Fernando Grisi | Frutinha (Fruity) / 2023

the kiss

by Douglas Messerli

 

Fernando Grisi (screenwriter and director) Frutinha (Fruity) / 2023 [21 minutes]

 

11-year-old Pedro (Fellipe Samuel) plays goalie for the older soccer players Santos (Garbriel Mionete) and Marcos (Lucas Alves Rodrigues Martins), while Felipe (Pedro Miguel Chiappa),* a fragile boy of Pedro’s age sits on the sidelines to draw. The older boys make fun of his lack of talent and refusal to even attempt to play with them, as Felipe, by now somewhat use to their abuse, moves to pack up his things and leave.

     But this time Pedro stands up for him, telling the older boys to leave him alone and assuring Felipe that he doesn’t have to play if he doesn’t want to.

     Later that evening Felipe overhears another of his parents’ incessant fights, in which the father arrives home late again, refusing to even go up and see his son, despite the mother’s protests. “That boy’s turning out very weird. You give him too much freedom,” he argues. Painting and decorating are not what men do, insists this macho slob, probably cheating nightly on his wife.

      In the morning, Felipe, after dressing, doesn’t even dare pass by the rooms in which his parents might be waiting, leaving by his own bedroom door.

     In the gym, Pedro sits alone, awaiting perhaps the arrival of his older friends. But seeing Felipe enter, he suggests that he help him train. Felipe demurs, having been told previously by Pedro that didn’t want him playing the game with him. But something has changed. He now recalls that Felipe has a great kick. And Felipe agrees, but as a goalie is completely useless, afraid of the ball. When Pedro laughs at him, Felipe again moves to leave, but Pedro suggests that they switch. Felipe kicks, while Pedro leans in the other direction, permitting him a goal.

      When the other boys arrive, Santos can’t believe that Pedro has brought the “fairy” to join them. But Pedro simply says, watch. And this time, with Marcos as goalie, he kicks in a score, Pedro hooting in delight. The two have become friends, with Pedro, on their walk home, even inviting himself to Felipe’s house.

      Pedro notes that he’s never been to Felipe’s house, Felipe commenting that he didn’t seem to be a friend until now. But Pedro is wowed by Felipe’s art on the walls, although he finds some of then to be a little “weird,” the word which keeps creeping up on Felipe throughout this short movie. Pedro asks his new friend to draw him in a Spiderman suit.

     When Felipe next pays football with the group, however, he trips and falls, Santos calling him retarded, while Marcos warns him, sarcastically, that he’s scaring the “fruity.” They further describe him as a baby and a loser. This time, Pedro does not come to his defense.

   When Felipe finishes the drawing of Pedro in a Spiderman suit, he briefly shows it to him before crumpling it up into a ball. Yet that doesn’t stop Pedro from putting his head on Felipe’s shoulder. When walking home, Pedro invites him now to his house, Felipe suggests that he might see him as a little baby. “Yes, you, Santos, and everybody hates me.” Given his home situation, it is no wonder that Felipe is so sensitive to what his own school mates say.

     Pedro suggests he just forget “those assholes,” explaining that he doesn’t hate him, and neither do they. “They just have to be tougher. Show it to them,” and he walks off. But Felipe follows. Pedro suggests he liked the drawing, Felipe that he shouldn’t have made it, with Pedro responding, “Ouch, that hurts. What did I do?”

      Of course, it’s what he didn’t do that hurts Felipe. But the boy also has to get used to a world without protectors. You’ve got to be tough, Pedro consuls, and show them you’re not….”

      “A fruity,” Felipe interrupts. “So, it’s my fault.”

      Pedro, the more mature of them, takes on all the blame. “No, it was all fault.” From now on, he insists, he will speak up.

      But Felipe is still hurt. “You used to never talk to me.” He moves on to his own home, so it appears, alone.

     Yet, in the next frame when we think we are seeing Felipe in bed alone, he suddenly discover that he is instead in bed with Pedro, evidently on an overnight stay, apparently in Pedro’s house. Pedro apologizes for having made fun of him earlier, but argues that it was, in part, a result of his having stopped playing with them. “I was sad no one remembered how well you could play. But I would like to be your friend. If your majesty (a slight ribbing that he has also previously used to signify Felipe’s standoffish behavior) will allow.”

