Luis Hernández de la Peña | Gloria / 2015

the laundry needs to dry

by Douglas Messerli

 

Luis Hernández de la Peña (screenwriter and director) Gloria / 2015 [17 minutes]

 

Hernández de la Peña’s eloquent statement of highly sublimated difference begins quite simply with an empty Mexican bus, onto which the driver José María (Adrián Aguirre) jumps before beginning his daily route 59. The uncleaned Mexico City streets are still filthy with refuse, hours presumably before the streetcleaners will make their way down the avenues.

     Sound, the roar of the engines, the bang of the tires against pavement over which the bus moves forward into its daily routine, the driver’s own voice demanding his passengers move to the back, the screech of the brakes as the bus comes to its many stops, all are ringing in out ears even before we get to the credits, after which, at the end of his day, the driver’s manager settles up his pay, “You’re off tomorrow, right bum?”

      As the well-spoken director makes clear, sound is important to this memorable short film in which from the very beginning we don’t have any idea where the story might be going. At moments on his daily route of the drive, José María, seems interested in the woman’s cleavage which it catches in his mirror of one of his female riders, but mostly there is a calm acceptance of all the various types of individuals who enter his vehicle. And already, from the first moment of the film, the audience has already, without even knowing it, entered into a kind of voyage on which we have no idea where we are going or why. Yet anyone who has ridden public transportation realizes, it is also familiar, the roar of the traffic, the somewhat friendly driver, the basically bland but sometimes problematic fellow riders. Those of us who have often participated in the shared voyages of a daily bus ride, recognize the starts and stops of the early part of this film. And that is just what Hernández de la Peña was evidently attempting to capture:

“One of the things I wanted with Gloria was to try a narrative that resembled somehow the actual experience of remembering something. When you’ve been in a place or met someone and then had to remember it to tell someone else how it happened, you don’t typically have a photographic memory. You don’t even have to have a beginning and an end. Things just sort of jump into your mind and kind of flash with bits and pieces of images, sounds, and faces. You also don’t know the story of whom you’ve just met or where he or she is headed.”

    The director continues: “This is especially true in the beginning of Gloria where I tried to jump right into a story that is already happening. You suddenly find yourself inside a bus, parked in a very peculiar and unknown place, and you see a guy get in and start driving. And from there you start moving with the character and following him around through his day, taking in his world, and discovering things about him. It’s pretty similar to how things happen in our everyday experience.

      It’s also true that sound plays a very special part in the initial sequence. And it did in real life too. It almost became a character with its own dialogue and rhythm, and I think making it stand out helps you get into José’s mindset by the end of his shift.”

 

     But it is at the end of that driver’s shift were the movie truly begins. Or where the deep realization of how the story of our bus driver has only begun reaches our previously unreflective minds. We have seen the driver up until that moment as only as a city employee. But now, without any self-reflective sense of need for adjustment, he suddenly and in relationship to all others, simply flows into becoming someone else, as if the magic of Ovid’s Metamorphoses had come sprinkling down upon his very being.

     From bus central, José María goes directly to his small-town gay bar where, when offered something to eat, he simply refuses—“It will make me fart.”

   In the warrens behind the club’s bar, he encounters Victory (Sostenes Rojas), who is refusing to answer her ringing cellphone.

    Our former bus driver takes out a beautiful blue sequined dress from his bag, and almost immediately Victory recognizes it as one of his evidently numerous drag personas, Gloria, whom he has evidently rarely performed although she is deeply beloved. “You haven’t played her for centuries,” gushes the tough drag queen.

     José María carefully puts out his wig on a head dummy and asks Victory what her boyfriend Sergi has done this time to make her not accept his phone calls.

      She explains, with dramatic affair. Returning home, ready to take a shower, she discovered Sergi sleeping in her bed. “I said Fuck it! But okay. I’ll get into bed and tomorrow will be a new day.”

      “Anyway, I got into bed and I saw Sergi had on a huge stiff. …And so I couldn’t control myself so I gave him a blow job.”

       Our bus driver wonders what possibly might be wrong with that. “Don’t tell me Sergi doesn’t like blow jobs. Everyone likes them.”

       No, that wasn’t the problem, declares Victory, the problem was that Segi’s dick tasted of shit. She sent him to hell, she insists. It’s one thing for him to fuck “as many girls as we wants,” but “to stick it into other guys is being a whore.” Besides, she admits, her boyfriend never fucked her. For Sergi she was just a dick with titties.

