Lorenzo Vigas | Desde allá (From Afar) / 2015, USA general release 2016

noli me tangere

by Douglas Messerli

 

Lorenzo Vigas (screenplay, based on a story by Guillermo Arriga), Lorenzo Vigas (director) Desde allá (From Afar) / 2015, USA general release 2016

The New York Times film reviewer, Stephen Holden, began his 2016 review of Venezuelan movie director Lorenzo Vigas’ From Afar with the following reminder of gay terminology:

 

“The term ‘chicken hawk,’ applied to older gay men who seek sexual favors from boys in their late teens and early 20s, isn’t heard much nowadays, nor is ‘rough trade’ used anymore to describe the street youths the men pay for play. But in “From Afar,” those labels apply to Armando (the brilliant 60-year-old Chilean star Alfredo Castro), a dead-eyed dental prosthetist living in Caracas, Venezuela, and to the hostile young roustabouts he picks up on a corner.”

 

       Yet, Armando is not so much preying on his young pickups as he simply uses their bodies as a visual accessory to pleasure himself. It is as if, in the homophobic culture of Caracas, the dental worker has determined to buy these boys as if they represented a living gay porn magazine. With his evident wealth he lures the boys to pose half-dressed before him simply to masturbate, no touching or real sex involved. In many ways he is kin to Thomas Mann’s Gustav von Aschenbach in Death in Venice, although Mann’s character dies of a kind of internal passion for the beautiful young boy he eyes, while we feel that perhaps, inside, the poker-faced Armando is already spiritually dead.

       We further sense this when, after bringing home another street boy, Elder (Luis Silva), he does not even bother to defend himself against the kid’s verbal abuse when he calls him a faggot, nor attempt to protect himself when he is beaten and robbed. It’s as if he half-expected it; perhaps, we can only wonder, when you regularly bring home such street roughs it’s part of the territory, and, maybe, part of the dangerous thrill. At least in this encounter someone has laid hands of him.

       Vigas is a master of understatement, both in his visual images and his handling of the narrative. We get to know very little about our “hero.” The greatest emotions he displays are when he suddenly visits his sister, who shares with him her knowledge that their father has “returned,” both appearing to be troubled by the fact. We never do discover what the father has done to them, but we discern that both of them have been seriously abused; his sister and her husband are about to adopt a child, suggesting that she either cannot conceive or chooses not to.

       We learn much more about Elder, observing him at his job as a car mechanic, on the streets, and in bed with his girlfriend after he has just severely beaten and perhaps even killed her brother. The mercurial boy is like a volcano which any moment might explode, but who also carries a great deal of passion within.

      When, soon after, we see Vigas beginning a long stalking of his abuser, we also sense there might be some greater passion lurking within Armando as well. When he does re-encounter Elder, he pays the boy without demanding any voyeuristic reward; he even agrees to help Elder purchase the car he has remodeled (we might suspect that the shop he works in is dealing in stolen automobiles).

     Soon after Armando not only discovers the project-housing where Elder lives, entering his bedroom to observe the photos and trinkets the kid has collected (including one he has stolen from Armando), but when the boy goes missing, bribes others to tell him about his whereabouts.

       He finds Elder’s battered and bruised body, in retaliation of his own brutal beating, the boy moving in and out of consciousness, and takes him home to nurse him. As soon as he regains his awareness, Elder attempts to once again take advantage of his savior, trying to break into Armando’s office safe. Again the elder man seems almost amused by the fact, and makes no attempt to change the empty relationship. Soon after, he even attends a family event with Elder’s mother and family members in attendance, who all suspect the worst of Armando. When one of the celebrants discovers Elder and Armando in the bathroom, the boy attempting to kiss the older man; the handsome, full-lipped boy, is shunned not only by his family but by his street-gang friends. He now has no one to turn to but Armando, to whom he admits that throughout his childhood his father has beaten him.

 

      Now we know, at least, that the link between them is that both have a hatred of their fathers, and that the link they together have forged is the need to play out patriarchal-related roles, attempting to bond in a father-son like relationship that redeems their own childhoods. Before long, we see Elder crawling into his “new” father’s bed, the elder man still refusing to touch or hold him.

       When they spot Armando’s father on the street, Elder follows him, later, apparently, killing the man, tossing the bullets on the counter for Armando to see them: “Don’t worry. No one saw me.”

