Joaquim Leitão | Adão e Eva (Adam and Eve) / 1995

three fathers

by Douglas Messerli

 

Joaquim Leitão (screenwriter and director) Adão e Eva (Adam and Eve) / 1995

 

Despite the radical changes now touted after the 1970s events surrounding Stonewall, even as late as the 1990s—with some notable exceptions—US films were still rather coy and polite in their basic avoidance of the subject homosexuality. The highly serious but still relatively discrete AIDS drama Philadelphia was hyped in 1993 for its daring honesty and deeply felt presentation of gay sexuality despite the existence of the far superior and truly radical independent films on the subject such as Arthur J. Bressan, Jr.’s Buddies and Bill Sherwood’s Parting Glances released as early as 1985 and 1986, both directors themselves dying of AIDS.

           To be fair, one must give credit to exceptions such as NBC’s problematic film on AIDS, An Early Frost, with a teleplay Ron Cowen and Daniel Lipman and directed by Sherman Yellen, also released in 1985, which instead of focusing as the other two had on the dying gay man, dissipated its energies on the “terrible dilemma” of an ordinary American family having to face up to fact of a son dying of a “gay” disease, without the father ever truly focusing on what homosexuality actually meant for young person during that terrible pandemic or allowing the film to have a fully open discussion of what homosexuality was all about. It muttered niceties and revealed some LGBTQ wounds but steered clear of sexuality itself.

      Similarly, the other “radical” commercial US film Arthur Hiller’s Making Love (1982) carefully tiptoed through a happily married man’s gradual discovery that he was gay and supposedly ruined actor Harry Hamlin’s career for playing the confused traitor to heterosexuality. And Norman René’s moving but terribly late-to-the-subject of AIDS movie, Longtime Companion (1989), viewed homosexuality and the disease which was then killing so many young gay men primarily through the lens of a wealthy TV producer and other fairly well-off acquaintances instead of facing down the pandemic as it suddenly hit those living ordinary lives such as Bressan and Sherwood had attempted basically shirked its reality.

      By 1995, the date of the Portuguese / Spanish movie I am about to discuss, the US had only just begun to hint at what Ruby Rich described as a “New Queer Cinema” in the US which would begin to take on the quirky issues that even the staid, homosexually adverse British had long before brought up in Roger Tonge’s TV drama of two young gay boys who took to the road of 1987 in Two of Us or as in another general British TV release, Nigel Finch’s The Lost Language of Cranes (1991) a world in which both father and son reveal their homosexuality at the same moment. No one in US commercial US filmmaking offered up such a radical vision of gay life such as British director Stephen Frears had in his film about a British punk and “Paki’s” unlikely gay relationship in My Beautiful Launderette (1985)—although I argue that underneath its shiny gay sheen it is truly a conservative affair that might have even appealed to Margaret Thatcher—to say nothing of the far more radical forays into LGBTQ life by the Germans such as Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Werner Schroeter, Rosa von Praunheim, and others beginning a full decade earlier, and to totally ignore the Australian celebration of transgender and transsexual life in Stephen Elliot’s The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert and the varied political and social issues brought up by popular Canadian gay directors’ works of the 1980s and 90s such as John Greyson and Wrik Mead.* The Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar had already transformed Spanish film in the mid-1980s and the early 1990s with some of his most popular of his films.

     And suddenly even the seemingly docile and quiet Portugal wanted in on the new gay cinema with the production of Joaquim Leitão’s Almodóvar-influenced Adão e Eva. I began this essay with the incomplete history of gay film from the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s, in part, because despite the relative success in the US of Priscilla, presented as a minor commercial film here, one simply could not imagine that a film like Adam and Eve, produced, in part, by a private TV channel (the Portuguese SIC), might have a success in the US as it did in its home country where it become one of the biggest box-office hits in the history of Portuguese cinema.   

    The doe-eyed seeming innocent, but hard-hitting TV journalist Catarina Meneses (Maria de Medeiros) hardly seems like the kind of woman who might cause a major scandal, but like one of Almodóvar’s hard-headed feminists, she suddenly decides that despite the fact she is involved in a fairly happy lesbian relationship with Te (Ana Bustorff), she wants a baby, a subject to which Te evidently hasn’t been very open.

      In Spain, she calls up a noted Spanish humanitarian doctor Rafael Tristan (Karra Elejalde), offering up an important document that she has obtained from her journalistic channels that could help him in his political cause. She delivers it to him on a bus bench as if it were a top-secret document of national interest, looking about her as she lays it beside him as if spies might immediately be about to pounce.

      Rafael cannot at all imagine her secretive behavior and jokingly calls her Mata Hari, but doesn’t realize just how close he has come to the truth. For by pretending to be hurt by what she does for him, she lures him into a dinner date which winds up in his bed as the two have wonderful sex. She disappears by the time he awakens the next morning and searching the hotel and the name she has given finds not only that there has been no one registered under that name but that there has been no Iberian Conference she claimed to have been attending.

