brotherly love
by Douglas Messerli
Carlos Hugo Christensen, Ubirajara Raffo
Constant, and Orígenes Lessa (screenplay, based on the story “La intrusa” by
Jorge Luis Borges), Carlos Hugo Christensen (director) A Intrusa (The
Intruder) / 1979
Quite by accident I came across an English
language-subtitled version of Carlo Hugo Christensen’s 1979 film, A Intrusa,
based on a short story by Jorge Luis Borges, “La intrusa.”
The
brothers also regularly take advantage of the local brothel, as well as
occasionally working for others as cattle rustlers. Both the brothers are known
throughout the community for their bad tempers, and keep others away from their
own small spread.
In
short, these brothers outwardly project the behavior and mores of those
surrounding them, but at home show another side of themselves consisting of
great affection and tenderness for one another. As critics have noted, the film
and story present these figures in a kind of Jekyll and Hyde relationship,
representing to the outside world a dangerous force which is utterly
ameliorated within their home.
Evidently in the Borges story and certainly in Christensen’s cinematic
version, there is also something a bit “queer” about their fraternal
relationship within the confines of their own ranch. We sense this almost from
the first moments of the film when returning home after the cockfight they
strip naked and mock-fight, much like the cocks they’ve just witnessed, before
they crawl into bed with one another.
But we know that in this macho world we must also be somewhat careful in
how we evaluate that relationship. As the critic Herbert J. Brant notes, in
Hispanic culture the choice of a female sexual partner does not necessarily
mean “that the male character is, by definition, exclusively and permanently
heterosexual.” Women, in the highly patriarchal society of the day, were even
less than objects. They were useful as housekeepers and a source of release for
the male sexual drive, but, as with the woman in this story, Juliana (María
Zilda Bethlem), they could also be bought and sold.
The purchase of Juliana by Eduardo evidently serves a double purpose as
obtaining a cook and housecleaner as well as providing him with heterosexual
release. But her arrival also represents the “intruder” of both Borges’ and
Christensen’s work. To make certain the viewer immediately recognizes the
significance of her entrance, the director has waited to announce the major
credits of the film, including its title, cast, and other film crew the 18 long
minutes of film-time it has taken to get to this point.
He
does not have sex with the girl, perceiving that quite clearly she is a virgin,
which, later on, when goaded by another local, João Iberra (Fernando de
Almeida) a few days later that he has now deflowered the virgin, results in
Christian calling for a duel between Iberra and himself.
Christian gruesomely severs his opponents’ hand, but also receives some
wounds which are salved by the brothel owner before he is sent back to his
brother.
Realizing the source of Christian’s recent problems, Eduardo now offers
to share Juliana with his brother, and the two alternate, using her, we quickly
discern, less as a source of satisfaction than as a kind of sexual conduit
between themselves. Although there is nothing outwardly homosexual in their
behavior, we cannot help but perceive that their rather brutal efforts of love-making
have less to do with their gratification of male-female sex than with each of
the brothers finding a communal source upon which to express their
fraternal desires. I have chosen that preposition carefully since we later
discover that Juliana basically does not serve the brothers as a connection of
the male penis to the female vagina but rather as what one might describe as
vessel in which to deposit the sperm as a kind of offering for the fraternal
other. In a sense, to the brother’s way of thinking Juliana remains as a kind
of virgin to which they offer up their sperm as a kind of shared blessing,
which explains Christian’s “acquisition” of a young virgin and his battle with
the man who steals her virginity.
If that might seem to release the
sexual frustrations that the brothers face, it creates even more serious
problems when both make excuses for trips into the local outpost, intending
once there an opportunity to visit the brothel to fuck the girl. When they both
accidentally encounter each other there they realize that in lying to one
another they have broken their bond even further, and, accordingly, determine
to buy her back at the higher price they had originally asked.