       The violence, if nothing else, temporarily brings them together as, basically, Elder rapes a willing Armando, forcing the “far off” man to truly come to terms with his own sexuality. For some directors that may have been the end.

       Yet From Afar is very far from a “feel good” movie, and explodes into a far more gritty, vaguely revenge drama, as Elder is suddenly arrested by the police, Armando having evidently turned him in. As Justin Chang, writing in Variety, declared, “The movie ends, as it begins, with a shot of Armando, and it is haunting in no small part because we seem to be seeing him clearly for the first time.”

      Although Vigas’ first film at times, in its withholding of information, seems a bit coy, it is, nonetheless, a deeply complex work which brings up issues of not only voyeuristic behavior, stalking, and father-and-son relationships, but problems about faith and trust. Love and sex and little to do with the relationship between Elder and Armando, while commitment to another being is central, and as often happens in human relationships, their lack of it destroys them both.

      The movie’s award of The Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival may have surprised and even irritated many film critics, but the masterful story-telling of Vigas and his screen-writing partner, Guillermo Arriaga, well-deserved to be lauded.

 

Los Angeles, June 21, 2016

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (November 2017).

Pepi Ginsberg | The Pass / 2022

you’re not supposed to be here

by Douglas Messerli

 

Pepi Ginsberg (screenwriter and director) The Pass / 2022 [15 minutes]

 

I don’t know what drug the reviewer of the IMBd site was on, but she/he certainly couldn’t quite wrap their mind around the truly marvelous short film of Pepi Ginsberg, The Pass.

 

   Let us begin again, as Ben (Angus O’Brien) clearly new to this vaguely Texas-like world, who rather subtly asks a beautiful black man Sam (JaQwan J. Kelly) where he might find some gay action, and is told that he should bicycle out to the The Pass.

     Without specific directions he finds his way to an outlying river site where he strips off his pants and is about to dive in, until he is told by a local, Christopher (Paul Bomba), a nice looking regular, that “he’s not supposed to be there.”  

      Chris, who doesn’t like the nickname, is obviously a voyeur who loves to watch the beautiful swimmer enjoy the local waters, and follows him closely as they engage in conversation. Inexplicably, helicopters hover in the background as Christopher keeps insisting that Ben leave his leisurely swim, as if there were truly some significant danger about diving into the waters of “The Pass.”

    When Ben finally emerges, a straight woman and her daughter are daringly ready to enter the waters, whom he nicely greets. Why he isn’t welcome is not explained, but evidently, we have to presume, the authorities, are out to make sure that no queers can enter their swimming hole. Instinctually, Ben leaves Christopher to his own worries.

   That’s fine, however, since he soon encounters Sam nearby ready, apparently, to join him in a bedroom interlude.

 

    If The Pass is a somewhat silly narrative, it nonetheless conveys the sense of terror that gay men and women must daily face in any new, clearly sexually unfriendly, territory. Nothing actually happens in The Pass to suggest the dangers of being gay, and it is not totally apparent that its central figure, Ben, is actually gay, or that Christopher and Sam are queer. The problem, as this quite nicely directed short film reveals, is the unknown, the world surrounding any possible gay or would-be gay action, even the look—in this case a quite nicely muscle-bound swimmer—of someone who might be “different” is tricky territory.

     It is a world a paranoia, of a world of problematic behavior such that even a nice swim at a local isolated spot might be seen as an entry into an inconceivably dangerous territory: the world every LGBTQ+ figure must enter into every day of their lives.

 

Los Angeles, July 12, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (July 2024).

Jérémy Barlozzo | Je Sais Pas (I Don’t Know) / 2020

kisses

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jérémy Barlozzo (screenwriter and director) Je Sais Pas (I Don’t Know) / 2020 [14 minutes]

 

This absolutely charming but admittedly light comedy begins with two men inviting over a woman for an evening dinner, both of whom evidently like her and would enjoy a bed-time romp. Despite the apartment owner’s (Clément Olivieri) lovely dinner of chicken however, there are problems.

 

     His close friend (William Dentz) is married, his girlfriend parking a new baby between them each night. And then, well the cute woman they’ve invited for dinner (Noémie Schmidt) is perfectly ready to serve as the dessert for the evening—on one condition: that the two male friends kiss one another and engage with her in a threesome.

     The two men we realize are perfect for one another, as she evidently realizes as well. But even though they try out the requested kiss, they’re not at all sure that they want to engage in a sexual threesome. After all, these boys are straight.

