by
Douglas Messerli
Laura
Huertas Millán (screenwriter and director) Jeny303 / 2018 [6 minutes]
The cinematic legend goes that when Laura Huertas
Millán began interviewing a transsexual named Jeny, her film was accidently
superimposed on the same 16mm film stock that she had used to film one of Bogotá’s
architectural icons, building 303 of the University, a modernist Bauhaus
structure in which her father, on the architecture faculty, had taught and had
asked her to film.
The building had also been the center of many student uprisings, and their political slogans had been registered across the walls of the former architectural wonder, a building demolished in 2015.
By odd
coincidence the ugly imitation of basically male German architecture is also rubbed
out by the voice of the transsexual she had recorded, Jeny, who explains that
she had gone to a party. “Passing by a bedroom, at a party, I saw people
heating heroin. I wanted to try it out on my body.”
Apparently the lesbian couple, helping each other to inject the heroin, quickly acquiesced, since Jeny became an addict who spends most of this 6-minute tape explaining how she attracted men who wanted a man looking like a woman while still displaying a penis.
She
describes the men she attracted putting their hands upon her thigh to make sure
at the very moment when her boyfriend would suddenly appear, threatening them
for being faggots and, with a gun, sometimes beating them as they robbed the
supposed sexual assailants. In therapy, Jeny admits to her playing along in the
game of sexual abuse, probably to get more money for her and her boyfriend’s drug
habit.
The important
metaphor of this film appears early in the short work, when Jeny describes her
first experience with the drug: “I felt my heart beating very fast. My lips
were dry, I was very thirsty. It was like being elsewhere.”
The
accident of the superimposed film image does in fact take us to that strange
elsewhere, a world created out of the German experiments of the Weimar Republic
from 1919-1933, imposed upon the 1960s South American Columbian city of Bogotá,
which itself came to be desecrated as Hitler had the German experiment, by a
later youthful generation in the architecture’s displaced location. This is a
film about dislocation, the lack of the proper identity which attracts many a
male, perhaps even, in a metaphoric sense, the filmmaker’s own father,
precisely because it isn’t what it seems, but represents some sort of
imitation.
For all
of this, however, Jeny303 is at heart a film about drug addiction, speaking
only metaphorically of the transgender dysphoria. It might have been a far more
interesting work if the director had been able to further explore what sexual
joys Jeny, who after all was a human being with a heart and a body, not a
building made of brick, felt about her male admirers, and how/if she finally
grew to resent her boyfriend’s attack of those would-be sexual partners. Or
might there be a far deeper story about how their abuse sexually satisfied her
in revenge for her own obvious societal difference and ostracization? These are
not the concerns of this far more formally concerned short cinema.
Los Angeles, October 31, 2024
Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (October 2024).
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