Manu Roma | Huesos (Bones) / 2020

giving up one appetite for another

by Douglas Messerli

 

Manu Roma (screenwriter and director) Huesos (Bones) / 2020 [9 minutes]

 

As the musical score by Miguel López hints, the young lead in Spanish director Manu Roma’s 2020 short film, is a ticking time bomb who, if he continues in this manner, won’t survive for long.

Victor (Khalid Guessaid) is a handsome young man soon turning 21, and would like, before he birthday to lose his virginity. As a gay man, that is not as easy as one might imagine. His first pickup joins him in the car, only to suggest he’s forgotten his cellphone and will be back in a moment (he only lives 2 minutes away, he assures Victor), only to never return.

      Presumably, on his second pick-up attempt, with evidently an old friend, he’s successful, since they retreat to the back seat to have sex. Yet, we can’t be sure since his second friend, Pol (Antoine Topin) suggests he liked him better when he knew him earlier on.

      The reason is that Victor’s second birthday resolution is to bring his body down to less than 50 kilos. When he meets his second pick-up Victor has reduced to about 108 pounds, and he even he admits he’s all bone, something he’s quite proud of.

      But his friend is clearly worried about his substantial loss of weight. And so do is the movie, warning at the end that in Spain more than 300,000 young people between the ages of 12 and 24 years-of-age suffer from an eating disorder, 10% of them being males.

     The movie makes its point, I suppose, but for what purpose other than a kind of moralist propaganda. Roma is too talented a director to let his films be used simply for these purposes. As commentator Fabian Hebestreit writes on the Letterboxd site about this film: “It’s basically a PSA [Public Service Announcement] about the rise in eating disorders among Spanish youth. Well filmed, but with paper-thin characterization, and instead of any conclusion it just gives us some statistics at the end.”

      Given the darkness of the print I saw, I’m not sure that it’s even that well-filmed

     Why doesn’t Roma explain how this young man ended up in the situation that he has still not been able to experience sex by the age of 21, and what determined him to lose so very much weight. I am sure the two are related, but it might have been useful to show how that all came about and how he might have evaded such a drastic solution to his difficulties by finding somehow with whom to share sex.

     

Los Angeles, April 1, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (April 2024).