     Or are they? The female trying to hook them up is frustrated, and despite her bathroom reentry with the tawdry Chinese robe she has borrowed from her host, she redresses and says goodbye, the boys also, even after another, quite unexpected attempt to kiss one another, “just for curiosity,” say goodnight.

      The evening’s chef (Olivieri), obviously frustrated by the evening’s events, binges on the beautiful apple tart he has baked for the occasion. To his surprise, his male friend returns. What now might happen? I don’t know.

     This short film is all gay potential, with a flirtatious notion of what might be the plot of a feature film.

 

Los Angeles, July 12, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (July 2014).

Jamie Babbit | But I'm a Cheerleader / 1999, USA 2000

cheerleading

by Douglas Messerli

 

Brian Wayne Peterson (screenplay, based on a story by Jamie Babbit), Jamie Babbit (director) But I’m a Cheerleader / 1999, USA 2000

 

One can just imagine the wealth of good intentions that Jamie Babbit and her screenplay writer Brian Wayne Peterson planned for their tale of a cheerleader unaware of her lesbian inclinations who, sent away for conversion therapy, discovers not only her sexuality but finds her true love.

     Babbit has noted it was her desire to not only to feature the icon of an American femininity, a cheerleader, as her hero, but to represent the lesbian experience from the femme perspective as opposed to the butch lesbian heroes of Rose Troche’s Go Fish of 1994 and Cheryl Dunye’s The Watermelon Woman of 1996. 

     Peterson, who had worked with reparative therapy in a prison clinic for sex offenders, wanted, moreover, to make a film that would not only entertain with its satiric presentation of such conversion therapy clinics, but that might make people angry enough to actually discuss the issues the film raised.

     At the same time, their satiric take on such clinics as the New Directions featured in the film could also demonstrate the absurdity of gender-defined notions of behavior, which would help their cinematic audience to comprehend that queerness in general, and lesbianism, in particular, came in a broad range of behavior patterns, most of them incomprehensible to the narrow-minded normative structured societies in which these individuals had been raised.

      Buoyed by the popular films of John Waters and others who, setting their LGBTQ tales in a vague sense of the past which mixed perspectives from the 1950s and early 1960s, Babbit and Peterson determined to also set their illustrative fiction within the context of highly theatrically-lit and colored-saturated sets that nodded to James Bigood’s Pink Narcissus (created from 1963-1970) and embraced films such as Jacques Demy’s The Young Girls of Rochefort (1967) and his earlier heterosexual romance, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg from 1964. In an odd sense, you might almost compare production designer Rachel Kamerman’s, art director Macie Vener’s, and costume designer Alix Friedberg’s transformation from a world of beige, tans, and browns into a rainbow spectrum from baby blue to hot pink as a kind of 1990s version of The Wizard of Oz’s radical shift from black-and-white to Technicolor.

      As Mollie Pyne wrote in her review on the blog AnotherMag:

 

“Sartorially, beige can be elegant and classic: camel or nude or mushroom. But to be beige is different, it is burdened with a singular meaning: boring. In the film, Megan’s parents wear various shades of beige and her friend Kimberly (Michelle Williams) is seen in an all-brown look. Jared (Brandt White), Megan’s boyfriend, wears a tan jacket over his football jersey with matching trousers; his car is tan with an equally subdued interior. The school’s lockers are brown, as well as everything inside Megan’s family home: furniture, decor, lighting. Within the first five minutes, beige is established as symbolically repressive. It covers or replaces the passionate and fiery red of cheerleading outfits or jock uniforms. Beige reflects the rigidity and sexual oppression being enforced by Megan’s family, friends, True Directions founder Mary J. Brown and society.”

 

    Finally, the creators of this “fairy tale” must have delighted in being able to cast drag queen RuPaul in a supposedly “straight” role as s New Directions graduate—meaning he has been successfully converted from gay to normative heterosexual sex—who is now that organization’s scout and team leader; John Waters’ friend and regular actor, Mink Stole as Nancy, the major character’s mother; Bud Cort, who played the iconic suicidal character Harold in Hal Ashby’s 1971 film Harold and Maude, acting in this film as Megan’s father; and the hunky, good-looking actor Eddie Cibrian as the unknowingly gay Rock, son of New Directions leader Mary Brown.

