Caio Scot | Depois Daquela Festa (After That Party) / 2019

 can we talk?

by Douglas Messerli

 

Mel Carvalho and Lucas Drummond (screenplay), Caio Scot (director) Depois Daquela Festa (After That Party) / 2019

 

Of the dozen films I discuss in the collection of essays, “Family Secrets,” Brazilian director Caio Scot’s After that Party is the only truly comic presentation of family sexual secrets, reflecting as it does a far more contemporary viewpoint which we hope now dominates open societies.       

     This story is really quite simple. Leo (Lucas Drummond) and his long-time girlfriend (Mel Carvalho)—with whom, oddly since it has no reason to appear in this tale except as a kind of quirky aside, he evidently doesn’t have sex—attend a party at which, quite by accident, they both witness Leo’s father (Charles Fricks) in attendance kissing another man.  

    The shock of the scene momentarily sends Leo reeling, having to leave the party immediately to contemplate the situation. His girlfriend pushes him quickly to try to express his true feeling about the incident, and it appears that he is not so upset because he has discovered that his widowed father is now gay, but that he hasn’t told him. The two, father and son, have long been close, and Leo still lives at home with his dad.

      Although the discovery does not seem to be particularly momentous with regard to his love for his father, he and his girlfriend feel it necessary to relieve his father of his secret by revealing their discovery. The question is simply how to go about it, and Leo spends a sleepless night in creating a scenario over a meal of lasagna where he might bring up the subject by discussing his father’s job as an advertising executive before turning it to a discussion of his friends, their off-hour activities, and whether or not he meets others outside of his co-workers, etc. until he can zero in on the particularities which might lead to the revelation.

       Unfortunately, his father serves stroganoff, not their usual Friday night meal, and their conversation is interrupted by a telephone message before it can even begin.

       A day or two later Leo finally confronts his father by recalling a childhood story about himself in which he was afraid of asking his teacher permission to go to the bathroom, as a consequence peeing in his pants and receiving the taunts of his fellow students, all resulting in his determination never to return to school. His father reassured him that he had done nothing wrong, and to prove that he needed to return to the classroom to assert his innocence of wrongdoing.

      So too, he now suggests, he argues his father needn’t feel that he has done anything wrong in the fact that the son has witnessed at the very same party that Leo and his girlfriend attended, his father embrace and kiss a stranger.

      For a moment the father attempts to deny it, but quickly becomes speechless. When he regains his composure, he explains that he never cheated or lied to Leo’s mother and loved her dearly. But suddenly he has found an unexpected love with another human being who just happens to be a man. But there was simply no way he could explain it to Leo for fear that he would misunderstand the situation. 

    

     When it is now established that Leo has no problems with him now having a “boyfriend” the two hug, the elder realizing that there was no need for secrecy, that he was deeply loved and remains so. Leo insists that the three of them have dinner so that can, he jokes, “determine his intentions” regarding his dad.

      Scot’s film feels a little too much like a liberal school-room advocation of open minds and free talk about sexuality. But the script, written by the two actors playing Leo and his girlfriend, at moments is delightfully manic in the son’s attempts to arrange for that open and free conversation between father and son, resulting in Scot’s work being a lot of fun, even if we know the final “feel-good” results. Surely there are a great many Leos and dads out there who have been shaped, post Stonewall, by the general acceptance of LGBTQ behavior in liberal societies worldwide. But, alas, I am afraid that they still do not represent the majority of households. On the very same day I am writing about this film, I have also just watched director/producer Aiman Hasani’s Dutch film Khata (2019) in which a couple of teenage brothers, trapped into male prostitution and with nowhere else to turn, are denied entry into the own home by their parents upon their discovery of their boy’s secret vocations, which only closes off their final possible route of escape. Indeed this film might also have been included in these pages except that I felt it was more centered on their involvement in gay prostitution which I will feature in an upcoming essay, “Working Boys.”

     But it’s a delight to watch a work in which family secrets do not necessarily result in terrifying consequences.

 

Los Angeles, September 21, 2021

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (September 2021).