Wednesday, December 11, 2024

Axel Barranco | Deseo (Wish) / 2020

i don’t want to be a woman

by Douglas Messerli

 

Axel Barranco (screenwriter and director) Deseo (Wish) / 2020 (17 minutes)

 

Mexican director Axel Barranco’s Deseo takes us back to the black magic of the gods as expressed in Otavio Chamorro’s “animal love,” in this case the forces still powerful in the Mayan statues a young boy and girl discover in a Mexican museum.

     Alejandro (Pablo Flores) and Lucia (Matilde Castañeda) are on a class trip at the National Museum where there is currently a Mayan exhibition that will be ending the next day. Both are bored and disinterested in the trip except that the people to who they’re both attracted to are there also, for Pablo his fellow classmate Javier (Héctor Marino).


      Their teacher’s announcement that they have to now enter the show allows what Alejandro perceives as a special moment when they can actually approach the boys they desire, asking them if they might accompany them in the show. Alejandro goes first, striking up a brief conversation with Javier, who seems affable enough and readily agrees to join Alejandro.

     Their brief discussions are rather aborted, Javier saying that he’s been considering his future, and Alejandro, obviously too nervous to even respond, saying there nothing happening with him. As they enter the darkened rooms, Javier asks if his friend actually thinks these works are magical, and after a pause Alejandro says, “Yes,” staring intensely at his friend as the other observes the statues and other artifacts. Alejandro suggests it’s getting hot, and pulls out a notebook, Javier handing him a pen so that he might take notes. One can perceive that even that small gesture excites Alejandro.

     The boy tries to get up the courage and finally does ask Javier, “Do you want to go out...,” his friend immediately responding “Yes, I’m hungry,” turning to leave, while Alejandro, now alone, finishes his sentence “...on a date with me?”


     Even more alone now than before, he mutters to himself, “Maybe if I were different...Javier would want to go out on a date with me.” Unknown to him, the crystal at which at they have been looking glows white, obviously its magic at work.

     The next morning when he awakens to his usual 7:00 clock alarm he gets out of bed to discover only dresses in his closet, and when he looks into the mirror he has long hair and, so he discovers, small breasts. He is now clearly someone different, Alejandra (Giovanna Jiménez), who, in delight, applies makeup and dresses in a completely different way for school that morning, which even her best girlfriend recognizes as a change: “How did you get so pretty?”

     Before she can even get comfortably ensconced in her classroom Javier asks her if they can study together and a few seconds later invites her out to dinner that night.


     At the restaurant, she is delighted for the company and begins small talk in a way that all first- time daters do, both ordering similarly barbecued hot wings, he an orangeade and she a lemonade.

She asks him why he asked her out on date and Javier responds that he has always seen her as someone different and special, surely pleasing the inner Alejandro.

     When she asks him what he planning on studying, however, he suggests two quite radically different alternatives, the first that he would like to study acting and the second that he may join his father as an accountant. On what does it depend? He’d like to study acting but it’s a family tradition to be an accountant, his father, grandfather, etc. which is the direction his family prefers.

      Alejandra suggests that he should choose that which makes him the happiest. But he finds it difficult to be loyal to himself. If he would study acting, he answers her query, he might study in New York, the name of which lights up Alejandra’s face: that was where Madonna got her start?

     Like the soccer player, asks Javier, clearly having no clue who Madonna is.

     When she asks him what kind of roles we wants to play, he mentions that he recently told his father that the only thing he could never do was act a “a gay role, a faggot role.”

     “No, no, no,” she immediately corrects him, “A homosexual role. Not a faggot role. Homosexual is the way you say it.”

     But he cannot get her drift. “Homosexual, faggot, gay....”

     “No, no, no. They’re aren’t synonyms,” she interrupts. “It’s just homosexual, period.”

     “Whatever...it’s just a disease.”

     The waiter delivers their drinks.

     He repeats that it is a disease, Alejandra again correcting him, “It’s not a disease.”

     “I have read about it,” he insists.

     “No, it’s not a disease. OK. It’s just a preference.” Suddenly rising, she turns back to him: “And I can’t believe you don’t even know who Madonna is.”

      She continues: “You should study acting. There are lots of roles for assholes.”

     In the next frame we see the Mayan stone now glowing purple and Alejandra running up to the museum and begging the guard to let her in just for a moment, but he will not relent. The show leaves the next morning, and we see Alejandra sitting near the museum door in tears and desolation.


      A figure is in bed, and the alarm rings, this morning at 11:04. Alejandro awakens, checks out his chest and peaks in his pajamas just to see his cock before he rises and dances with joy. He is still a gay boy, happy to be who he is.

 

Los Angeles, July 20, 2021

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (July 2021).

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