Bonzo Villegas and Carlos Vilaró Nadal | En el mismo Equipo (On the Same Team) / 2014

beyond the mountain

by Douglas Messerli

 

Bonzo Villegas and Carlos Vilaró Nadal (screenwriters and directors) En el mismo Equipo (On the Same Team) / 2014 [22 minutes]

 

Argentinian filmmakers Bonzo Villegas and Carlos Vilaró Nadal’s quiet film of 2014 En El Mismo Equipo (On the Same Team) is ostensibly another of the many fictional films about gay sports players who have difficulties, given the macho hetero-normative values attached to athletic activities throughout the world. Moreover, Emanuel (Pablo Delgado) plays rugby, the most touchy/feeling male-groping sport in the whole world—except perhaps for wrestling. But wrestlers go after each other one on one, while rugby is a truly team sport depending upon the emotional bonding of the entire group. As South African director Chadlee Skrikker’s 2019 short film Hand Off reminded us, rugby is a difficult sport for a homosexual to play given that the entire team has to be comfortable with physical contact with the gay man.

      Yet Emanuel has evidently a fairly easy sexual relationship with another team player, Tano (Emiliano Monteros) with whom he still hasn’t completely come to terms. As the two escape to the woods after a game, he insists he’s not like his friend, that he thought Tano was the only one with whom he could share his feelings, but now realizes that they’re “different”: “I’m not like you.”

     “Who says?” Tano counters, arguing that Emanuel simply has to relax, to accept life as it is, which will make all the difference. The two make love, but we sense a deep frustration, even anger remaining in Emanuel’s thoughts as we see him in his room later slugging his rugby ball as if it were a boxer’s heavy bag.

        A dinner conversation of his family members concerns, among other things, a friend who has gone away to Buenos Aires and come back as a gay man. Although a couple of those at the table argue something to the effect that it’s not so unusual these days, several, including Emmanuel’s father, appear to feel it’s still “unnormal,” and most of the women side with the gay man’s local ex-girlfriend. One quieter sister, Laura (Verónica Paz) observes her brother and seems to sense his troubled state of mind, particularly when he suddenly leaves the table.

       She too appears on the small porch apparently ready to talk with him, but he has been greeted by a another of rugby buddies passing in a car who insists that he join them in the evening’s pre-game night, since the next day they are playing the team from Santiago. He agrees, although the long shower he takes in preparation makes clear even that choice has involved a painful sense of conflict.

     He arrives at the party only to see his sister is there as well, already fairly drunk, and he is surprised by her presence. Meanwhile his friends force him to speak with a girl, Agustina, of whom he has previously commented. He briefly talks to her and her friends, but soon excuses himself “for a moment” to get a drink; he never returns to continue their conversation. Wandering around the lawn, observing others of his teammates involved in heterosexual flirtation and love-making, including Tano, he seems lost, and finally pulls away from the party, standing apart from the others. He is soon joined by his sister.

       She speaks to him simply: “I don’t know if you know this, but there’s a lot more beyond the mountain. The world doesn’t end at Tucuman or Yerba Buena. The house is not the only place you could live in. Or rugby isn’t the only activity you could do. These parties aren’t the only place you could be at. You could live a life completely different if you decide to do it. But yeah….you’re gonna need a lot of balls.” Not a great English language translation of the Spanish original, clearly, but wise observations nonetheless.

      Through several frames Emmanuel has been seen carrying an airline add advertising freedom, which now makes it clear that what has been holding him back is not rugby, or even his inability to accept his homosexuality. He is after all different from his friend Tano, not in his sexual orientation but in his desire to escape from the small town restraints in which he is entrapped. Many of the problems facing young gay people lies not so much in their inability to accept themselves as gay individuals but in the inertia of having to break with and move away from the normative heterosexual pulls of their lives. It is simply easier to fall into the patterns of nearly everyone else in the world in which you’re born and raised. Some gays can’t come out because it takes the energy of determined self-will to escape what everyone around you defines as the preferable way to survive.

       But in the end, Vilaró Nadal and Villegas’s small gem is not a “coming out” movie nor a movie about the difficulty of escaping from the heterosexual demands of playing sports, but a story about a young man coming to terms with adult life, of defining where and how he wants to live that life whatever it might bring.

     Clearly Emanuel (which means “God with us”) does not sleep that night. And the next morning we see him wandering a wooded road before standing on a small stone wall to stare out over the valley at the rising sun. The camera pans down to see the small travel ad slip from his fingers, and intercuts with a few faces from his immediate past life. When the camera pans back up to the wall, Emanuel is no longer there, having gone only God knows where.

 

Los Angeles, June 23, 2021

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog and World Cinema Review (June 2021).