Collen Tonderai Demerez Changadzo | Angelo (Angel) / 2024

the journalist

by Douglas Messerli

 

Collen Tonderai Demerez Changadzo (screenwriter and director) Angelo (Angel) / 2024 [27 minutes]

 

Poor Angelo (Eduard Galiá), having just broken up with his girlfriend Justina after the two had left their small hometown and moved to Barcelona. He’s not even happy with his heavenly name.

      In Collen Tonderai Demerez Changadzo’s short coming out film, however, with everything awash in a golden glow, we don’t have be sorry for long, however. Angelo simply takes out a lovely fresh gray-bound journal and begins to write, describing a life every young 20-some year-old gay man might have longed for.

     If for some time after his breakup he is lonely, dissatisfied with other women, and tired from hard work, this enterprising young man is soon visited by his high-school friend Marco, now living in England. Beautiful Marco (Sergio Pérez), so Angelo soon discovers, is now gay. And suddenly our angel is quite ready to put away his halo and the blue panties he’s kept from his relationship with Justina to try out gay sex.

 

     He’s a quick study under Marco’s gentle kisses and embraces, and within moments its clear that all the time, he realizes, that he has perhaps secretly been gay. All right, that’s not the way most of us experience coming out, with a sudden thrust of pleasure, never before having imagined that we might have contrary sexual desires, but Angelo is just lucky.

      Suddenly he begins to notice other male bodies, manly lips, buttocks, muscles—you know, all those things to which gay men are naturally attracted. And just as quickly our little angel is delighted with himself, after being a good boy all his youth, to do and feel something his parents wouldn’t have approved of. That’s called “self-identifying,” one of the first joyful things that happen to young gay men, their recognition that there’s something pleasurable in being queer, different from all the others. It’s one of the minor joys of coming out.

      But for me the major joy of coming out was simply the sex. And Angelo seems just as happy to write about his experiences from afar, voyeuristically watching the boys in the beautiful Barcelona sunlight. Somehow this writer and director can’t imagine that such a cute kid might now very much want to walk up to one of those local beauties and ask him to join him in his bed. Or that Angelo might suddenly get a yearning to visit some of the local gay bars.

 

     Poor Angelo, day and night he just keeps filling up his journal with his lovely observations of discovering the pleasures of being a gay man, apparently without experiencing any of them.

      This is a very pretty movie with far too little action.

 

Los Angeles, July 9, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (July 2024).