Juan Martín Simons | K / 2005

a bedroom trot

by Douglas Messerli

 

Alejandro Andrade, Luis Gamboa, Roberto Quintanilla, and Juan Martín Simons (screenplay), Juan Martín Simons (director) K / 2005 [12 minutes]

 

K (Miguel Ángel Jiménez) seems to be a pretty tough character, known well around town as a man who can get you want you want. He passes quick drugs onto friends, exchanges cash in an open meeting place at a bar and makes love to the bartender, Nelson (Álex Quiroga), all within the first few moments of Spanish director Juan Martín Simons fast-moving short film, K.

       Presumably, with a name like K, the writers wanted to convey the possibly evil and certainly powerful hustler of Kafka’s tales. And there is something troubling and possibly dangerous, if not precisely evil, in this film’s central figure. Although he asks Nelson, also his next-door neighbor, to also meet up with him for sex that afternoon—it’s Nelson’s birthday—he is soon off for pickup in a car (Jesús Paglieny), evidently one of his many clients; and he seems to have a deal going with another of his friends for some hot goods fresh in from Thailand.

      But it’s the bi-sexual Nelson who really double-crosses K, who when K shows up for their appointed sexual rendezvous is still in bed with a local girl (Yanira Farray) who’s clearly convinced herself that Nelson belongs to her. And K, who has cancelled his attendance at a meetup that evening, nonetheless shows up to his client (Javier Campillo) and has a kind a S&M sexual engagement the overweight, heavily-tattooed man. Simons counterposes their sexual rendezvous, neither of which seem particularly fulfilling for our “heroes.”

      The next morning Nelson finally shows up in K’s apartment, having not been able to sleep all night, just at the moment with Nelson is about to go to bed. When Nelson asks him if we worked last night and even goes further to ask him “how it was,” K snaps back, “Like you and that chick.”

   Nelson agrees that both were just “routine,” but obviously there is a tension between them. Nonetheless, K pulls out Nelson’s now late birthday gift, the “hot stuff” from Thailand, a new pair of sneakers, a gift obviously perfect for the young man on the move. They quickly kiss, as Nelson, fed up with K’s droning music, puts on a disc for dancing, pulling up K from the couch as the two gently engage in a kind of bedroom trot to Jorge Aníbal Serrano’s “Loco (Tu Forma de ser)”, gently kissing in a manner that neither of them was able to enjoy the night before.

    Despite the blockades both have put up to keep out others, their love has broken through, symbolized perhaps by the lock that K, throughout this film, emphatically pulls open to quickly let in his lover Nelson, while keeping everyone else out. These men surely prove that true love is wherever you find it, despite any limitations put upon it.

 

Los Angeles, September 10, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (September 2023).