      Back in Lisbon, as she celebrates an evening out with Te she seems moody—she is actually suffering a secret pregnancy stomach ailment. And later when Te attempts to feel her breasts, she becomes adamant that she leave her alone, suddenly explaining the entire situation, and asking that they break up so that she can bear and raise child alone and in peace despite all the great times they have had together.

      Shocked and outraged at her sudden secret, Te grows violent, leaving only after issuing an ultimatum that she will get her revenge for her lover’s underhanded behavior.

        Meanwhile through his medical connections, Rafael tracks down Catarina’s address and discovers her pregnancy, matching the child’s blood-type with his own and realizing that he has been tricked into fathering her baby.

       As if that weren’t enough, Catharina has a vengeful enemy in another studio worker, Helena Amado (Cristina Carvalhal), who is equally determined to find a way to defeat the woman who has increasingly been receiving all the major television awards for her reporting, while she has been ignored.

        When in a single day—after she has been suffering intense morning sickness, she is threatened by her TV rival, Rafael shows up at her front door, and Te barges in to finally confront her ex-lover—chaos erupts. Te has what might be described as a nervous breakdown, tossing pots, paintings, and furniture at the fragile pregnant woman before finally slugging the Spanish visitor Rafael and knocking him out. As Catarina attempts to call an ambulance for Rafael, Te moves in for a further round of attacks and she is forced to strike back at Te to simply protect herself from being interrupted in seeking help. Te also falls to the floor in a coma

       At that very moment, reporters from a magazine show up to interview her. She quickly sends them away and calls up a friendly fellow worker, Francisco (Joaquim de Almeida), who just happens to be Te’s former husband, pleading for his assistance.

       Francisco not only temporarily helps extricate her from the chaos—placing both victims in hospitals and visiting them daily—but contributes to it as during the next few weeks as both recover, Te undergoing mental care as well, Catarina falls in love with her gentle “savior.”

       Three people now claim to be the father of her unborn baby, one biologically, the other through a growing love, and the third through love lost. And the rest of the film is a battleground seemingly littered by their own and other’s bodies, at the very moment her envious fellow journalist Helena, has figured out all of Catarina’s betrayals and threatens to expose her in a TV game show which she hosts.

       Miraculously, as Catharina attempts to both maintain their support and push away those who most love her, in her attempt to focus of the real subject at hand, her unborn daughter, they come together to save the day.

     Te takes Helena on a wild goose chase ending in a roll-over of the car in which they have been traveling, leaving the mean-spirited reporter in an isolated location the very night in which she had promised to meet the producer with the full evidence, which assures that she misses her TV opportunity to spill all she knows to her rapacious public.

      Having been brushed off, Francisco quietly stays near her just for her protection.

     Rafael has written her a letter explaining that he is now determined to return to Spain and leave her in peace, but hopes that he might remain in touch just for his own child’s sake.

     As Catarina wanders home eating an ice cream cone that she has long craved, she suddenly spots Francisco nearby and smiles as if possibly allowing him back into her life. But at the same she spots Te, obviously having come to meet Francisco to share what has happened to Helena. Taken aback by their being together again, Catharina steps back into the traffic. At that very moment Rafael, having left his package in Catarina’s mailbox, exits her apartment building, and being closest to Catarina, he leaps to save her from being hit by a taxi, himself falling to the ground with her.

      Francisco reaches the spot a few seconds later and calls for an ambulance—once more. But this time Rafael is not hurt and thankfully not dead, but opens his eyes and returns to the crazy world his almost sacrificed for her sake.

       In the next frame the three of them waiting outside Catarina’s hospital room where she has just borne a healthy daughter. Each of them claiming the father, they demand to see her and the baby, which she has named Eva. Francisco jokes that it’s good that Rafael survived for if he had not, the baby might be named Isolde (Tristan, if you recall, being Rafael’s last name).

        Order has been restored to Catarina’s terribly messy life through the love she had engendered from everyone who has met and known her—except, of course, for Helena, who undergoes her punishment through having to appear as the substitute guest on her own TV show, and who, when she refuses to answer a leading question about her feelings about her producer, is doused with a bucket of cold water.

        If Adam and Eve is not a great film, it is certainly a lot of fun, and takes its audiences to a much better place for understanding of the complexity of heterosexual, bisexual, and homosexual relationships than almost any US film of the early 1990s had succeeded in doing. US studios were being gradually dismantled or reestablished simply for the purposes of pop youth entertainment, leaving independents and small filmmakers with the possibilities of offering audiences more complex film experiences. Whether or not they succeeded is still open to question, but by the end of the decade LGBTQ concerns were no longer considered something that the movies could ignore.

 

*And I’m ignoring the many innovative French, Italian, and Scandinavian innovative gay films of the same period.

 

Los Angeles, December 26, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (December 2022).