Thus far, Christensen had kept fairly close to Borges’ tale, although
capturing its subtleties in visual terms instead of literary words certainly
has helped make the master’s subtle sexual implications far more obvious. But
by taking the logic of their relationship a bit further, and playing out a
sexual reunion with Juliana in their house wherein both brothers, laying on
opposites sides of her quite obviously grope and lust after each other’s body,
using the female’s skin simply as a receptacle to deposit their sperm,
Christensen brought Borges’ subtleties into a new light. Borges was so
infuriated that he threatened to demand that the film be censored at a time
when censorship was increasingly used to silence artists of all kinds.
Christensen, himself, had had to leave his homeland of Argentina for his early
sexually-transgressive films.
As Brant observes: “Borges, naturally, is very clever about how he
insinuates the growing mutual love between the brothers. Unlike Christensen,
Borges never portrays any sexual situation involving the brothers or Juliana
and he certainly never directly indicates what the relationship between the
brothers might suggest. But on the other hand, Borges does insinuate that the
love between the Nilsens is the kind of love between men that surpasses the
love between a man and a woman. A Biblical citation, indicated only by the
chapter and verse designation “2 Reyes, I, 26” is the curious epigraph to the
story.”*
That reference to 2 Reyes appears in my Bible in the 2nd book of Samuel
in which King David laments the death of his dear friend Jonathan**:
How are the mighty fallen in the midst of the battle!
O Jonathan, thou was slain in thine high places.
I am distressed for thee, my brother Jonathan: very
pleasant hast thou been unto me: thy love to me was
wonderful, passing the love of women.
Certainly, as applied to the Borges story,
that epigraph seems to confirm the sexual implications of the brotherly love
between the Nilsens. Yet, as Brant and other scholars have suggested, Borges,
upon of hearing Christensen’s scene (being blind at that time, he could not
have seen it) he had what might be described as a kind of “homosexual panic,” a
dread fear that he and his story might suggest that he, himself, was
homosexual.***
Although Borges had not gone as far in his story (written in 1941),
Christensen logically expands through a more contemporary presentation of what
might have happened to the Nilsens upon Juliana’s return.
Even the brothers realize in that sexual encounter with one another over
the body of Juliana, that the walls, so to speak, must now fall, and they grasp
hands in the recognition of what has occurred between them.
While Christian is out, Eduardo kills the woman, wrapping her in a
carpet—in what might be seen as misogynistic reversal of Cleopatra’s
introduction of herself to Cesar—which he loads into the back of one of their
carts. Asking Christian to join him in a delivery to one of the clients Eduardo
steers the cart in what the younger brother finally realizes, in the wrong
direction, at which point the elder admits what he has done, now suggesting
that they leave her in their cart so that the vultures might finish off the
remains of her body.
As
the brothers climb down from the cart to take their horses back to their ranch,
they briefly come together with open pampas revealing a beautiful sunset behind
them as they intensely hug one another, surely now ready to express their love
in a far more direct manner.
Like this director’s stunning 1967 film, The Boy and the Wind, A
Intrusa helps to solidify Christensen’s reputation for creating profoundly
complex sexual texts which require his viewers to question their own
preconceived views of what sexual couplings might signify. I can only hope that
Criterion, Kino, or some other film group restores these two films offering new
subtitles as well as releasing other cinematic works of this great
Argentinian/Brasilian director’s oeuvre.
*Herbert J. Brant, “Borges’ Homosexual Panic:
Christensen’s Film Version of ‘La intrusa’,” presented as a paper at the
Northeast Modern Language Association Convention in April, 1996).
**Readers of My Queer Cinema might also
like to consider this passage in conjunction with my discussion above of Saul
Femm’s discussion of the relationship between David and Jonathan in James
Whale’s The Old Dark House.
***At least one scholar has speculated that
Borges might have been raped as a child or a young man.
Los Angeles, September 7, 2020
Reprinted from World Cinema Review (September
2020) and My Queer Cinema blog (September 2020).
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