     Moreover, the creators’ “good intentions” seemed to pay off. The film earned a substantial profit, despite its R-related rating, and was ranked in 2011 as the 73rd highest all time box-office selling LGBT-related films. Despite several negative reviews at the time of its release, it has remained popular with LGBTQ audiences, even gaining over the years since its release in popularity among gay, lesbian, bi-sexual, and transsexual audiences.

       All of which suggests to me that despite the remarkable increase of LGBTQ films since 2000 that many of these do not present the same complexity of thinking as did so many such films of the 20th century, even if sometimes their expression of queerness was often muted and even hidden. In a world of filmmakers such as Ackerman, Almodóvar, Cocteau, Denis, Fassbinder, Haynes, Hitchcock, Jarman, Pasolini, Téchiné, Visconti, and even lesser known figures I’ve written about in these pages such as Christensen, Da Campo and Saville, a work such as Jaimy Babbit’s is not only lightweight but laughable as an exemplar of substantial filmmaking.

 

      There is no doubt that it’s great fun to see a story in which an innocent cheerleader like Megan (Natasha Lyonne) fantasizes about her fellow female cheerleader’s bodies while enduring the deep and clumsy tongue kisses of her supposed jock boyfriend, and then, given that she has taken to eating tofu, listening to the songs of  Melissa Etheridge, and has grown fond of Georgia O’Keefe’s gynecological flowers, is sent away to a conversion therapy house, where she learns from the authoritarian leader Mary Brown (Cathy Moriarty) that she is not the normal young enthusiast that she perceived herself to be, but a horrifying lesbian—all on account of the fact that while her father temporarily was unemployed and her mother became the household source of support. It’s even fun to become friends with the gay boys trapped in New Directions for the very same reason. And it’s so very pleasant to see the cheerleader finally in love with the seemingly cynical, but actually quite vulnerable Graham Eaton (Clea DuVall) who is not as fearful of being a lesbian as she is of losing her family inheritance if she doesn’t reform. These, after all, are the standard tropes of LGBTQ coming of age romances, despite the unlikely location in which these events transpire.

        We can even grant that the work’s true villain, Brown, has a notion of reality that ignores the logic of transitions that occurred in the culture over the last several decades, but why the writer and director focus on normative sexual values that were already eroding by the late 1950s is a bit harder to explain. Even within the sort of “out of time” logic in which these all-American figures exist,  to have a young tofu-eating lover of Melissa Etheridge, a trendy neighborhood gay and lesbian bar, alternative groups offering homes to young rejected queer teens, a goth-like young lesbian figure, and PFLAG (Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays) meetings all inhabiting the same space in which women are defined only by their abilities to cook, produce and care for babies, clean the house, and wait hand and foot on their hubbies’ every whim appears more than a little anachronistic.

         Yes, we know that even working women today still are largely responsible for childcare, cooking, cleaning, and the sexual satisfaction of their husbands, but not in the pop-up picture of reality Babbit has cooked up. Today balancing those many roles may be even more complex and difficult than they were in our stereotypical vision of the 1950s whipped up by TV shows such as Leave It to Beaver, Ozzie and Harriet, and Father Knows Best, but that is precisely my point. Gender roles may never have been so simply defined in reality as they are in Babbit’s picture. And frankly, a more subtle and complex vision of how those roles are defined might be of far greater interest dramatically than are the silly tableaux of But I’m a Cheerleader. One need only to be reminded of Jan Oxenberg’s 1973 film Home Movies, in which she describes and shows an old home movie of herself as a cheerleader, where a bit like Megan, she clearly enjoys being with other women, even fantasizing about them.       

     Yet, Oxenberg’s short is so very much more convoluted. She suggests that she perhaps became a cheerleader precisely because she was a lesbian, arguing that at the time maybe if she could be what women were presumed to be on the outside she could still be a lesbian on the inside. She feared that if she might become a lesbian on the outside, actually kissing another woman in her cheerleading outfit it would shock the entire community. “I mean, we weren’t even allowed to chew gum!” In other words, cheerleading was not so much a pleasurable activity by a way of survival.

     For Oxenberg, being a cheerleader was not a mindless thing the way it is for Megan, but a complexly layered way of playing a role in order to maintain just enough balance to remain within the normative society until she could later escape. Babbit’s cheerleader has apparently no self- knowledge, even needing to be convinced by those who would “reform” her that there is something within her that needs to be reformed. It appears that Babbit’s cheerleader is such a stick figure that it’s not until she can abandon her ideas of being a cheerleader that she can become a lesbian who’s capable of love and still enjoy the cheers.

