Leandro Wenceslau | Enquanto Ainda é Tempo (While There Is Still Time) / 2014

say goodbye

by Douglas Messerli

 

Leandro Wenceslau (screenwriter and director) Enquanto Ainda é Tempo (While There Is Still Time) / 2014 [14 minutes]

 

In Brazilian director Leandro Wenceslau’s short film While There Is Still Time, longtime friends discover that they are also in love with one another when Caio (Thiago Aguiar) announces to his friend Lucas (Filipe Morais) that his father has received a scholarship in Germany, and that he and his family will soon be moving there.

      Lucas first senses it as a kind of betrayal. Why hasn’t his friend told him immediately, he wants to know. He backs away for a short while from their intense relationship, the kind of friendship where, at any moment, you expect the two to come together in a kiss.

 

     But gradually the two high school boys do return to some sense of normalcy. And just as we might have imagined, at a point when Lucas asks Caio to help him put on a necklace, the two boys suddenly find themselves in the middle of a deep kissing session, realizing, perhaps too late, that they have truly loved one another all along.

      Unfortunately, the film has not established any of their previous relationship, and at no point do we see either of these boys engage with their families, who seem well-attuned to their son’s friendship and not particularly homophobic—although Caio does comment that his father is committed to the entire family staying together, even though they have long ago gone their separate ways.

      Accordingly, we are simply told that these two boys are in love without providing us with any previous evidence, even if we can see it in the eyes and gestures from the first moment that they communicate with one another in the film.

      Before either the boys and their audience realizes it, Lucas is rushing to the airport to say goodbye, perhaps forever, to the boy he now realizes he loves. He presents him with a new necklace, a cross, as a sign of his love.

       So the film might have ended had not Wenceslau created a strange melodramatic ending right out of a telenovela, a form so popular in South America. As Lucas begins to leave the airport longue, he appears to be hit by a car, people gathering around him to photograph the event. Almost at the same moment, Caio suddenly appears, presumably having miraculously convinced his family that he must stay on in Brazil. Lucas comes round, and the two embrace, suggesting a very happy ending. Or is it, we must wonder, simply the last image that Lucas imagines before dying? There’s no way of knowing, and we feel cheated, either way, by the implausible ending.

 

Los Angeles, February 27, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (February 2024).