Omar Zúñíga Hidalgo | Brussels / 2010

business lunch

by Douglas Messerli

 

Omar Zúñíga Hidalgo (screenwriter and director) Brussels / 2010 [10 minutes]

 

In this short film which takes place in New York City, Gaspar (Oliver Smith) has lunch with his father Edward (Michael Douglass), an occasion which proves a disaster and provides us with an insight in why, despite repeated attempts, he can longer communicate with his always busy businessman father.

     Back in Brussels, where Gaspar lives, waits his lover Sven, a Chilean-born gay man with whom Gaspar lives. Sven remembers Chile, evidently, only as a young boy and has few ties to the country today, despite regular questions during Gaspar’s mother’s visits about his “home” country. The couple plan to visit Santiago sometime in the near future.

    That is about all the information with which we are provided in this barebones mood piece, that focuses in instead on an all-too-common meet-up with an uncommunicative parent, who clearly has utterly no true interest in his son and knows only the vaguest of things about him.

     Both are interrupted in their luncheon date by phones, and to give him credit, the first time Edward is interrupted he hangs up quickly, explaining he’s having lunch with his son. Gaspar does the same when he receives a call from his office in Brussels. But it doesn’t take long for Gaspar’s father to become engaged, soon after, in an angry discussion about a junior partner who has evidently seen a client without his permission.

      If previously, he has seemed only vaguely interested in Gaspar’s world, he now completely shuts him out, letting his son pay the bill as the two leave the restaurant, Edward attempting to buy a magazine about cars at a newsstand, something in which Gaspar might have been interested as a child, but has long outgrown.

      In a hurry to catch his plane, Gaspar leaves his father behind as he speaks mindlessly into the telephone.

       The film has very little to do with LGBTQ life as such, but can be seen instead a revelatory “slice of life,” which might provide an insight into this young gay man’s childhood and his long dissociation from an uncaring father. When one has to make an appointment to see one’s father, he can only recognize that the relationship is less of a family bond than it is as a client. Clearly, there is nothing but business to bring the son back to New York. Everything that truly matters to Gasper is back in Brussels.

      One has the feeling that this film is terribly personal, and has less to do with something Chilean-born director Zúñíga Hidalgo is attempting to reveal to his audiences than it has to do with a dilemma he is working to resolve in his own life.

 

Los Angeles, April 29, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (April 2024).