Caio Scovino and Gustavo Koncht | Sobretudo Amor (Love Above All, aka Especially Love) / 2022

a tear for love

by Douglas Messerli

 

Caio Scovino and Gustavo Koncht (screenwriters and directors) Sobretudo Amor (Love Above All, aka Especially Love) / 2022

 

Broadcast in 6 episodes on Brazilian TV Telemundo in 2023, directors Caio Scovino and Gustavo Koncht’s Love Above All is a somewhat typical LGBTQ soap opera of the kind which have become quite popular throughout South America and Asia, particularly when it describes itself as featuring “boy love.” It is hard to see the central characters of this work, Italo (Victor Bueno) and Daniel (Gustavo Aguiar), however, as what the Asians signify as “boys,” since these young men are 20-some year-old college students, neither of them being “twink”-cute the way “boy love” is usually represented. If nothing else, neither of these boys are innocents in the manner that we usually perceive boylove works.

   In the first episode Italo is seen breaking up with his selfish boyfriend Bernardo, who has evidently lied to him on several occasions about having sex with others, even though it is clear that Bernardo is still in love with Italo and Italo still feels some feeling for him.

     What we also soon discover is that Italo, who is a law student at the local university, is almost completely under his mother Angela’s (Luisa Lagoeiro) thumb, thoroughly disliking his studies but afraid of telling her after two years of tuition, payments which obviously aren’t easy for this middle class family of two.

     When we meet the Italo’s mother, in fact, she is in an uproar over the newest gossip that an inmate was moved into the complex, a man who has evidently just been freed from prison. And she is already on the phone seeking a new place to live in a nearby apartment complex that, as her son points out, is perhaps far too expensive for their financial situation. But her goal, as she explains it time and again throughout the series, is to protect her son from bad influences and, in the case, from outright danger, her logic being that even if he merely stole an ice cream cone that doesn’t mean it won’t lead to major robbery and even murder.

      Angela, the mother’s name, is not only a kind of hysteric but totally prejudiced in numerous respects. Although she has come to accept her son’s homosexuality, she is still determined that he pick a nice boy like Bernardo, who comes from a good family with money. Having herself married—we later learn quite unhappily—out of just such concerns, she is equally determined to make sure her son finds somewhat he might be able to financially support him, and Bernardo seems to come from a rather wealthy family.

 

     In some respects, Italo’s best female friend Marisa (Jula Maracela)—you know the kind of girl all gay boys in movies have (formerly described derisively as a “fag hag”)—in this case is in agreement with Italo’s mother, and becomes particularly adamant with Italo, soon after, when she discovers that by accident Italo has already met up with Daniel in a situation whenin he mislaid his apartment keys, and has grown fond of him. Daniel now works as a janitor at Italo’s college.

      In a matter of two episodes, Italo and Daniel hook up on various occasions—one clearly just a cooked-up event by Daniel to get Italo to return to his apartment supposedly to help him as he attempts to fix his shower, both boys inevitably ending up playing in the shower fully clothed—and begin to fall in love.

     Even Marisa’s discovery that Daniel’s imprisonment was the result of having murdered his father, doesn’t dissuade Italo, who by this time has fallen in love with his neighbor after a gentle kissing session in a corner of the college campus where he’s never been before, but which has become Daniel’s favorite silent spot.

 

     Despite family objections, and a great deal of anger when his mother discovers that he has been seeing the “criminal,” Italo and Daniel are moving toward a deep relationship. And even Marisa—who discovers herself in a strange situation, when she finds herself pregnant from one of the partners of a homosexual couple who are both delighted with the news of her pregnancy—no

longer in a position of giving advice about love, still insists he needs to have Daniel admit his criminal record.

 

     Pressured by family, Italo finally admits to Daniel that he knows he was in prison, without telling him that he also has heard about the crime. He hopes that Daniel might explain the situation and open up to him, but it is clear that the boy is fearful that if he does so he might lose Italo’s love. He demands a kind of hiatus, and within that period, Italo’s mother visits Daniel convincing him, as only a manipulative mother can, that her son is not the right match for him. Lying about the relationship between Italo and Bernardo, she insists that he is still very much in love with the boyfriend and that Daniel is merely a fetish. Bernardo, from a good family, can provide everything for her son, while Daniel has a past which will surely haunt them both. By the time she is finished, Daniel will not even take a call from his lover, feeling that he must push his love—and apparently his only friend—out of his heart in order to truly demonstrate his love for Italo. A tear drops from his eyes to end the conversation between the conspirator and her victim.

     Meanwhile, Angela arranges for Bernardo to show up with Italo’s lost cat, claiming to have found it in the garage. Meeting his old friend again for the first time in months, and now feeling as if he has been dumped by Daniel, Italo reluctantly has sex with Bernardo and even, with some strong mental resistance, agrees to announce their engagement the very next Saturday.

      In the interim he once more encounters Daniel, only discover that he knows of Bernardo’s existence. Wondering how he might know his name, he gradually discovers how his mother has intruded upon his sex life, and along with his deep resentment for the way she has already attempted to determine his career, he becomes furious with the situation, explaining to Daniel the truth, that he still loves him and is not at all interested in the selfish Bernardo, with whom over the years he has broken up time and again because of his lies.

      Daniel also painfully recounts how the murder of his father happened. His father was a violent alcoholic who used to regularly beat his mother when he got drunk. One night, when he was more drunk than usual, he began to pummel Daniel’s mother so severely that the young man pushed his father down the stairs, whereupon his father died. For that Daniel served two years in prison.

      To get his revenge on both his mother and former boyfriend, Italo asks Daniel to the engagement party, which will be attended by friends of both families, including Italo’s equally “crazy” aunts.

      But things don’t quite turn out as he expected. First of all, Marisa reveals that after a second test, she discovered that she is not pregnant, and is disappointed, as are who homosexual friends, that she will not be a mother. Although Italo does declare at the party that he loves Daniel, not Bernardo, his mother storming out of the room, he also becomes embarrassed for having made a scene in front of Bernardo’s family and friends and apologizes; his attempt, he explains, was not to hurt anyone.

      Daniel also insists that his lover attempt to make it up with his mother. In a moving conversation, Italo discovers that when she was young, his mother loved someone who fell outside of parameters set up for her, a poor artist. She was convinced by her family that he wasn’t the right match for her because he could not support her. And despite her love for the boy, she took the advice of her mother and father, and married another man, a man who she soon discovered she truly hated. But when Italo was born, she turned all her attentions toward him, replacing him, in part, as the lover she no longer had. She has sacrificed and, accordingly, has expected her son to do so as well. But his declaration of love has not made her now comprehend where perhaps she was wrong. That love is more important that everything else in order to live a full life in the present as opposed to some dreamed of future.

      The film’s transformation of the formerly narrow-minded mother comes far too easily, and is not truly believable. And the fact that Italo (not at all a handsome boy) would be able to attract a straight boy who, despite his prison time, evidently has never before kissed a male, is also rather hard to swallow. And it is equally unbelievable that a traditionally-minded girl like Marisa would have agreed to have sex with two homosexual boys living in a deeply loving relationship.

      Brazilian TV gay soap operas are not realist dramas, however, but rather serve as explications of moral dilemmas, offering up rather predictable and normative solutions for even the most outrageous and outré sorts of behavior. In this somehow still charming movie, the producers can now check off a gay boy-former prison inmate relationship, as well as a good girl willing to go to bed with two married gays, from their never-ending list of predicaments, explaining simply that things are not always what they seem to be, and that people don’t fit easily into boxes. I can’t wait to see what next year brings.

 

Los Angeles, March 3, 2023

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (March 2023).