Antonio Hens | En malas compañías (Doors Cut Down) / 2000

toilet conquests

by Douglas Messerli

 

Antonio Hens (screenwriter and director) En malas compañías (Doors Cut Down) / 2000 [18 minutes]

 

The first film that I discuss in the context of what I have described as “Plastic Paradises” is Spanish director Antonio Hens’ Doors Cut Down, the only truly comic work discussed in this context, although it takes us on a series of journey’s that are equally as compulsive, hallucinatory, and absurd as the others I discuss, representing a ridiculous paradise with little difference from the other six more serious-minded works.

     The young Spanish high school student Guillermo (Israel Rodriguez) is certainly a different species of a teen fag from almost anyone born before 1970, the kind of gay kid we all wish we might have been, gleefully picking up all the boys without suffering any sense of the queerness or oddity of it.

      Guillermo trades his everyday looks for his thin frame, his charming smile, and a savvy sense of knowing how to capture the attention of any traditional male macho beauty of any high school football team (in this case we’re speaking soccer).

      This kid has also traded in his English language lessons for a degree in shopping for mall bathroom sex, picking up men young and old as he pleases while helping to realize that all they have to do is shut up, pull down their pants’ and let him perform fellatio or, once he gets the kick of it, turn him around and fuck his ass. He has all the cockiness certainly that it took me decades to discover with regard to how use the john for a more complex kind of relief. There, if you’re good at it, you can really let go as this boy reminds us.

    We observe him in only a couple of his toilet stall conquests. As even the adolescent wonders, “I don’t know why men pick me up. It might be the way I look back when they look at me.” Our young Romeo doesn’t just sweep his eyes down in a bashful tease, but stares back directly into the lust-ridden eyes of the elder.

       Ernesto (Antonio Álamo) is a young 20-something who, as Guillermo describes, is a real asshole in attempting to find someone with whom to fall in love in a men’s room. The boy clues him in, reminding him with regard to the police and security guards he so fears, that their role is merely observational.

       If at home, he lives with a typical homophobic father, the boy knows the man is too horrified of his son’s exaggerated behavior to actually share the facts with his mother, let alone others. When the couple hire him an English tutor to help him pass his abandoned school studies, Guillermo tries to break the ice by removing his shirt and asking the handsome young bookworm to tell him how to say all the dirty words in English; and when even that doesn’t do the trick, he gets quite specific, demanding to know how to say “Fuck me up the ass.”

     When the tutor proceeds to do so, he opens the boy up for all such future activities. The only problem is that, having forgotten his keys, Guillermo’s father reenters their apartment to hear the creak of the bedsprings and his son’s painful groans, opening up the bedroom door to witness “the horror, the horror” of his son joyfully taking it up the ass. Silence pervades their home for a long while after. “Nonetheless,” he reports, “I passed my English test.”

        Meanwhile, one day in his mall sprees the boy encounters the handsome 21-year-old mechanic Asier (Pablo Puyol) who used to attend his school, who impresses all the girls by taking apart and reassembling motorcycles, a contemporary equivalent of what where I grew up we used to call “greasers” because of the vast amounts of Vaseline they applied to their hair and for their mechanical abilities, but which Howard growing up in Baltimore knew as “drapes,” a word I didn’t believe until John Waters brought it back into the language in his 1990 film Cry-Baby, defining it as a “rebel, the opposite of a square.” Whether called greasers or drapes their wore a uniform, in our days, of a white crew-neck T-shirts and denims, and long carefully combed black hair, all of them looking to my eager eyes like Marlon Brando and James Dean, guys who terrified me and with whom I knew I can never have anything to do.

       Our young hero, who has a theory that if you stare at the back of a guy’s head long enough they have to turn around and see you, does his magic, Asier turning to find the cute kid licking a banana ice cream cone; and within minutes they’re visiting the mall bathroom truly enjoying a taste test. Unfortunately, the mall security guards must have gotten bored or been told by someone to keep the young chickens away from the hawks, and go pounding on the stall doors, arresting both the mechanic and the well-oiled machine he was enjoying straddling. Once out of the bathroom, Asier goes on the run, while Guillermo is brought down to police central where his parents are called and told not only what he was doing but that it wasn’t his first time.

       When the worried parents trot him off to a psychotherapist of the year 2000 he praises the boy for “accepting himself and meeting other gay men,” and scolds Guillermo’s parents for being the ones the ones who need therapy. “My father went berserk,” Guillermo calmly reports in the narrative voice over. “It was the first time I felt proud of myself.”

       That’s a simple line that might be missed in all the other action of the film, yet it is of vast importance. I might never have heard such words in the entire history of LGBTQ cinema before the year of the new millennium.

        Guillermo forgives Asier for bolting, and two become a couple, kissing in front of the school before setting off on the mechanic’s bike like any love-possessed straight couple in the dozens of high-school based films of the 1950s and 1960s. 

     Occasionally, they still haunt the mall, teasing the guards by openly kissing in front of them, the boy evidently having come of legal age. But the kid’s curious if the bathrooms are still filled with the same queer boys, and they take a look only to discover that all the stall doors have been cut down on top and cut up at bottom. In those stalls with which I was familiar, the authorities simply tore off the doors of every other stall, presuming no one would want to do anything sexual being so exposed; but a lot of guys found it preferable, using the glory hole while being able to observe the others greedily eye them as they passed. No one went to have sex in a public bathroom who was afraid of public sex.

       Asier and Guillermo leave the men’s room with a bit of nostalgia for the old days, but happy in their relationship—until the boy catching a cute guy walking in the direction of the men’s room asks Asier to wait for him for a moment as he goes on the chase.

       Hens’ comedy is no less driven by uncontrollable urges which force the individual into uncharted territory than the others I describe. Perhaps it is simply that the adolescent of Doors Cut Down more fully enjoys his manias—something that in the past queers were simply not permitted.

 

Los Angeles, October 17, 2021

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (October 2021).