Adrián Vivar | Rutina (Routine) / 2022

hate pretending to be love

by Douglas Messerli

 

Adrián Vivar (screenwriter and director) Rutina (Routine) / 2022 [21 minutes]

 

Mexican director Adrián Vivar’s Routine is a film that is bearable to watch only if you read it metaphorically. If it were presented as realism, it would be just too painful to experience, although we know that what it represents does actually occur in families over and over.

      For the hero of this cinematic exposition of homophobia, Mario (Luis Ceceña), is a young gay closeted 16- or 17-year-old, who must daily make his way through a world in which there seems to be little love and support for someone like him.

     His mother is highly religious, like so many of her kind using her religion as a shield to hide behind while hating anyone outside of what her conservative Catholic dogma decrees is sinful. Mario’s father is a misogynistic brute who equally maltreats both his wife and his son, demanding each morning—part of the substance behind this film’s title—that his breakfast be ready and grabbing away the newspaper his son attempts to read. When he hears that the Mexican government may pass legislation giving LGBTQ individuals the right to marry, hate storms out of his mouth, reified by his wife’s conventional religious beliefs.

     Each morning the bus which would take him to school, refuses to even recognize Mario’s existence, and he is instead forced to take a taxi in which the driver reasserts all the standard reasons why gays should be given no rights—although always justifying his version of homophobia with the words “That’s just my humble opinion.”

      Another figure with whom Mario daily meets up passes him, phone to ear, espousing homophobic remarks about a supposedly gay friend

      At school, Mario can least exchange glances with the gentle Leo (Ángel Higuera), but even that is somewhat controlled by his lesbian friend who obvious tries to control access to Leo. And the boys on either side of him spend their time sharing their nightly exploits with hot women, interrupted only with their inability to comprehend why anyone would want to be gay.

       Beginning in May 2019 and during the year, 2022, in which film was made, several Mexican states begin passing laws permitting same-sex marriage, first San Luis Potsi, then the state of Hidalgo, also in 2019, followed by Baja California Sur in June 2019. In 2020 the Contrell of Tlaxcala passed the law, followed by Sinaloa in 2021, and Zacatecas later that year. The Congress of Veracruz passed the law on March 1, 2022, which went into effect three days after the Supreme Court of Mexico finally ruled against the anti-gay provisions. The other states legalized it the same year. Still today, although marriage licenses of issued, gay marriage is illegal in some states, as is adoption of children is still illegal, including Baja California Sur.

       But in this film, the government of Baja California Sur, where most of this movie was shot, after a religious protest followed by a Pride protest the following day, ended with the government voting against.

      Gradually, through the week this movie portrays, Mario, growing more and more furious with the “routine” homophobia he must daily face, begins to speak out, at first rather softly, but increasingly louder. When his parents insist that he join them in the anti-gay march, he refuses, but quite literally kidnapped by his father and locked in the car as it drives off to the homophobic even despite his protests.

      On the next day, Mario dares to openly gaze at Leo in his classroom, and is awarded with the gay boy’s invitation to a film the next afternoon, meaning that the two boys disappear from their classes, joining in the afternoon gay demonstrations. In those few hours, they bond, Mario clearly also falling in love.

       As Leo arrives at Mario’s house, he goes to kiss him, Mario at first pulling back, but finally accepting it almost as a dare and demonstration for his family. From the house Mario’s father suddenly erupts, chasing Leo off and pulling his son inside to beat him.

       The next morning Mario confronts his mother, wondering why she too hates him. She insists she loves him, but he firmly attempts to explain that by not accepting him as who he is, a gay son, she represents all the hate and repression which supposedly Christianity stands against. “Spare the rod” is not within her grasp of comprehension.

        Finally, the voices of hate he has been experiencing all week sweep Mario up in a tronada of words which result in his own fury. This time instead of watching the bus pass him by, he stands in front of it, as we see the sign on that the bus: Sociedad (Society) who obviously refuses to stop in their relentless forward drive for his kind. The following day’s newspaper announces the death of a young man in a bus accident.

        This time a boy looking very much like Mario, opens the paper, as a mother, very much like Mario’s mother cooks up his breakfast. The new boy screams in the torture of what has become far too routine.

 

Los Angeles, October 7, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (October 2024).