Gorka Cornejo | Yo sólo miro (I Only Watch) / 2008

the voyeur

by Douglas Messerli

 

Gorka Cornejo and Gonzalo García Chasco (screenplay), Gorka Cornejo (director) Yo sólo miro (I Only Watch) / 2008 [18 minutes]

 

One of the oddest first films of the first decade of the 21st century, Gorka Cornejo’s short movie of 2008 focuses on an unhappy wife, Julia (Susi Sánchez), frustrated in her closed-off relationship with her husband of many years, Eduardo (Joan Crosas).

 

    Their dinners together are mostly quiet, she, clearly somewhat of a martyr, often eating yogurt or different dishes or smaller portions of what she feeds her husband. She dearly loves her son, and can’t wait for his phone calls, while Eduardo gruffly takes them over, often cursing his son for reasons undetermined.

      Even clearer in her attempt to be the martyr, but also perhaps in an attempt to further understand her husband, Julia spends her spare time watching her husband’s porno tapes, although obviously uninvolved with their sexuality, but seemingly fascinated or perhaps even tortured by them nonetheless.

     Her husband suddenly reveals that he has been called for several days on a business trip. She, packing up for him ahead of time, suddenly discovers a cache of three other porno tapes hidden away in plastic bags, these, to her shock, representing gay pornography.

      She mentions having to do through the closet in order to find the leather suitcase, but he does not respond.

 

     In his absence she watches these new gay tapes, again with a seeming sense of mixed fascination and horror. And upon his return, it is clear that she is determined to speak to him about the matter, sitting for a while on the bed, as he showers, with the porn tapes beside her, but finally rushing off to the kitchen, although the porn on the bed for him to discover.

     They eat, once more, in silence, she finally pleading to know why he had never told her, had left it up for her to discover his secret desires—or perhaps, given his regular “business” absences from home, his outside sexual activities.

 

     She begins to explain that she understands, he immediately interrupting her to insist that he could never explain himself to her, that it is impossible for her to comprehend.

       That night she attempts to actively engage in sex, as opposed to passively waiting for his evidently not very exciting sexual attentions. He gets up, explaining he cannot go through with it.

     When he returns from work the next evening, there is someone ringing at the door. When he gets it, he taken aback to discover a cute rent boy (Iker Lastra) who almost forces his way into the house, having been hired by Julia.

 

      Eduardo is stunned, terrified that she is perhaps imagining a new way to sexually engage him, but she quickly attempts to explain that the young boy is entirely there for him; “I only watch.”

      The film leaves Eduardo alone in the room considering his wife’s maneuver and her statement. We do not discover whether he finally takes her up on her offer or throws the new sexual surrogate out of their house.

 

    So quirky is this short Spanish film, that it’s hard to know whether to interpret as a fairly enlightening approach to the sudden discovery of a husband’s hidden sexual desires, or to perceive it as a perversity as I would guess most viewers might describe it. But we all know that such seemingly kinky relationships do exist in real life, and perhaps may actually help keep couples who have grown out of sexual love to maintain their other emotions of care and respect for one another. And, if nothing else, Julia seems to have found a sublimely comic way to punish her unfaithful husband.

 

Los Angeles, March 8, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (March 2024).