Vanesa Stoynova | Loverboy / 2023

a nostalgia without associations

by Douglas Messerli

 

Vanesa Stoynova (screenwriter and director) Loverboy / 2023 [29 minutes]

 

Ostensibly the story of a married couple, El (Leo Rose) and Noemi (Aixa Kendrick) who have long ago separated and are now finally signing papers for their divorce and closing down their old

house, director Vanesa Stoynova’s short film Loverboy is a subtle work actually about a trans man who has fallen in love with a black woman. Trapped by torrential rains into staying at their old home together overnight, the couple relive some of the joyous times of their relationship and end up spending one last night in each other’s arms before again facing their incompatibility despite their deep love.

 

     As with Neil Jordan’s film The Crying Game there will surely be many viewers who might not even perceive that the young El (Elena Chamorro) is a transsexual figure when as a young man he meets Noemi (Nazira Cisse) at a party which he has attended with a bunch of rowdy frat boys.

     In fact, it seems apparent that even Noemi does not recognize the boy—who she simply perceives as being a “softer loverboy” as opposed to the louts who have brought him to the party—as having once been a woman. However, as she herself admits, the moment El entered the doorway, she sought out someone who might know his name, sensing something different about the boy.

      Presumably by the time of their marriage, she had discovered his true past gender, although we are not privy to such information. All we know, years later, is that despite their deep love the marriage has not worked out, Noemi being a popular extrovert, while El centered his life on his wife, preferring to remain apart from the company of the kind of boys who nearly killed him at the party so many years earlier through demands that he share in their alcoholic binges and drugs.

    Indeed, at one point their drag what they presume is El’s dead body to the street, trying even to prevent his friend from seeing if El were still alive.

      But this film also does not delve further in the reasons for their divorce. And one can only wonder how much El’s transsexuality played a role in their difficulties. Stoynova’s film, instead, is a kind of sad dirge to a love affair, without fully sharing what that love was based on or explaining why it came to an end. Accordingly, the film provides a sense of nostalgia without providing any of the clues of what the past and the associations contained—except for a few Christmas decorations that Noemi drags out of one of the boxes they have packed up to be junked.

      What we are left are merely the wonderful performances of the two El’s and the two Noemi’s, young and old, both tentative and forceful figures who both stand out as exceptional in a room full of drunken frat boys and their mindless girlfriends. The four actors keep this film afloat as we cannot help but stare into their youthful and older faces, the first full of possibility and the second with tired frustration and, particularly in El’s case, deep sadness for what has been lost.

      The short night of the storm is simply a fragment of the feelings they must once have felt for one another, and we can only sense in those brief scenes what brought them together and tore them apart.

      Stoynova’s work is ultimately moving but unfulfilling. We want to know more about these figures; but as in real life, the director keeps us out, leaving us to our imaginations.

 

Los Angeles, March 19, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (March 2024).