Li Cheng | José / 2018

finding freedom

by Douglas Messerli

 

Li Cheng and George F. Roberson (screenplay), Li Cheng (director) José / 2018

 

Godfrey Cheshire, writing on the Roger Ebert film site, describes Li Cheng’s film set in Guatemala as “ethno-fictional” hybrid in the manner of the early 20th century films of Robert Flaherty and the more contemporary work of Ulrike Ottinger and Chloe Zhao, in part because of its presentation of the landscape and culture of the Central American country, and because, the director and his crew began with research even before filming of Guatemalan life.

      Cheshire describes the film as being divided in three basic locales:

“Locale one, home, is a poor but tidy apartment where the boy [the central character José, performed by Enrique Salanic] lives with his mom (Ana Cecilia Mota), a religious woman who worries about her son. Locale two, work, is a restaurant where Jose solicits and delivers curbside meals, working alongside a gruff boss and a young couple who are romantically involved. Locale three, which we might call hookup-land, is his solitary practice of seeking sex using a dating app. The way this Cheng introduces this story element is typically casual and understated. In one scene, José’s on the street looking at his phone. In the next, he’s in an apartment with another naked guy, wiping up after sex and lying to his mom on the phone about why he’s running late.”

 

      While, I don’t necessarily disagree with Cheshire’s assessment, he forgets that perhaps the most important locale is later in film, when José visits his grandmother in the country, and where he truly visits famous Guatemalan sites outside of the capitol city.

      Moreover, the director never abandons his story for the purpose of further exploring the culture or landscape. In this film they are one and the same. José is a product of his culture, in love with his own country, and resists even his lover’s attempt to lure him outside of Guatemala City, where he has grown up.

     Li Cheng, who received his PhD in cancer research at Rutgers before turning to filmmaking at the New York Film Academy, is now a US citizen, and as a “world nomad,” may be an outsider to Guatemalan culture, but you could hardly describe him as a tourist or even a cultural anthropologist. His presentation of his characters and the culture are as intensely intertwined as a native might perceive them; and at heart, it is his character José’s own conservative love of mother and home which causes him to suffer.

      Unable to afford his higher education, José works throughout most of this film as restaurant procurer—something we don’t generally have in the US. He stands outside the restaurant, soliciting cars to stop and park nearby, running back and forth to the kitchen to serve them almost as in an old-fashioned root-beer stand, curbside. The hours are long and arduous.

      José is also gay, and in the conservative and quite dangerous world in which he lives, there is absolutely no way to bring home a date or run out nights to the local bars. His only opportunity for sex is at slack moments in the day, when he sneaks away for an hour or two from his job, and with the help of a dating app, meets up with other men in the apartments and cheap sex hotels that Cheshire has mentioned above.

       Although, he gets dressed down by his boss for taking off time, it’s also clear that he works hard and effectively most of the day, and is a necessary employee, getting on with all the others.

     That is until something totally unexpected happens. Meeting up with a young construction worker, Luis (Manolo Herrera), José not only finds himself totally enjoying their sex, but after a brief conversation with Luis, he discovers they have a lot in common; before he knows it they are visiting taco stands together, watching religious processions, enjoying fireworks, and, most importantly, as Luis shows up with a motorbike, taking a day-trip into the surround woods, which ends with both young men, without knowing it, falling desperately in love.

    That growing love might have been enough for José to help him redeem his seemingly empty life and to quell the quiet control over him that his lonely and needy mother daily employs. The day he mysteriously runs off with Luis to the country, for example, she worries for her son after witnessing him being carried away by young man, and prays endlessly to God until he returns late that night.

      She too works hard, selling home-made sandwiches on street corners for as long as she can before the police brutally move off all such street vendors. And it’s clear that she truly feels vulnerable, with no one else to turn to, even though she does also have married daughters. Her demands on her son are seemingly justifiable, which makes it even more difficult for José to pull away from his mother’s deep worry and love for him.

       Yet, that is precisely what Luis now demands. He wants them both to move away from the city into the country where he insists he will build them a new house and where he can still work on construction crews. Increasingly, in the brief but highly intense meetings, Luis changes the scenario from a desire to a demand, finally insisting he will leave José if he will not join him.

      Despite his irresolvable pulls, José finally decides to pack up his bag and meet Luis to move off from his beloved hometown and the intensity of family life, such as it is. But Luis never shows up, and a feeling of total despair and depression creeps over José’s previously quite joyous life. Yet even now, he looks after his mother and serves as an open ear for one of the girls at the restaurant where he works, whose boyfriend has just run off without her after she discovered she’s pregnant. “I’m scared,” she pleads. But in this world, nearly everyone is, José included. Will he be forced to live the rest of his life without love?

       Arriving home late one evening from a venue where the police have yet again turned street vendors away, José’s mother is attacked by thugs, her purse stolen, and her own aging body shoved to the ground. She says nothing about the attack to her son, but it is yet another burden he innately feels as the coils of his mother continue to enwrap him in repetition.

       One slightly older man, who has managed to purchase one of the new apartments that Luis and his crew have been building, meets up with José for a quick sexual interlude and tries to convince José to move in with him, even promising to help send him back to the university as an art student, which José evidently once dreamt of being. But it’s clear there is no love there, and there is still a mother to look after.

       In a strange twist of events, José’s mother insists that he must make a voyage to the country to visit his grandmother, which finally allows the young man to escape for at least a short while. In the country, he works hard daily but spends quiet nights with his grandmother who admits, for the first time, that his grandfather just disappeared one day, when José’s mother was still a child—probably at the hands of militants or the local military police. They rounded up every male, she reports. She searched for him for months, without success.   

   Traveling to the largest nearby village, José himself, with picture-in-hand attempts to trace the whereabouts of his former lover, Luis. But no one recognizes him. Finally, José moves on to visit the famed Mayan stelae carvings at Quiriguá, studying them as if they were clues to his quite desolate life.

       Afterwords, we see him lost in a suburb, searching out the nearest bus station. He stops to ask a young man standing near his motorcycle where the station is, his response being that it is about 5 kilometers away, a long walk. But almost immediately he asks José if he wants a ride, to which the young man readily agrees. And in one of the strangest endings to a film I have seen in a long while, José simply gets on the bike and they drive off. Might his new friend also be gay? Will they develop some sort of relationship? Those possibilities are not even hinted at.

 

    But it is somewhat apparent, that José is not truly ready to return to Guatemala City, that perhaps his horizons, his dreams, and plans have all shifted, although even that is opaque. Whereas, José’s life previously was something we might describe by rote, so patterned was his behavior as he moved the tripartite spaces of his existence, from home to work to an afternoon rendezvous to home again, his existence in the country seems to be utterly random as he moves off in several different directions.

      He has perhaps totally lost his way, or, to look at it another way, he has apparently found something else that is far more important, a freedom and spontaneity that he was never previously permitted. Where he goes from here is anyone’s guess.

      This is a brave and beautiful film which expresses itself simply until things grow so complex that there is no longer any explanation.

 

Los Angeles, March 24, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (March 2024).