      They now ask one another what they will be when they grow up. Felipe asks, “Do you still want to be a soccer player?” “Well, that’s very hard,” Pedro answers. “But you can do it. You play better than anyone I know.” And when Pedro asks the same question of his friend Fe, he jokes back, “A soccer player, obviously.”

      “You should be an artist,” suggest Pedro. “And being an artist is not too hard?” Felipe responds. “Not for you,” assures his friend.

      In short, the two boys, in getting to know each other, reify their talents, praising each other for their own natural gifts.

      When Felipe complains that the mattress on the floor on which he is sleeping is hard, Pedro invites him into his bed, where they sleep laying in opposite directions.

    But now Felipe is troubled, asking Pedro “But what if I am…you know…” Pedro joins him in a head-to-head position. “What do you mean?” Felipe backs off: “Nothing, nothing.”

       Yet Pedro probes, “How do you know?”

       Pedro: “I just know…I think it’s…because of you.”

       To end up side by side in bed, on the verge of a kiss.

      The next morning when Pedro brings Felipe to the soccer gym again, insisting that he is the best player among them, the boys again demean Felipe and insist that he is now Pedro’s boyfriend, which gives them further fodder for their endless bullying. “No need to crush his little heart. He was hoping for a romance with you.” It’s clear they sense where they can hurt anyone not like them the most. But suddenly they do hand the ball to Felipe, explaining they were just razzing the newbie.

       Still, Felipe wanders off, tired and frustrated with the endless dismissals of his identity as a human being. His parent’s nightly quarrels ring out like a continuation of his own difficulties:

        “I don’t know how you can be such an asshole”

        “You know I can’t take this anymore.”

        “So you’re giving up, just like that.”

        “Shut up. Shut up, you can’t say shit about that.”

      Clearly, this couple is ready to break up, just as Felipe has felt it necessary to leave the toxic company who surrounds his beloved Pedro.

       As Felipe goes to his door-window he encounters Pedro, chastising him for just walking off. Again, Felipe attempts to defend his hurt, but Pedro insists it was “no big deal.” But then, of course, he knows nothing about the internal fights about similar issues taking place in Felipe’s own house.

        All you say, Felipe argues, is they’re dumbasses, and I can talk to you. He challenges Pedro: “Are you afraid of what Santos will think of you?”

        Pedro points out that he too is afraid the same thing. But Felipe declares he was afraid before he had made friends with Pedro. “I believed it when you said you wanted to be friends.” Obviously he is still seeking a protector. But then, there is something more behind his words.

        Pedro insists that is still an amigo, but Felipe will not buy what he sees as his dishonesty. Say it, that you like me back. Pedro’s startled silence seems to answer Felipe’s accusations.

        Now it is Pedro, holding Felipe’s drawing close to him, who cannot sleep at night. But then Felipe can’t sleep either. It is almost two much to observe two 11-year-olds suffer over the slights of love, but today’s world has already poised them, far too early, to become adults.

       The next day, finally frustrated, Felipe determines to return to the school gym where the three boys, Pedro, Santos, and Marcos are already at play.

         The moment Felipe enters the gym, Pedro goes over to him and kisses him on the lips.

         YouTube advertises this beautiful Brazilian cinema as “a gay kid’s short film,” which perhaps it is. But I have seldom seen teenage and even adult films so honest about the difficulties of establishing a gay relationship in a world in which despite all the expressions of community embracement, is still ready to attack queerness in whatever form it appears on the immediate and local level. The polls may show that most people support gay equality, but tell that to the locker rooms, the school hallways, the dark streets around gay bars late at night; send the news to the film industry and many work spaces throughout the US, and then try to pass that message on to Russia, Kenya, Uganda, Hungary, Poland, and China. For anyone still trying to live a gay life in most of the world, things are still difficult. Perhaps an open kiss on the lips is what we need to remind us that being gay is simply another form of love.

        As you might guess, I was touched by Brazilian director Fernando Grisi’s short film. The music by an unidentified composer surely helped. This short film is actually a wonderful tonic to the absolute sweet perfection Heartstopper, my beloved series about slightly older boys undergoing some of the same experiences.

 

*The director, in a rather perverse sense of casting, chose a Fellipe to play Pedro, and a Pedro to play Felipe. It must have been rather confusing for both actors.

 

Los Angeles, December 20, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (December 2024).