Álvaro Pastor | Invulnerable / 2005

admission

by Douglas Messerli

Álvaro Pastor and Antonio Naharro (screenplay), Álvaro Pastor (director) Invulnerable / 2005 [25 minutes]

 

Co-writer Antonio Naharro plays the central figure Elías in this Spanish short film, part of what I might describe as the second wave of films on and about AIDS.

     The film begins with a documentary-like patina, doctors interviewing males and females about their sexual activities and habits presumably before or after AIDS tests, interspersed with scenes from Elías teaching his science class.

 

    Suddenly we see Elías face to face with a doctor who asks “You weren’t expecting it?” Like numerous doctors of the day, she reassures him that “Things have come a long ways now and it has practically just become a chronic disease.”

      So the film announces its slightly different perspective from so many of the AIDS films before it: a study in being HIV positive even with all the drugs that save lives resulting in many of the same stigmas, of the struggles as a gay man to have sexual relationships, and of simply surviving with after-effects of the drugs—major issues with which the rest of the world seems oddly unaware.

      Elías is already in a relationship with a fellow-teacher Pedro (Andrés Waksman) and the tensions between them arise almost immediately, Elías bowing out of future dinner meetings as Pedro tries to the massage the worried look from his face in the faculty room.

      While one can surely condemn our “hero” for not immediately telling his friend of his diagnosis, one also can understand his reluctance, he himself having yet to adjust to the truth and obviously fearful of losing the only support he has, of feeling even further removed from the world from which he is still forced to closet himself. While those around him complain of student cellphones, inattentiveness, and other work-problems the issues that crowd into his head are nearly overwhelming.

 

     Putting off the invitations to spend his nights with Pedro, Elías returns to gay bar life, picking up an American trick to fuck. A moment later he is attending his first AIDS support group meeting wherein we get a glimpse of the both the positive and negative—one woman has now been HIV positive for 20 years, another says her doctor has lowered the dosage of her medications, while others relate how they got there: cheating husbands, loneliness, sexual addiction. Some reveal that after their HIV diagnosis they lost their jobs, their parents stopped communicating with them. When asked how he, a newcomer is, all Elías can respond is, “I’m not sure.”

      Just reading the drug regimen, so it seems, is a bit like encountering the instructions of how to put together a complex piece of furniture from Ikea. In the midst of these cinema moments, he encounters his friend Pedro at one of the bars, both surprised to see one another there. They kiss, and it is difficult for Elías to immediately ignore another sexual meetup.

      We are not certain, in fact, whether or not this scene represents an earlier memory, for soon after we see the two at dinner describing their first sexual experiences, a discussion more likely to have occurred in one of their first meetings. If so, his new regimen brings on his memories of their past joys, revealing the teacher’s recognition that their relationship now may be something only of the past.

      But when we observe him with Pedro again after sex, Elías seems once more troubled as they discuss their relationship of only a week, planning perhaps to move in together. Is this also something of the past or more recent? Had they just met when Elías discovered his condition? Even so he might have infected his friend from their earliest of encounters. 

      Guilt present and past is obviously creating strong feelings for Elías, and whether or not the sexual activities we witness are of long ago or after his diagnosis, their effect on others might be similar. Was the earlier scene in the bar a remembrance of an event that might have led to Elías’ infection? Time suddenly becomes a swirl of sexual memories for a man who suddenly must deal with such a life-altering illness.

      What is clear is that for years Elías had unprotected sex, in bathrooms, bars, and strange beds, feeling himself perhaps invulnerable, particularly after the age in which so many young men and women had died. Those who came of age after new drugs had been discovered simply did not need have the same fears—at least so they imagined, even if, as students of science, they knew of the consequences.

 

     We see Elías almost manically scrubbing down a window, after showering checking over his entire body to see if there are any signs of AIDS. Things have radically changed in his life, although superficially they seem to go on just as before. Finally, he sits down with Pedro and almost off-handedly announces that he is HIV positive. He says he understands fully if Pedro wants to break off their relationship since his own face will soon dry up and his ass will shrink so that his friend may no longer want to fuck him. He takes a ton of pills every day. But most of all, he’s sick of pretending. We now know at least some of their joyful times together, in and out of bed, were after his diagnosis.

      The anger, subdued as it is, quickly follows: “And you knew all the time that you had this?

 

     In the very next frame, a night scene, Elías is wandering the streets alone, the whole world moving on without him, the camera panning on other couples, heterosexual and possibly gay. Obviously, he has broken up with Pedro.

      Soon he is back at the bars having sex, a voice reporting he has run out of condoms, the other muttering, “It doesn’t matter.” Presumably, Elías is that other voice.

      During the days he lectures to his students about new discoveries in viruses, but at night he fucks his way through the bars, increasingly taking drugs other than those he must swallow each day at home.

     Pedro returns to him, but in the midst of a deep embrace as they move toward to sexual moment, he suddenly stops, declaring that “he can’t.”

     At one appointment at the doctor’s, he encounters his ex-lover Lucas. They pretend to each other that things are going well, Elías asking him to text him, an event we perceive unlikely to happen.

     After an argument with his father over an inconvenient visit, Elías suddenly calls up visions of the two of them at the zoo and other lovely moments with both his father and his mother. It is enough to make a grown man break into tears, as Elías now does, his life whirling out of control into what seems like a vortex of wrong decisions. His newest results from an AIDS test comes back positive.

      Elías tells his father about his condition and is embraced with deep love. Before his class—in an enormously brave school-teacher coming out scene the likes of which I’ve not witnessed since Frank Ripploh appeared in front of his class drag in his 1980 film Taxi zum Klo (Taxi to the Toilets)—Elías chalks out a drawing of the human immunodeficiency virus, the AIDS virus, explaining that it’s a virus spread through blood or semen shared with another man or woman, “And I have it.”

 

    The students sit silently in startlement as the film imagines as alternative where they all go screaming from the room, as they might have only a few years earlier if someone had announced that he had AIDS.  But they remain, one student finally daring asking the important question, “Were you infected by blood or semen?” a smile crossing Elías’ in his recognition that things have indeed significantly changed.

     In 2005, the year in which this film was released, according to a UN report there were 4.9 million new infections of the AIDS virus globally, bringing the total number of people living with the virus to 40.30 million individuals. Such important and profound movies such as Invulnerable should not go ignored.

 

Los Angeles, April 19, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (April 2023).