     The always cogent and down-to-earth José María wonders how she know it was another guy. “Cause it could have been a woman. Woman have asses too.”

   And so he calms Victory’s dilemma, as she finally she realizes the situation. “Do you think I overreacted?” she wonders. The bus driver expresses the obvious: “What I think is you have to relax for the show.”

    Once more, in his on-line interview with Devin Karambelas, the director cogently explains his character:

 

“One thing that’s pretty cool about José as a character is the fact that, to a great extent, he’s a fulfilled person. He has managed to combine the different aspects of his personality—even those that might appear irreconcilable—in a way that feels extremely natural, almost ordinary. It feels like he has created a personal set of principles and mechanisms that help him deal with his everyday and hold on to what he holds dear. I believe his props—especially the dress—are part of these mechanisms.”

 

      The floorshow has already begun with dancing girls (or boys as girls). We see the marvelous

José María giving a blow job to Victory of calm her down.

       And just as suddenly, in her sparkling blue dress, José María is on stage performing “El Favor De La Soledad,” this in a translation different from that of Luis Hernández de la Peña’s film:

 

Soledad, la única que viene

When everyone walks away

The one only one whom I can cry

That doesn't rebuke me once

Lets me take out everything, ah!

Soledad, sé que por un tiempo

I stay away from you

And I broke my promise not to be unhappy

And now I'm here crying

For having loved him so much

 

……….

 

Loneliness, loneliness, loneliness

Do me a favor. I swear

Make him feel what I am feeling

Loneliness, loneliness, loneliness

Do me a favor I swear

And let him know that I adore him

Loneliness!

 

     What most US citizens and perhaps those of other countries don’t realize is that José María is imitating and referencing the Mexican icon, the “Supreme Diva of Mexican Pop,” Gloria Trevi. Throughout her career she has also been perceived as a LGBT icon (she’s been the Mexican LGBT Parade Queen at least two times), and many of her songs make powerful gay statements. As the director reveals in his interview, “Trevi is particularly famous for having been in prison almost five years, after a sex scandal in which she was accused of corrupting minors. I thought her troubling life and her dark and multi-layered story would make an interesting inspiration for José María in his particular context.”

    Knowing what we now do and what we’ve seen so far in the film, we realize that on this particular night, that our young Mexican bus driver hero, who as Hernández de la Peña describes as “an individual who can’t be accurately defined as gay or transvestite or bisexual, and yet has managed to live his own way inside a very tight and judging society,” on this particular night is feeling a loneliness that perhaps even his drag other can’t quite fully express. The song is sung with such a sense of urgency that we know this man is at the edge, the audience—including me, who dropped a few tears—touched by her performance.

     But when he’s finished and packed up again, he leaves, telling the club’s owner, Xaviera (Fernando García Ortega) that he’s done, she paying him, with the exception a few nicer words such as “honey,” just as the bus manger as done earlier in this film. He looks back at the crazy scene to which he has just performed before he exits.

      He walks the dark streets of the small town back to his own home, where his children and wife are now asleep.

      As he undresses, his wife asks “How are you?”

     José María answers the only way he can possibly express it: “Good. Go to sleep.” He puts his blue dress into the laundry basket, obviously needing special attention.

      “Who did you play today?” his wife asks.

      “Gloria.”

      She turns over, turning on the bedside lamp, perhaps a bit troubled. “It’s been a while since you played Gloria.” Out of view, he sits on the bed, she asking, “You wanna fuck?”

      As he rises in the morning his two children, daughter and son, are watching a kind of Mexican cowboy dancer. His wife is ready to take the laundry to the roof, but he insists he will take it there instead, walking up several long flights of stairs, the heavy basket on his shoulder in the position of so many women of the day, as he moves up to the entanglement of private rooftop drying places, what one may describe as a strange kind of laundry prison. He finds their tiny rooftop drying allotment and begins to pin up with close pins the fresh laundry, a white frock and his own blue Gloria dress, it’s pearl-like pop-bead spangles hanging from it.

     The camera pans over the top of his head showing us this small city’s other prison-like structures, row after row of them. There is no escape, so it appears. The screen goes black as the credits rise. 

     Like the works of Julian Hernández, Robert Fiesco, and many others, Luis Hernández de la Peña’s short film reminds us yet again of how significant contemporary Mexican LGBTQ filmmaking is.

 

Los Angeles, August 21, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema (August 2024).