Enrique Telémaco Susini | Los tres berretines (The Three Amateurs) / 1933

tangoing between the divides

by Douglas Messerli

 

Nicolás de las Llanderas and Arnaldo Malfatti (screenplay), Enrique Telémaco Susini (director) Los tres berretines (The Three Amateurs) / 1933 [in Spanish only]

What is the somewhat prosperous owner of an Argentine hardware store, don Manuel Sequieros (Luis Arata) supposed to do in his later years, given that his children, his daughter Elena’s (Malena Bravo) fascination with cinema, his son Eusebio (Luis Sandrini) fascination with the tango, and his other son’s Lorenzo (played by a real soccer player, Miguel Ángel Lauri of Estudiantes de la Plata) infatuation with soccer. Can you blame him for turning to his third son, Eduardo (Florindo Ferrario), an architect whose career appears to be taking him into full success? His other children, in his mind, are all failures living their lives simply for their whims.

     The film begins, in fact, with Manuel’s wife, Carmen (Benita Puértolas) returning home from a movie she’s just attended with her daughter and her obviously effete homosexual friend Pocholo, who the lonely and argumentative unfed patriarchal Manuel almost immediately throws out of his house.

      Strangely, however, the film’s true outsider, and the center of its attention, is Eusebio, who as a would-be tango composer, floats in an out of his soccer brother’s massage sessions and locker room, his sister’s fascination with film, and his straight architecture brother’s worlds.

      Eusebio, does not know how to put his music to score, hiring an musician to write out his songs as he whistles them—only to discover one is already a popular tune—or, much later in the film, paying a drunken poet to put his newest tune into language, which, surprisingly, becomes a hit.

      It is Eusebio who discovers that his architect brother is in deep debt, and by borrowing from his soccer-playing brother and using his own earned funds from his new tango hit, is able to pay off his financial contracts. Lorenzo scores the winning soccer kick in his game, making him famous as well. 

     Eusebio, in fact, becomes in Susini’s film a kind a fluid, in-between character dancing his way through life, a sort of bi-sexual being who can join in his brother’s deep homoerotic sports massages and, in the next moment, realize the financial difficulties of his business-minded brother Eduardo. Moving in and out of the worlds which his father finds insubstantial—cinema, dance, and sport—Esuebio creates his own architectural space in order to create an imaginary world for which he has no particular facility, convincing his recalcitrant father to enjoy the very entertainments he has refused in his business-minded obsession.

    The film uses the tango, in this instance, to represent a sexual world in which Eusebio can at least imagine himself to intervene in a kind of multisexual relationship to the world in which he exits. He is an outsider, betwixt and between, who is able to insinuate himself into the worlds of his family member’s lives—Elena, Lorenzo, and Eduardo—in a manner that makes him almost a transgender figure, a man who can equally be at home in opposing societies.

 

Los Angeles, February 24, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (February 2024).