       At least the lesbians of Babbit’s film represent various “kinds” of sapphic love, whereas the males of But I’m a Cheerleader are all sissy boys forced in their gender role-playing to fix automobile carburetors, run obstacle courses, and shoot off guns. When was the last time any urban husband who didn’t work as a mechanic was asked to fix the family auto carburetor, let alone change the car’s oil? I would argue that most of the heterosexual males I know have never shot a gun—although given the number of guns owned by males throughout the USA, I admittedly must be acquainted with a special breed of heterosexuals. Even soldiers sometimes have difficulties running obstacle courses, even if in Beau travail Claire Denis makes it all seem like ballet.

 

      What’s even more disturbing about Babbit’s and Peterson’s work is the idea that a conversion therapy organization is truly something which might simply be satirized out of existence. Anyone who has seen Joel Edgerton’s Boy Erased (2018), in which students are brutalized, physically tortured, with one later committing suicide, will find it difficult to laugh about even the milder but equally absurd tactics of New Directions.

       Finally, we have to ask precisely which audience was Babbit attempting to reach in this propagandistic-like film. As Stephanie Zacharek, writing in Salon argues:

 

“And then, of course, there are the central messages of But I'm a Cheerleader, wrapped up in all that candy-colored coating: Be the person you were meant to be; don't let anyone try to change you; beware the strictures of society, particularly suburbia, that threaten to squelch who you are; no one should be bound by conventional notions of masculinity or femininity; and, of course, we must accept those who are different from us. If you haven't yet learned these lessons, or if you've never seen an actual starburst clock, you might get something out of But I'm a Cheerleader, but you're not likely to go in the first place. Babbit is only preaching to the converted.”

 

     Similarly, NitrateOnline’s Cynthia Fuchs writes: “....the film leans too hard on its bubble-gummy look and non-scary send-ups of homophobes, making everything so huge that no one who is phobic might recognize himself in the film. ....Its most appreciative audience will likely be the converted (the film has been selected to close the gay and lesbian film festivals in Philadelphia and San Francisco, and appeals to teen girls, according to pre-release tests). But the audience who might benefit most from watching it either won't see the film or won't see the point.”

     Ultimately, after watching this film we remain in a kind of no-man’s-land in which we can neither believe in the characters and gestures of its queer figures nor the film’s ridiculous sexually normative beings. Even as Megan swoops down to save her lover Graham and Dolph coaxes his gay lover Clayton away from “graduating” into the denial of their sexual identities, to where are these “truly” saved beings hoping to escape, particularly in a world in which you may not even be allowed to chew gum.

 

Los Angeles, November 15, 2020

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog and World Cinema Review (November 2020).

 

Arturo Ripstein | El Colonel no tiene quein le escriba (No One Writes to the Colonel) / 1999

everything is as it was

by Douglas Messerli

 

Paz Alicia Garciadiego (based on the novella by Gabriel García Márquez), Arturo Ripstein (director) El Colonel no tiene quein le escriba (No One Writes to the Colonel) / 1999

 

Almost from the very beginning of Arturo Ripstein’s highly moving film version of Gabriel García Márquez’s No One Writes to the Colonel, we perceive the small, sleepy town in which Colonel (Fernando Luján) lives lies in near stasis. The lives of the Colonel and his wife, Lola (Marisa Paredes), have been lived in the world of the past since the murder of their beloved son, Agustin. Even their clock throughout the early part of the work is broken, and after it is repaired, they are forced to sell it. Having put his house into mortgage in order to pay for a proper burial for his son, the Colonel and his wife, moreover, have survived with practically nothing to eat, both of them lying to each other about having already eaten or being unable to consume anything, in the wife’s case, due to asthma.

     The Colonel, moreover, lives still in the world of his youth, during which he fought, along with the Communists, in the Cristeros War (La Cristiada), the 1917 Mexican battles waged against the clerics by then Mexican President Plutarco Elłas Calles in his struggle to help peasants to gain property rights, a revolution which the Catholic Church had opposed. Thousands were killed in the 10 year persecution of Church and its believers.

