Benjamín Cardona | Más que el agua (Thicker than Water) / 2014

the recurring pattern

by Douglas Messerli

 

Benjamín Cardona (screenwriter and director) Más que el agua (Thicker than Water) / 2014

 

Joaquín Benjamin Cardona) is an out gay Puerto Rican and has finally left his parent’s home, with the help of his grandmother, to live on his own. He has had short-lived gay relationships. But to say that he still have difficulties with his sexuality is an understatement. With his life-time best friend, Carol (Isabel Arraiza)—herself a confused and unhappy heterosexual photographer—the only bars he seems willing to visit are straight ones and then only accompanied by Carol. It’s at just such a bar, while he waits for Carol to show up, that he meets Xavier (Ronald Torres), perhaps the perfect man for him, a man, in the brief time we see them together, who gently challenges Joaquín layers of reservations and fears.

     And for a short while, director Cardona’s complex film reveals their idyllic first days of love. Indeed, it appears that finally Joaquín has found his perfect mate, and in the process he breaks all communication with Carol, perhaps recognizing that their symbiotic relationship is part of his problem, that their dependence upon one another is centered upon their inevitable failures in love.

     But Más que el agua, we quickly discover, is not a film about a relationship between two gay men, but about the difficulties of one man attempting to come to terms with his life and, most particularly, his own homosexuality, something many men and women have never fully been able to embrace in themselves. For the thousands of LGBTQ individuals who proudly declare their joy for existing in the world where they might be accepted by others, there perhaps as many who have never fully been able to come to terms with love outside of the borders of the heteronormative worlds in which they exist, hating both worlds for the pitch struggles they feel within.

     Instead of following Joaquín’s new love, the director begins moving back and forth through other episodes in the young man’s life, which include the attempts of a fellow worker to arrange dates for him, other instances of temporary love, and Joaquín’s utter and almost inexplicable rudeness, at one point, to a slightly flirtatious young man who might have compatible as a companion or just friend.

      Most importantly, these disjunctive peregrinations into his past reveal his few returns home where he meets up with a friendly father but a monstrous mother Sarah (Jacqueline Duprey) who, if she even bothers to speak to him it is with total disgust and abuse of both Joaquín and Carol whom, in one instance, he has brought as a date.

      Although from her religious point of view, she cannot accept her son, they have accepted the fact that his sister is having a baby out of wedlock and that the couple has been living together, although even that fact infuriates her. But heterosexuality after all is preferable.

      At another point his mother even orders Joaquín out of the house forever, insisting that the only part of him that will remain is the photograph she keeps near the door of him as a young boy. One can well perceive that Joaquín has not had a strong familial base on which support his own sexual differences.

     On the other hand, his relationship with his grandmother is warm and friendly, she, also having rejected the conservative religiosity of her daughter, is equally unable to deal with his mother. And during one visit to his grandmother before her death, Joaquín openly admits to a pattern of self-destruction when it comes to love, reinforced by his fears and inabilities to commit to his own sexual existence.

     Gradually we begin to perceive those long-time patterns of his life, engaging with individuals deeply as he has with Xavier, before suddenly pulling away and leaving, basically to return to the equally confused and unhappy Carol who together support one another by pretending that they themselves have been the victims of others.

      This time when Joaquín returns to Carol, having left Xavier, she is angry for his having not only cut her temporarily out of his life but for just this continuing pattern. Carol asks why he has finally returned to her, already knowing the answer. “I just want an explanation. I waited for you for a long time, you know. I knew you’d get tired of him.”

       “What makes you so sure of that.”

       “Because that’s how it is. That’s what you do. You let people walk into your life, and when you get tired of them or feel like they are suffocating you, you disappear.”

       “At least I know what I want.”

       “I don’t think so. Don’t be so sure of that.”

       In this case, Joaquín truly does regret his having left Xavier, and returns to him hoping they might start over again or even continue where they left off. But Xavier, it is clear, cannot begin over or continue a relationship with a person so unsettled as Joaquín. And this time the rejection is devastating to the young man because he knows that it is entirely his fault, that Carol has been right. The problem is his, as he has discussed with his grandmother: how to forgive himself, and if he cannot, then how to go on living.

 

     The last scene repeats the first one and, indeed, may be simply a continuation of that conversation where they sit looking out over the harbor, trying to rally their forces by declaring that “Things aren’t as bad as you think.” “You have the freedom to do as you please.” And, the commonplace mantra, “we have one another.”

      Joaquín asks a serious question: “What’s going to happen to us?”

    Carol answers it, probably as she always has, in a meaningless way that substantiates the true emptiness of their friendship: “Nothing. Nothing’s going to happen. You’ll be okay.”

      The fact that he is not “okay,” and that their relationship, in fact, represents nearly “nothing” is the true problem that neither of them can fully face, that what they seek is something other than “the thicker than water” friendship that so falsely walls them off from what they truly want.

 

Los Angeles, October 1, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (October 2023).