Daniel Rivera | Fin de semana bisiesto (Leap Weekend) / 2020

impossible love

by Douglas Messerli

 

Daniel Rivera (screenwriter and director) Fin de semana bisiesto (Leap Weekend) / 2020 [20 minutes]

 

14-year-old David (Matias Alvarez) is spending his vacation with his older cousin Pamela (Camila Oliva). But now there’s a record-breaking heatwave on, and he can do very little but sleep all day, without energy to even want to go get the ice she’s run out of. Her boyfriend is on his way, but won’t pick up the phone, so she can’t ask him to stop on the way get some.

     David dutifully trudges out into the heat to bring back a bag of ice, which has almost melted before he returns. But now the boyfriend, Jaiver (David Vargas), has arrived, a handsome man who Pamela doesn’t quite seem to appreciate. In a sense, although he’s her age, he’s almost a kid himself. For example, she’s disturbed that he’s been chewing a piece of gum for two days, that he dare to offer some beer to a 14-year-old.

     But Javier basically ignores her, and lets the boys take some sips from his can. Almost immediately David is smitten with the man who treats him as if he were a human being, and despite the heat, he begins to take an interest in what’s going around him. When Javier takes out his gum, David secretly grabs it and begins chewing it, just to share something that was in Javier’s mouth. Unfortunately, he swallows it, hours later to spit it up, now half digested.

     Later, in the bathroom, spotting the boyfriend’s Calvin underwear laying on the floor, he takes off his own undershorts and puts on Javier’s. He’s gradually become obsessed with his cousin’s boyfriend.

      When Pamela and Javier announce they going out shopping for dinner, he requests she bring back some cream, but she refuses. Javier pops in and asks what kind of ice cream: “watermelon,” he smiles back. By this time, he’s stolen the boy’s heart.

      And the next day they go to a local park where Javier teaches him to drive. With Pamela in the backseat busy on her cellphone and Javier in the front with David, we observe Javier look back to see if Pamela is attending to what’s going on, and he reaches over to touch the boy almost as if he were going to hug him or if nothing put his hand to his chest.

     The heat distorts reality. We can’t quite know what we’re even seeing, and besides at that very moment the engine, overheated, conks out, and trio must walk back home.

      The frustration grows for David, as he overhears a fight between Javier and his cousin. He was to have the spent the week with her, but now declares he has to leave the next morning. One can only wonder whether he had noticed the boy’s obsessions about him or that he might wish to even return them, absenting himself so to prevent any such event.

      David wanders back to the stranded car and curls up in the back seat. He awakens to realize the auto is moving, Javier on the phone with Pamela saying that he will be there in about 15 minutes, bringing back David. No, he cannot come in.

      In this wonderfully obsessive film by Chilean filmmaker Daniel Rivera, David has almost forced the man to kidnap him, so intense has his love become. But it is not an appropriate love, and he knows it must soon come to an end.

 

Los Angeles, July 31, 2023

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (July 2023).