Edgar Garcia and Luis Torres Alicea | Ánfora (Amphora) / 2021

a choice of collecting or sharing

by Douglas Messerli

 

Edgar Garcia and Luis Torres Alicea (screenwriters and directors) Ánfora (Amphora) / 2021 [26 minutes]

 

Roberto (Edgar Garcia), a middle-aged widower and the younger photographer Félix (Luis Torres Alicea) are in a relationship, but what that intimacy consists of is difficult to explain.

    The film begins with Roberto driving the long distance for his San Juan, Puerto Rico home to the countryside get-away of Félix, a lovely aqua blue stucco villa in the middle of nowhere. The house, in fact, like much of the surrounding landscape and the objects within the house help to define the photograph’s strange personality, a man who would truly prefer to isolate himself than participate in a community. As he himself puts it, he lives in a world where no one can reach him: “Complete disconnect.”

      On the other hand, Roberto’s “complete sense of responsibility” kills him, the total stress. In fact, he’s driven the long way simply to tell Félix that he can’t stay over for the long weekend that they had planned.

      But slowly through the beauty of the home, drink, the nearby sea and sex, Félix does seduce Roberto into remaining for the night. In looking through some of Félix’s photos, Roberto comes upon pictures of himself that Félix took of him the day they met.

      He felt, he claims, that something within him “vibrated.”

      That was the day, Roberto recalls, when he received his dead wife’s ashes and he went into the park to get some sun.

       They also talk about Roberto, the older ones of which are in color, but then…there was he wife’s diagnosis and things got postpones, his life put on hold.

       Slowly we get to know these needy individuals. We discover, for example, that Félix is something of a crackpot theorist, having a notion of the bodies of human beings and the constellations. He believes the universe is reflected in parts of the skin, and forces Roberto to

remove his shirt to prove it. We are all, he declares, remnants of stardust. Painting each other with luminous markers, the two make love.

       Roberto, affected by his partner, also begins to believe that as remnants of stardust we hide beneath our skin where no one can see us.

      But there is also, it appears, a lurking violence there as well, which is evidence by the fact that in the middle of their kisses, Félix suddenly turns the older man around and fucks him despite his protests. Afterwards, Roberto fucks Félix.

 

      Roberto’s statement that “It’s been a while” is an extreme understatement. The last time he had sex, he admits, was five years previously, since his wife’s diagnosis.

      Roberto asks the same question of Félix, suggesting that it might have been two weeks ago. His response, however, is even more shocking: “Never.”

        And suddenly we sense there is an element here of something close to Wagner’s tale of Tristan and Isolde, of a love that is intertwined with death, reiterated by Félix’s questions about Roberto’s wife Eva’s dying. Was he there?

        Yes, he replies. She drowned in her own liquids, having lung cancer.

        Asked what he felt like inside at the time of his wife’s dying, Roberto responds. “Nothing. Literally nothing.” He explains that he felt free with the permission, after so many hospitals, so much pain and suffering, to live again.

        And we now perceive that these two men are both empty vessels (the water jugs that the film’s title evokes). Perhaps only by being together can they refill their own beings with meaning and love.

       The vibration that Félix observed in him on that first day in the park, Roberto suggests, “was the desire to live again. The desire to start over.”

        As I have suggested, however, there is also something in both their attempts to refill or simply fill themselves with love that also relates to death. While traveling to visit Félix, Roberto has taken off his wedding ring for the first time and put it into his pocket. The voyage to love also represents the end of something else.

      It also has been made clear that, although he has grown up near the sea, Roberto has never learned how to swim and, in fact, is terrorized by the possibility of drowning, paralleled in his comments about his wife’s drowning in her own body fluids.

        Félix takes Roberto to a spot where he takes some of his best pictures, where he repeats how he likes to get away from everything. “And at the same time capture it. So I can always have it there and feel it whenever I want to.”

        There is something slightly dreadful in that comment, a statement about capturing and imprisoning emotions, objects, and even people—perhaps to refill that metaphorical amphora—so they might be there for his pleasure whenever he wants. His compulsive desire to photograph life is akin to perhaps to collecting butterflies or insects, killing them, and embedding them in protective glass so that one might revisit them again and again.

        He almost plays that very scenario out. He teaches Roberto how to float, but at the end of the film he has disappeared instead of remaining to protect him, watching through his camera as Roberto floats, seemingly half-dead, in the ocean waters.

        As Roberto suddenly becomes aware that he is alone, he panics, falling deep into the waters, as Félix takes up his camera to catch the images of the drowning man through his lens.

        At the last moment, however, he rushes out to rescue Roberto, the older man coming to as the two men hug, realizing, perhaps, the dangers of both filling their needs up with one another and remaining empty. In the future, they must either find a balance to protect each other or leave themselves empty.

        It is the story, of course, of any relationship of love. How much do we give the other and much to do take, how much to we want to capture the other to fulfill our needs by destroying what they bring to us. It comes down to whether you perceive it as something to vaguely share or to collect and keep as a surviving reservoir.

 

Los Angeles, May 8, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (May 2024).