Júlio Maria Pessoa | Em Nome do Pai (In the Name of the Father) / 2002

a gay incest fantasy

by Douglas Messerli

 

Júlio Maria Pessoa (screenwriter and director) Em Nome do Pai (In the Name of the Father) / 2002  [17 minutes]

 

Brazilian director Júlio Maria Pessoa’s 2002 film In the Name of the Father, to put it quite simply, is a gay incest fantasy.

    I report this knowing that almost immediately a battalion of critic do-gooders, rightists and left-leaning LGBTQ supports equally may descend upon me declaring that this film, is in fact, a tale of pedophiliac abuse which, ending in the murder of the mother (Denis Weinberg) and the entrapment of the young son (Leonardo Miggiorin) by his father (Elias Andreato), is a despicable work that shouldn’t have even been included in these pages.

    It will not help in the least to remind these critics that in this case the son is not only pleased and excited by his father’s attentions but strongly encourages them throughout, lounging about in short running pants most of the time, and purposely showering when his father returns late from his nights out, generally drunk. At one point, the boy purposely locks his door, evidently not interested in sex that night or recognizing that his father is particularly drunk that evening. An IMDb commentator on the film reports that in an earlier version the door was not locked the first evening and the shower scene of the second evening was considerably longer than in the final 17-minute version we have available today. My guess is the second, the “locked-door version” was introduced so that we could recognize that, had the boy chosen, he could have had control over the situation. And, of course, we do not know how long the relationship may have been going on previous to our introduction to this dysfunctional family.

      In the shower scene, in particular, the son asks his father to bring him shampoo to engage his father in the act, the father sending the beautiful boy to near total ecstasy with literal shivers of pleasure as his father moves his hands from his cheeks down his body and at one point clearly masturbates the boy.

    On another evening or perhaps that same night, the mother, mostly passive, finally dares to check in on her son’s bedroom only to discover father and son both in bed together. She vows the next morning to take the son and her baby Caio away, determining to report her husband to the police in order to imprison him. As she now is determined to control her own future, she climbs upon a high stool to change the light bulb her husband has refused to deal with, while the son quickly slips out to unleash the pet dog who hates his mother and of whom the mother has complained throughout, the dog rushing immediately toward the house.

     In the final scene the mother is missing, presumably killed in her fall or from the dog’s vicious attacks. The father, son, and the baby all sit at the table, with the son happily feeding his baby brother, having obviously taken over the mother’s role, turning eventually straight toward the camera as if to say, “it’s better this way” or even displaying a cocksure attitude of “what are you going to do about it?”

      The commentator reports that in the early version a suspicious police inspector does show up near the end, but is ultimately satisfied with what has been previously reported. That scene is missing from the later version, making the film even more abstract, and placing the “family” even more out of touch from the rest of the world.

     The righteous gathering will, of course, point out that the son has been long groomed, not having left the house except for school for long periods of time, the mother mentioning, in fact, that he has no friends and hardly leaves the house. Even if the boy might have escaped the situation, they will remind me, the father still controls this basically patriarchally-controlled world in which the son has been caught up and now devoured. And they will most certainly point to the basic misogynistic tone of the entire work. Surely the misogynism and matricide will eventually destroy this young boy.

     It won’t help explain that this is not a psychologically realist work, but as I noted in the first sentence of this essay, is a “fantasy.” But it will surely not help at all to point out that such incest fantasies are actually not uncommon for gay boys. If Freud is to believed that the normal pattern of the heterosexual son is to create just such an incest fantasy between himself and his mother, the child replacing the father in his mother’s eyes—a fantasy well-known through Sophocles’ great Oedipus plays—for many gay boys the fantasy is altered to exclude the mother, replacing it instead with the father’s love.

     And the mother here is played purposely as shrewish-bitch, at one point wondering aloud to her son if she shouldn’t return back to work, he having to remind her that her child is still too young for that, since clearly this poor family cannot afford hired help to care for the baby. Her death for the boy becomes like a dream wish in order to fulfill his gay fantasy. Or other’s gay fantasies. For those very reasons, indeed, I can’t quite resist liking this work

      The IMDb commentator describes some of my own feelings about this work: “I was enthralled, fascinated and shocked.” Pessoa offers no apologies, and in the end, I couldn’t help but chuckle with faint pleasure.

 

Los Angeles, September 17, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (September 2023).