Mariano Rodriguez Ingold | The Meeting / 2020

how to make covid into a sexually transmitted disease

by Douglas Messerli

 

Francesca Root and Max Brown (screenplay, based on an idea by Root and Mariano Rodriquez Ingold), Mariano Rodriguez Ingold (director) The Meeting / 2020 [4 minutes]

 

How to keep sexy without the ability to touch and hold one’s attractive lover, or perhaps, in this instance, just to simply explore someone to whom you’re attracted seems to be the subject of US director Rodriquez Ingold’s film.

     According to the narrator (Ender Waters) the character played by Rodriga Cavalherio has a dream in which he is already sitting on a small blanket in a green back yard, when suddenly the porcelain-skinned beauty, with “a bland tail” appears (Kaue Serra), who lays down on another blanket far off on the green lawn. Both admire each other and quickly connect up on their cellphones.

     Serra has evidently brought a gift for Cavalherio, a pair of (his own?) blue underpants which the receiver quickly begins to sniff, moving in quite sexual positions which obviously excites the other, until the sniffer begins to cough and cough, the dream quickly snapping off like a lightbulb. Has the very odor of the present’s owner spread the disease? Has the sexual excitement allowed COVID to enter his nose and take over his own body? Might COVID be turned into a sexually transmitted disease?

     I suspect these are more profound questions than the director has bothered to ask of his own short film. “The meeting” is simply a short one, and not even a true meeting at that, since everything’s a dream—or perhaps a COVID nightmare! Clearly neither of these boys can get any satisfaction.

     Nor does it provide any true excitement for the viewer for that matter.

 

Los Angeles, June 4, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (June 2023)