Matías Risi | Diaz Pesos (10 Pesos) / 2003

payment for services rendered

by Douglas Messerli

 

Matías Risi (screenwriter and director) Diaz Pesos (10 Pesos) / 2003 [6 minutes]

 

Risi’s short retelling of O’Henry’s “The Tale of the Tainted Tenner” begins in our times in the bathroom of a gay bar, money found by a young handsome bargoer, who quickly passes if off to the bartender for drinks, who just as suddenly hands it over to an older man standing beside him at the bar, either his boss or a would-be customer seeking out a floor-dancer’s sexual services.

     The middle-aged man quickly gives the dancer a blow job and pays him with the 10 pesos bill which he simply drops upon the boy’s sweaty body.

     A park hustler quickly passes it off to a policeman, who hands it to his female lover or perhaps his sister beautician, from whom her young son picks it up. He colors and decorates it and just and secretly passes in on in his classroom to a friend, who before we can even catch our breath, takes it a grocer to purchase some candy.

     A hassled woman enters seeking some change for parking, the clerk passing her the ten pesos bill. In the car she rolls it up nicely for her cocaine fix and stashes it in her blouse between her breasts.  

 

    Back home, in exhaustion she sits down to the table with her husband (who appears the same man who paid the bar dancer for a blow job?) downing a glass of wine, as her maid finds the ten pesos bill as her evening pay.   

    On her way home the maid encounters what seems to be a mad man throwing away just such bills as he lectures on the street. She gathers up as many of the bills as she can. Clearly the original 10 pesos note has brought her, far removed the corrupt activities previously related to this bill,  much deserved good luck—the credits show us a close-up view of this Argentinian bill which features the image of Manuel José Joaquín del Corazón de Jesús Belgrano y González, an Argentine economist, lawyer, politician, and journalist who took part in the Argentine Wars of Independence, designed what became the modern flag of Argentina, and is regarded as one of the Founding Father of that country—the film’s numerous credits crowding into the crevices of the 10-pesos.

Los Angeles, August 22, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (August 2024).