Salvador Sunyer | Les étoiles (The Stars) / 2024

the gay gaze

by Douglas Messerli

 

Salvador Sunyer (director) Les étoiles (The Stars) / 2024 [17 minutes]

 

Founder and creator of the filmed Nanouk Films team (2002), producing creative documentaries, advertising content, and auteur cinema that has been regularly shown at film festivals and in world-wide museums, Spanish director Salvador Sunyer brought together the noted Catalonian director Oriol Pla Solina (in this film using the name Oriol Pla), along with actor/director Pol López and the noted cellist Ramon Bassal—all truly stars in their own right—together on a ship named “Restless Spirit,” where for 20 hours of improvisations between the cast and the crew they created this film, that doesn’t even pretend to be a “gay” movie, but actually is one of the most homoerotic works ever filmed.

    What first seems to be an advertising gig in which the handsome Pla is serving as the model gradually shifts from endlessly through the directions spoken up close by López that grow more and more gay by the minute. What begins as a sensual dive into the waters by the hirsute Pla is quickly turned into a shoot that attempts to discover “the perfect gaze.”

    It may start with the notion that he should simply move so that a shadow doesn’t cross his leg, but quickly escalates into the short barks of director López, “Close, close, close” [his eyes], and gently open them,” as he slaps him gently on the forehead. “Your masculinity is inside, okay? It’s inside. [He pounds him on the chest”] immediately shouting out the words, “More queer. More queer. More queer. Where’s the feminine?”

      They stop for a while, and López takes a call. But first bends close to his male “object,” demanding joy, more joy, as the other grunts almost as if it were a challenge to participate in sex, as López insinuates that there is something soft his model is looking for, “soft like gold.”

      It’s the “gaze,” argues López that he is seeking, “a gaze that makes people say ‘I’ve never seen that gaze before.'”

      After they play a game dependent on Pla being able to call up different figures from art, Giacometti, Rodin, Camille Claudel (whose work Pla doesn’t know), Botero, and Calder. Finally, despite Pla’s quite hilarious takes on the work of each of these artists, López calls up for the cellist Ramon Bassal.

      Calling for another break, the director insists Pla join him in some cocaine as Pla attempts to speak and is again quieted. Suddenly López demands a violinist, changing it at the last moment to a call for the famous cellist Ramon Bassal, who quite amazingly, a few hours later, shows up in a speedboat moving forward to join them.

      After a few phrases, López demands Bassal play in the manner of Duport, whose famous cello is now owned and played by Rostropovich. That seems to do the trick as Pla begins riving and moving up and down as if in an ecstatic moment of sexual ecstasy comparable to Alla Nazimova’s Salome.

      We can only wonder now whether the whole shoot was actually for a personal homoerotic voyeuristic fantasy of the director, or of the cinematographer Artur-Pol Camprubí, Bassal, or for us as the viewers—perhaps for everyone. Deeply hugging and kissing Pa, López suggests his “model” should back into the blue waters for a well-deserved bath of relief. The sexual gaze has finally been achieved.

      We can almost feel the semen on the tip of all the observer’s penises.

 

Los Angeles, October 12, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (October 2024)