Vladimir Durán | Soy tan Feliz (I Am So Happy) / 2011

boundaries

by Douglas Messerli

 

Vladimir Durán (screenwriter and director) Soy tan Feliz (I Am So Happy) / 2011 [14 minutes]

 

The plot, what there is of it, is so very fragmentary in Columbian-born director’s I Am So Happy (a short filmed in Argentina) that it is difficult to actually determine the real relationship of the figures it portrays. The standard description of film, evidently released with the film itself, reads:

 

“Fragments of a Saturday winter day. The Vittenzein brothers are alone at their family house. Mateo stops by to pick up Bruno and Camilo and drive them to the country house where their mother awaits. A sudden break slam brings them into the intimacy of a waste land.”

     But this film obviously intimates more complex relationships. The first scene, in fact, concerns the handsome Mateo, accompanied by his cousin Bruno, in a unisex barber, where in a rather mysterious series of comments Mateo (Lautaro Noriega) asks whether or not Bruno (Iair Said) has ever used gel on his curly mop of hair. Bruno insists that he hasn’t except once, demonstrating how it changed his look. The question seems meaningless, but it also appears perhaps as a suggestion, a hint of the possibility of improving his looks. Even the barber picks up on the comment, asking whether Mateo wants to put gel on his hair, but, in fact, Mateo’s curly locks are to be completely shorn by the barber who gives him a military-style haircut.

    Bruno looks on admiringly, but when he takes out a cigarette to smoke and refuses to put it away, Mateo sends him outside the shop where he continues to stare back in at his cousin, with pictures in the window demonstrating beautiful male hairstyles, while Mateo’s locks are shaved off.

     We already suspect, by the strange focus on gender (Bruno asks if this is a unisex hair salon) and by the very look of desire in Bruno’s eyes, that something far more than what is being spoken is occurring in this scene. And we also begin to suspect that perhaps Bruno is slightly mentally challenged, a teenager behaving more like a child.

      Back in Bruno’s home where he lives with his brother, the 10-year-old Camilo (Tomás Wicz) and their sister Andrea (Mariel Fernández), the younger brother evidently having invited over his friend Eduardo. We now see Bruno washing his face off in the kitchen sink while nearby Andrea has been drawing a tattoo on Camilo’s friend Eduardo, “like the ones from prison.” Bruno asks if he’s going to prison, Andrea joking, he has already been there. 

      Almost immediately after, we see Eduardo, Camilo, and Andrea sitting by the pool as Mateo arrives, Camilo particularly happy to see him. Bruno looks down upon the group from a small window of his bathroom upstairs. Inexplicably, but perhaps as a dare from Mateo, he and his young cousin lay down and dip their heads into the small pool, Camilo crying out since his hair is now dripping wet, Andrea insisting that he cannot use his jacket to dry off.

 

      Bruno, meanwhile, stares at himself in the mirror, checking out his underarms, his torso, and particularly his hair as he takes up a scissors and begins to cut it in the manner of his cousin’s new buzzcut. Once more, it is clear that he is attempting to immolate Mateo, that he somehow not only wants to be like him but to be him, or least become him. The love between the two is clearly intense.

      What follows are a series of in-house activities between Mateo and the two boys, as he plays games with them and watches them do a rather remarkable tap-dance routine together. Andrea attempts to show Camilo how to put toe-nail polish on her feet, but he fails to do it successfully. Mateo finally lays down on the floor for a nap with Camilo. 

    What these scenes in the house together add up to is a representation of an intensely loving family, who enjoy living together and particularly a pleased for the presence of their cousin Mateo, Camilo in a quieter way demonstration almost as much love for him as does Bruno. Their two major activities, painting his sister’s nails and tap-dancing with his friend also suggest issues of breaking down gender, dancing even today often seen as an unmanly activity as certainly it might be thought to learn how to paint one’s toenails a scarlet red.

       Of the three major settings of this film, the last car trip is the most important. Here, the subject shifts to issues of death as Mateo, the driver, comments on the insects who are dying on the car window as the auto speeds along. Bruno, sharing the front seat with Mateo asks Camilo to hand a water bottle from the back seat and in the process spills some of the water, claiming he is now all wet. Laughing, the two only men begin slapping at one another.

