Juan Pablo Di Pace and Andrés Pepe Estrada | Duino / 2024

the choices we make

by Douglas Messerli

 

Juan Pablo Di Pace and Andrés Pepe Estrada (screenwriters and directors) Duino / 2024

 

Ah youth! Was there ever a time when we were more in love with love itself than during our teenage years, particularly having just escaped the childhood cradles of intense family homelife? This has been the subject of hundreds of books, films, dances, and musical compositions over the years. It explains why so many of us still perceive our early military years or college days as among the most important periods of our life.

   Argentine filmmakers Juan Pablo Di Pace and Andrés Pepe Estrada, working with US and Italian producers have once again chosen to mine this material for the truly beautiful film Duino, which I just saw on the New York City gay NewFest yesterday.

     In Di Pace and Estrada’s film a youthful romance becomes something closer to a lifelong obsession of unfulfilled love just a bit less frustrating and certainly less grand than the passions of Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde.

     Darting back and forth in time between a young Matias (Santiago Madrussan) and his older self (performed by the handsome actor-director himself) who is attempting to make a semi-autobiographical film about his younger passion, the film creates a natural tension between a Proustian sense of the past and the far more problematic present. And in a sense that tension between a symbol of his young self, the on-film character of the movie, and the filmmaker himself making the movie about his making the movie provide the work with its most profound dimensions. Otherwise, one might simply describe it as a youthful tale about thwarted love.

      In the end, however, Di Pace isn’t actually so much interested in what sex and open love might have been like with his young would-be lover, Alexander (the younger version energetically portrayed by Oscar Morgan and the elder by the handsome August Wittgenstein)—although any gay person seeing this film would simply love to see them finally put their hands to each other’s face, put their lips together, and hump each other’s lean torsos—as he is in trying to explain why both have never able been able to fulfill each other’s deep longing.

      Was it their sublimated heterosexually-inspired fears, their parental concerns, their class and linguistic differences? Why was desire never fulfilled?

      Fortunately, Di Pace does not spend most of his screentime with the elder Matias pondering these issues—although he strongly conveys the tensions with the older man’s inability to finish the film and his friend Paolo’s (Tomás Kirzner/ Juan Cruz Márquez de la Serna) growing frustration with his the film's director, particularly since he is now the producer of the film. Rather, Di Pace dives almost immediately into long passages of the early years beginning at the almost paradisiacal school on the Italian Adriatic in Duino (at whose local castle Rainer Maria Rilke wrote his Duino Elegies), home to the United World College of the Adriatic, which Di Pace himself attended as a young teen. Some of the current students of that college were chosen to perform in the movie.

 

    The newly arrived Matias quickly encounters the spirit of the multi-cultural school as, fresh off the plane and bus ride, he is hijacked to attend an evening performance featuring student talent before they demand that he himself demonstrate some talent. The startled, doe-eyed Matias, has no choice but to perform a sort of attenuated tango, applauded and appreciated by all before, minutes later, he is swept up into the tornado of personality which the young Swedish prince Alexander represents.

      One of the few full-tuition paying students attending UWC, the multi-lingual Alexander has escaped there in order to not have to attend the military school his father had planned for him. And clearly in the short year or more he has been a student in Duino, he’s charmed nearly every other student, who themselves bring with them a wide range of group activities, including a nightly beach party, along with the mix of artistic talent which they all represent.

      Alexander almost immediately and, quite literally, takes the young Argentine under his wing (we see his hand again and again around the South American’s shoulders), touring him through local historical spots, telling him grandly dramatic tales, and, in general, awakening the young boy’s intellectual, spiritual, and sexual life. He soon is writing home that he feels a freedom here that he never before imagined.

      By the time his Argentine friend, Paolo arrives, camera in hand, Matias and Alexander have become a symbolic couple whom all the others recognized and perhaps even imagine as being lovers. Paolo and his camera catch nearly everything.

      As a young free-thinking rebels are prone to do, however, Alexander has already sent a couple of preposterous emails in the school director’s name back home to his parents, and when his duplicity is discovered, despite Matias’ attempts to stand up for his friend, he is sent home, the would-be lovers split-up before they even have an opportunity to open themselves up for sexual pleasures.

      Paulo also returns back to Argentina, sharing most of the film (he cuts it off the point where Alexander is about to be expelled) with Matias’ mother and father. Matias’ mother, however, has already sensed in the frames she has watched what is happening and pleads with Paolo to keep the film a day or two longer. Soon after, she insists that their son needs her and is determined to find some way to travel to Italy to see him, the father insisting he will attempt to find a way to earn the money.

