real magic
by Douglas Messerli
Juan Sebastián Valencia (screenwriter and
director) Magico / 2019 (17 minutes)
Columbian-born director Juan Sebastian
Valencia’s US production Magico begins simply as a work about the magician’s
performance of sleight-of-hand tricks. In fact, the work begins with the young
would-be magician Luke (David Aaron Evans) attempting to perform the vanishing
magician trick. He stands before his audience, placing a red cloth in front of
him, the cloth falling to the floor to reveal the missing man of magic. But as
another rehearsing magician entering the rented hall points out “I can see
you!”
He
continues, “Show me something real.”
The
young magician snaps back, “Who says it’s real. It’s called magic for a
reason.”
The
other suggests he must like being the guy who performs for kids at parties.
The
interloper, so he explains, is the one who rented the room at 4:30, and it’s
now past that time. Luke apologizes, and the other, Carl (Sam Street),
apologizes as well for interrupting the trick, “even if it was fake.” It order
for it to be magic, he insists, “it has to be real.” “The only way you can tell if a magician has
real magic is to learn his tricks.”
Pulling out a small wand and asking for Luke’s hat, he insists, “The
wand doesn’t carry magic,
Luke is skeptical of Carl’s seemingly empty dictums.
But Carl, unperturbed continues. “Your emotions help connect you with
the soul of the trick.”
He continues, as he speaks, to wave his wand
over the other boy’s hat. “Here,” he offers up the wand, “try it.”
The minute that Luke moves into the space near the hat there is a loud
snap as the two suddenly find themselves in a dark space they cannot identify.
As Carl offers his hand to lift up Luke to check the territory, the latter
suddenly finds himself moving up through his hat, returned to the space on the
stage where they had begun. He is confused, astounded. The magic has clearly
been real in his head.
Asked how it feels, he can only say, “Amazing.” Just as suddenly they
both find themselves on an ocean beach, eating ice cream. Carl continues his
lecture, suggesting that what most magicians forget is that the magic has to be
for them as well as for the audience.
By
the very next scene, it is clear, the two have become friends and are dressed
in outrageous costumes presumably about to perform together. Another man,
perhaps Luke’s “roommate” Sergio, wants to photograph them before they perform.
And Carl has brought Luke a special gift, his very own wand.
In
the very next scene, they are in a room with a bed, without their costumes,
with Carl suggesting that Luke’s roommate is going to wonder “what we’re doing
in here.” Luke suggests, “You better lock the door then.” Carl does.
Over the next few moments they strip down to their underwear as
soap-bubbles begin the fall all around them, with Luke declaring “Real magic.”
Time has passed, two weeks we later hear, and Carl has evidently
disappeared. We must read, presumably the previous scenes as a kind of
condensed metaphoric expression of a whirlwind romance between the highly romantic
Luke and the older Carl, who quite literally, to pull out the old cliché of
inexplicable sudden love, “has been swept off his feet.” The wands Carl talked
so much about quite obviously, become the film’s representation of their cocks
which apparently truly helped to focus their inner joy on one another, making
something that is never “real,” what we describe as “love,” seem real in its
transformation of one another’s lives.
But
now that Carl has suddenly left, leaving Luke confused and lonely, the magic
obviously has left him. And when he runs into to Carl again, it’s clear that
his brief encounter wants nothing to remind of what happened between the two,
his female partner also being his wife.
Without the film precisely saying this, it is pretty obvious that Carl
is one of the numerous bisexual men who play around when their heterosexual
mates are away.
It
is now up to Luke alone to find his own magic, and no matter what tricks he
attempts, no matter how hard he tries to repeat the old illusions, nothing
comes of it.
He
was hoping that together with Carl that they would easily win a national magic
competition, but Carl makes it clear that Luke and he are not a couple.
Luke practices, gradually focusing his tears into frozen crystals of
snow-like flakes that gather on his cheeks. But he is not at all certain that
he has anything special to show the competition judges. As he is called in to
perform, he once more encounters Carl and his wife (Dicle Ozcer), Carl pausing
to attempt to explain what clearly needs no explaining. But as Luke turns away,
a few bubbles suddenly appear, evidence that there has still some feeling for
Carl and even more importantly, that Luke has not lost his own magic.
He enters the audition without any props, standing alone on the stage as his tears turn gradually turn into snowflakes that magically fill the theater, wowing the judges who are amused and amazed by the boy’s inexplicable “trick.”
This film was awarded the Best LGBT Short Film Independent short awards
and received other awards as well. For me, however, the magic existed more in
the beautiful images of the film than in its rather clumsy metaphorical
statements.
Los Angeles, July 20, 2021
Reprinted from World Cinema Review (July
2021).
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