     By the time we meet the Colonel in the 1940s, the war and its results are a thing of the past, with the clerics returned to power and, much to the Colonel’s dismay, allowed openly to pray and to bless their parishioners publicly. In the smuggled, evidently illegal, newspapers that the town’s openly gay doctor (Odiseo Bichir) passes on to the Colonel, the old man has read that all former soldiers will be paid a pension consisting of a percentage of their former wages—money, quite obviously, which he and Lola are desperate to obtain. But over the 21-year period since this declaration, despite the Colonel having written the central government, no money has arrived. The title proclaims the reality that the Colonel, in his weekly strolls to dock to wait the arrival of the mail-boat, does not truly want to admit—although the whole town painfully witnesses his increasingly desperate disappointment. Reading the news from the city, the Colonel admits a kind of defeat in his recognition that “Everything is as it was.”

      Although his loving wife certainly knows that the money will never arrive, she, in a kind of tacit compact with her husband and his ideals, keeps hoping for a miracle, hiding the fact that the debtors are soon to evict them if their mortgage remains unpaid. The wonder of this work is that, unlike so many of García Márquez’s writings, there is no “magic” at work in their lives. The only thing of value they hold—other than each other’s sometimes begrudging love—is “Blondie,” a fighting cock once owned by their son, and the cause, so they are told, of his murder by a local carnival worker, Nogales (Daniel Giménez Cacho), who also shared with Agustin the love of the local prostitute, Julia (Selma Hayek).

 

     There are figures who, knowing of the Colonel and his wife’s situation, try to help, including the owner of a local market (whose kindness is defied by her daughter’s insistence that Lola pay for anything she might wish to purchase) and even the prostitute Julia, who buys a few provisions just to help Lola and her husband survive. But the destitute couple is too proud to even accept these insignificant provisions. We know from the outset, alas, that this elderly couple cannot survive, and much as in Michael Haneke’s 2012 Amour, they have only their love to temporarily sustain them.

     Knowing that, we see their brave attempts to survive a bit longer—the Coronel’s painful sale of “Blondie” to his corrupt former comrade in battle, Don Sabas (Ernesto Yáñez), Lola’s sale of her wedding ring to the local priest whose major community activity seems to be attending the weekly movies, and their symbolic sale to a German of time itself, in their temporarily restored clock—hardly matters; even the director and his writer, at times, seem to forget the results of these demands and sacrifices (Did the sale of her ring pay for the mortgage? Did the agents back off their attempts to evict the couple?), particularly given the fact that the Colonel, missing the fighting cock, buys it back with the intent to put it into competition.

      In a sense, it doesn’t truly matter, for the important thing is that this couple stands, in their steady love, against almost everyone else in their community—including the kindly figures of Julia, who claims that she cannot feel love, and the doctor, who leaves wife at home in his search for sexual satisfaction with local young men. In two instances, moreover, the Colonel proves that if the world around him has not changed, his knowledge and actions represent a moral shift that some few (particularly Julia and the village children) witness.

 

     Although everyone believes that Agustin has died for the love of a woman, stabbed to death in a fighting-cock ring, the Colonel gradually comes to comprehend that a banned underground newspaper his son had hidden beneath his shirt has become transferred to his skin through the moisture always present in this forever rainy village and the sweat of the event; revealed as a political radical, Agustin, accordingly, has been executed by Nogales not because of Julia but because of his political views. To most, this shift of causation may seem like a minor detail in what is described by his fellow citizens merely as “destiny.” But given the Colonel’s strong moral code, the realization of the “truth” is everything.

      The Colonel reveals that moral certitude once more when, after his Blondie has been stolen from his house by locals (beating Lola in the process) who wish to pit him against Nogales’ cock, the Colonel refuses to allow the fight to continue—despite the fact that Nogales, in league with the corrupt current government, offers the Colonel money and the payment of his overlooked pension if he will allow the fight to continue. The Colonel may be a dreamer and even a fool of sorts throughout Ripstein’s beautifully crafted movie, but in his utter rejection of Nogales’ and the community’s meaningless promises, he alters everything. Nothing after can ever again be as it was, even if the town’s citizens might pretend things will go on as before. The Colonel may hate the Church, but he is a believer of moral values stronger than any other citizen of his Mexican coastal outpost, including the so-called religious believers.

      The film ends, as we knew it must, with a dream of hope even within the reality of despair. Convinced his rooster will win in the upcoming fight 45 days away, he sits as if about to wait out the time in proud anticipation of the day when they can pay all their debts. When his wife asks what they eat in the meantime, he answers, “shit,” a word which ends this sad film. Like inverted cannibals, they now have no choice but to consume themselves—bodies which, at least spiritually, are rich and sustaining.

 

Los Angeles, June 28, 2014

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (June 2014).