Martín Rodríguez Redondo | Marilyn / 2018

the vultures

by Douglas Messerli

 

Martín Rodríguez Redondo (screenwriter and director) Marilyn / 2018

 

This Argentine-Chilean feature film is based on the real-life story of Marilyn (Marcelo Bernasconi), a newspaper story figure who lived, as does the 17-year-old hero of the film Marcos (Walter Rodríguez), in the rural outback of Argentina, not a good place for a gay boy coming of age.

     The family rents the farm from a nearby rancher, and they work hard to make a living with a herd of cattle that are often subject to cattle rustlers, who kill the animals on the spot before dragging their carcasses off. For Marco’s loving father Carlos (Germán de Silva) it’s an extremely hard life, and Marco’s older brother Carlitos (Ignacio Giménez), who is an unthinking brute of a man always ready for the hard work but without any imagination to relieve him from his own strenuous efforts, and his stone-faced, cold-hearted wife, Olga (Catalina Saavedra) work equally hard to make the ranch survive. Recognizing Marcos as an exceptional being, Carlos is determined that he will get an education, eventually perhaps being able to support the entire family with his more exalted position as a computer technician or even possibly a teacher.

     What he doesn’t quite perceive is that Marcos, although a good student, is himself unsure of his identity, constantly stealing his own mother’s clothing—some of which he himself has suggested she should buy to be more stylish in her wardrobe—and he also sews, making his own dress for the local celebration of the Argentinian Carnival.

      Suddenly, however, his father dies of the long hard work he’s been doing for some many years, changing the young boy’s entire life, as he is put to work with his brother, milking cows, and touring the large ranch in search of the dangers of intruders and rustlers, tasks at which he is not very adept and for which he is mocked by his brother and friends.

      Still, he secrets away material, sews up a black dress, and transforms himself into a glamorous young female for the Carnival celebration.

       Jay Weissberg, writing in Variety, nicely describes the complete transformation that occurs for the young faced with a life of enforced labor as he transforms himself into the Marilyn that, after his Carnival appearance, a local bar in song defines his new existence:

 

“The teenager’s almost blank passivity does become monotonous, but then there’s a carnival fiesta in town and Marcos transforms himself into an energized, stunning woman, flashing a bewitching smile and reveling in displaying his dance moves. The actor’s sudden, infectious animation blows open the film’s earlier staid caution, bringing Marcos alive in wig, make-up and sexy outfit as he suggestively shows off to homophobic, possibly closeted, rancher’s son Facundo (Rodolfo García Werner). On the way home with his only friend Laura (Josefina Paredes), a bunch of guys pull them over; Marcos tells her to go, and he’s brutally raped.”

     The boy who fucks him is the son of the same wealthy rancher who is fucking over his mother and brother by now demanding full payment for the ranch that they have long been renting. In a sense, Marcos hardly registers the nightmare he has just experienced. In some respects, we can imagine, it is the payment he realizes must be made for his difference; and there is a part of him that simultaneously that takes a self-destructive joy in realizing that in female dress he has been able to attract such a sexual reaction, as brutal and homophobic as it was. In pain, heavily bruised and clearly suffering the indignation of the event, he slowly marches home, his friend Laura finally returning on her scooter to bring him home.

       His mother, as unperceptive and ignorant as she is, immediately recognizes the bruises on his face for what they are, and gently mends his wounds, but at the same time dutifully searches through his drawers, gathering up all his feminine apparel and burning them in the yard as Marcos watches, tears running down his face. In the inverted world in which he is made to endure life, it difficult to know whether the rape or his mother’s total rejection of his identity is more devastating. At least the boys who raped him recognized him for what he was; his mother is determined clearly to make him into another being.

       The rancher who owns their property now arrives with further news of cattle rustling, and insists that both Carlitos and Marcos join and him and Facundo him in search of the criminals. They find only a cow in the midst of dying, which the rancher demands Marco immediately shoot to put him out of his misery. Yet Marcos, the secret fairy, lover, and transsexual cannot pull the trigger of macho authority. Carlitos pulls out his own rifle to take the cow down.

       The local rancher, not truly a mean man, announces however that if they cannot pay the money they owe him in a month or so that he has no choice but to force them out of the home in which they have lived for decades. He suggests they look into buying one of the hundreds block houses that other such farmers and residents of the nearby town are buying up on bank loans.

      Marcos’ mother and brother take a trip into town to see what these still unfinished houses might look like, determining that despite the hospitable ranch house they now inhabit, they are a liveable alternative, only to discover that without a supporter or money to put down as a loan they have left out of the new wave of the local bourgeoisie. But when Marcos is sent to bring back some bottles of water for the thirst pilgrims of his brother and mother, he encounters a young gay man Federico (Andrew Bargsted), who is totally enchanted by the lovely young farm boy Marcos, and who himself has already purchased one of the block houses.

      Marcos, sneaking out to visit him, develops a loving relationship with Federico which suggests all sorts of new possibilities to the suffering rural gay boy. He even invites him to his home, without bothering to explain the cold reception he is surely to receive by Carlitos and Olga, neither of which can be bothered by even speaking to him. When Marcos’ mother later discovers the boys having sex in broken down car on their property, she pulls out her rifle and sends Federico packing.

     Poor Marco, still clueless, keeps trying the contact his lover without a response, Federico obviously being furious that his friend had not explained the true situation of his family life.

     As if things were not bad enough, now Olga and Carlitos become almost paranoid, turning off lights and even candles when anyone approaches the house to pretend they are not at home, clearly fearful of the inevitable foreclosure and eviction. In punishment for Marcos’ continued attempts to contact his ex-lover, they pull away his one remaining communication with the outside world, his cellphone, leaving him to a life of lonely desperate terror.

      This peaceful, dreaming lover finally can no longer bear the world in which he has been forced to imagine his dreadful future. In the middle of the night, he quietly gets up, pulls down one of the family rifles and returns the communal bedroom where he shoots his brother and mother, killing them both. Marilyn has finally had her vengeance and in the same moment destroyed herself as opposed to letting them gradually tear away any remains of her existence.

     Premiering at the Berlin Film Festival in 2018, this cinematic masterwork is about as bleak as gay cinema can imagine itself. And although I truly loved this film, I suspect its dark vision is why I could not immediately write about it.

 

Los Angeles, December 24, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema (December 2024).