       We shift back at some point to the elder Matias’ attempt to film these early years, and the difficulties they are having. Matias seems unhappy with nearly every scene, having now gone far over budget, wanting just one more chance to film several scenes over, to “get it right,” as he indicates. How he wishes that somehow Paolo’s filming of these events had not been lost and destroyed.

      Moving back into the past, we discover that despite his return home that Alexander and his family have invited Matias to their winter mansion for Christmas, including a round-ticket for the voyage.

        Just as before, the two immediately bond, and sleeping in beds next to each other, night after night Matias awakens attempting to get up the courage to stroke his sleeping friend’s face. The boys, in fact, might have found a way to break through their sexual hesitations if suddenly Alexander’s beautiful sister, Kathrine (Julia Bender/Krista Kosonen) had not shown up. Alexander’s parents, who have already grown fond of Matias, as much as tell him that she might make the perfect wife.

      Kathrine is also taken with Matias and finds every way she can to seduce him, the naïf boy himself becoming unsure of his feelings. Without actually suggesting such an issue, the film hints that perhaps Matias himself wonders if he is bisexual.

       Alexander, quite naturally, feels angry about his sister’s intrusion and equally peeved by his friend’s seemingly open response to his charms.

       Even worse, however, Matias’ parents suddenly call. They have arrived in Europe and have tracked their son down to the Swedish mansion. Alexander’s family are gracefully delighted to invite them also to their Christmas celebrations.

       Just as we have a kind of three-level structure of perception dominating the outer frame of the film (the boy, the adult, and the real filmmaker who was once both of them), so now do we have a trio of women worrying over Matias, his own mother, Alexander’s mother, and Kathrine, all sensing that the intense feeling between the two boys is possibly dangerous to their visions of reality. And accordingly, Matias’ visit ends, once more, without the boys 'consummation or even a verbal expression of their love.

     As Matias and his parents drive off, the boy suddenly breaks down into uncontrollable sobs, realizing that once more he has lost his lover, this time perhaps forever. Yet his parents are not homophobic fiends, but stop along the way to admit that they have been wrong to try to attempt to help their son make decisions that might have been better left to him. Similarly, Alexander’s parents have thoroughly loved Matias, even if Alexander’s father still insists he must now attend military school, the tradition in their family. Neither sets of parents are monsters but simply want to do what’s right for their sons.

       The movie the elder Matias is making is now even further stalled as he attempts again and again to fully explain what has happened so many years ago. It apparently will not be ready for the festival in which they planned to premiere it, and he has almost lost Paolo’s friendship over that fact.

      Surprised, Matias receives another epistle from Sweden, inviting him to Kathrine’s wedding, she personally insisting that he must attend.

       Before he travels back to Sweden these many long years later, he visits his mother who declares she has been watching one her favorite movies, and begs him to take it out of the VHS machine. When he does so, he is startled to see that it is the long-lost Duino film taken by Paolo on his long-ago visit. He and we now finally watch that last scene, where as he turns to leave, Alexander turns back to look at his friend Matias with a sadly unequivocal stare of love and loss upon his face.

       In Sweden Kathrine herself comes to pick him up at the station, revealing herself to be pregnant. She has evidently made sure this time that the man she loves will marry. At the ceremony Alexander and Matias meet up yet again, but this time there can be no turning back of the clock. Both now recognize that memories are something different from what really was. That what didn’t happen in the past never happened for a purpose. Whatever the reasons might have been they cannot be rectified by trying to imagine another existence. Their love can never be anything more than a deep sublimation of desire, an unfulfilled longing. There is no way to fully understand or capture the past. Matias as Di Pace can now finish his movie.  

       In an interview in US Lifestyle Di Pace himself summarized these issues in describing his movie:

 

“It is a movie that dwells with memory, with parenting, with romanticizing the past so much that sometimes it can blind our path to love in the present. We were very drawn to the concept of ‘life imitating art’ and vice versa. The significance to every day life is that it is a universal story: we all fell in love for the first time, we all had that one person we obsessed about, and we all have parents who did the best they could.”

 

       Finally, even if it is not a great film, Duino is a tearfully poignant and profound testament to what we in our youths were not able to achieve, about the opportunities, for whatever reasons, we failed to take advantage of, and about the choices we made, instead of those we didn’t.

 

Los Angeles, October 12, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (October 2024).