       Soon they pass a burned-out car, Mateo commenting someone left it there, Bruno adding it was a stolen car, Mateo observing “They set them on fire.” The wide-eyed Camilo takes in all that they are staying with great interest, as soon after they pass a small roadside shrine with a Madonna and other religious relics, perhaps the site of a local death. But almost immediately after, Mateo quickly breaks the car, jumping from it as he shouts out “Bruno, no,” demanding he stand still.

       Clearly Bruno has, again explicably, jumped from the car, Camilo watching from the backseat as Mateo chases after him. Finally, Bruno stumbles and falls into the grass, near him. Calling him a dumbass, Mateo insists that next time he tell him. What he is to be told is not established: his cousin’s sudden urge to jump, the fact that he scratched himself, just way to return the attention to himself? Nothing is explained except perhaps cinematically, as the two men begin to wrestle, and then loving poke at one another, Bruno taking out a metal flask of liquor and drinks.

     Camilo, having left the car, watches from the distance, at moments almost turning away in some pain and confusion as eventually the heavyset Bruno sits of Mateo’s ass and refuses to budge, in fact moving up higher onto Mateo’s back, even near to his head. Camilo has wandered back to the roadside shrine observing the third major symbol of death, after the windshield insects and the burned-out car. A phone begins to ring from the car, and Camilo hurries back, digging through their luggage to find the cellphone. He answers, saying very little after his original Hello. It turns out to be his and Bruno’s mother calling to know where they are.

        The men, in the meantime, continue to gently hit one another. Until finally Bruno declares “It’s hot,” an snuggles his head on Mateo’s chest. “It’s really hot,” Bruno continues and he rolls over once again onto Mateo’s body. Mateo reports that he looks like a bald baby with his newly shaved head.

 

      Camilo, having hung up, again exits the car and shouts out to Bruno that it’s their mother. Bruno moves his head down from Mateo’s head slowly to his cock, as Mateo politely protests, “No, Bruno.” Bruno continues, as Mateo rises, “Hey boundaries,” moving away as Bruno rolls inconsolably on the ground rolling back forth as if in deep sorrow. Mateo walks slowly back to the car and Camilo watches the entire scene. The end.

         Why are they heading to Bruno’s and Camilo’s mother’s country house, and why has Mateo been called drive them there? Questions are not answered, only hinted at. Why has Mateo shaved his hair: he off to prison, hinted at by Andrea’s sketch of prison tattoo on Eduardo’s arm? Is Mateo perhaps on his way to join the military?

        All we truly know is that Bruno is totally in love with his cousin, desperate to have sex with him; and perhaps Camilo, as critic David Ranghelli has proposed in his fascinating and the only reading of this film, is just as engaged in a kind of triangle of love as he watches his brother with Mateo. Has the mother suggested the trip of the trio, knowing of their deep love for one another, but also calling, as Ranghelli wonders, to declare an end to their incestuous gay relationship, or as I would add, to finally set up her own boundaries with regard to love? Ranghelli writes:

 

“Why a call from mother? Adults have been absent from the film so far. Mother as absence? What functions does the call serve? Perhaps it is part of a humorous juxtaposition of the Virgin with the

homoerotic tussle playing out in the field, interrupted by a mother’s intervention? Mother as authority figure: “playtime” is over for the boys?”

 

        What we do sense, it that, after their symbolic baptisms—Bruno’s washing off his face in the kitchen and Mateo and Camilo dipping their heads into the pool—and the radical shifts of their physical aspects, something has changed forever, and that when they reach the mother in her country house, any further idolatry and sexual engagement will be over, their love cut off and forced to die. Her sons may perhaps never see Mateo again.

        This film is more of a poetic coronach or lamentation than it is a plotted narrative work. Things have happened, are happening, and will happen for this family that no outsider can fully comprehend.

        Durán’s short film was shown at the Cannes Film Festival competition.   

 

Los Angeles, March 11, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (March 2024).