherent narrative for the man the neighbors called “Mr. Fox” for a childhood appearance in the play The Little Prince and the Fox. Rather, Nolasco creates what Rich Cline describes as “a freeform collage with a dramatic core,” the interplays scenes of a active sexual life of S&M and leather sex, along with dreams, and the social fears of what AIDS represents, as well as hinting at the spiritual highs and lows of Acácio and his sexually-involved friends.

      At one moment, fearing that he nearing death, Acácio invites all of his friends to a party. Yet with the pills available and a daily regimen, he survives, despite hospitalizations, yet toying with the reality of his own death—at one point inserting a gun again and again in his mouth, using it like a dangerous cock as he masturbates.

 

      There are several moments of him having hot leather sex with actors Stefano Aguiar, Norval Berbari, Cássio Borges, Jonnatas David, Jerry Gilli, Diodi Lucas, Delcides Neto, Kassio Pires, Thauan Portillo, Leandro Rabello, and Marcos Vinícius.

      Dreams and fables also play a significant role, as Acácio describes going to the beach with friends, having to take a circular staircase to reach the shore before suddenly realizing that his friends have abandoned him, the staircase having disappeared and there is no way to return. At another point two men with an ax seem to threaten him in a forest, but actually when they come across his dead body, one sucks up the blood and shares it with the other in a long sensual kiss.

     Both of these dream-fables, obviously, emanate from the fear and realities of AIDS, the feeling of abandonment, loneliness, and the recognition that even in death the blood of body contaminates all who have intimately shared it; having symbolically drunk of the dead man’s blood becomes a kind of death wish in itself.

      What this film ultimately says about gay sex and AIDS is unclear. It reads more like a purgation of the love, fears, memories, and pleasures by a gay man who survived the bleak pronouncement of the disease longer that even he might have imagined back in 1995.  

 

Los Angeles, February 2, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (February 2024).