Gabriel Dorado | De Vuelta (Back Again) / 2015

where the heart is no longer at home

by Douglas Messerli

 

Miguel Casanova and Gabriel Dorado (screenplay), Gabriel Dorado (director) De Vuelta (Back Again) / 2015 [13 minutes]

 

Back Again begins quite interestingly, with the return of a young man, Alex (Carlos Cuevas), to his small hometown in Spain after some time away. He’s greeted by his old friend, and apparently former gay lover, Jordi (Aleix Melé) on his motorbike.

     Alex suggests it looks like it’s going to rain, but Jordi insists since it’s the night of festival of San Juan—the Spanish June 24th celebration of the summer solstice, usually accompanied by fireworks and bonfires—that it wouldn’t dare rain.

   Nonetheless, there is a downpour, and the two boys are forced to make a run for it through the nearby woods to an old abandoned house, as we learn soon after, that they often visited in their younger days. Somewhat inexplicably Jordi argues he doesn’t want to go there, and we wonder is the house haunted. We discover, in another way that indeed it is.

      They are forced to take shelter there nonetheless. But we sense a deep tension between them. It appears that Alex might have even returned with the intention of reviving his childhood relationship with Jordi, but now there is something missing.

      A telephone call to Jordi, in which he explains where he is and who he’s with, ends with him assuring the caller he’s okay and everything is fine. Already Alex is set on edge.

      But when the caller rings again, and Jordi is forced to reassure the person again, ending the call with saying “I love you,” we know the cause of the tension.

      Alex immediately wants to know about the new lover: “Do I know him?”

      But Jordi responds, that yes, he knows her, Marta, evidently a mutual friend from the past. Suddenly Alex begins to sulk, and Jordi is angry with his reaction, attempting to explain that although they fooled around as kids, things have changed. It’s natural that they would, he reassures Alex. It’s normal.

     The two wrestle in mock battle, ending up in laughter and a return to their former rapport.   

     Soon after the rain lets up and they run through the woods with large sparklers in hand, the two witnessing the fireworks from a few miles in the distance. They have clearly settled into being just friends. When Alex asks has Jordi if he ever imagined leaving his town, he replies “To another place? Any place is a good place, if you’re happy,” and the two smile, suggesting that they indeed have found happiness again.

     Yet, Néstor Romero Clemente’s beautiful musical score accompanying this short work tells us something quite different, that there is still a deep emptiness between them that can’t be resolved in the simple “there’s no place like home”-platitudes that the script suggests in its argument for heteronormative resolution as opposed to their childhood sexual explorations, with which clearly Alex would have liked to continue.

      If Jordi has found true happiness in his isolated Spanish village, it appears that Alex will soon be on the road again. We don’t know, in fact, whether he has come “back again” simply for a visit or intended on a more permanent stay. But if Spanish director Gabriel Dorado is suggesting the latter, I’d bet against it. Alex has no longer any major role in his friend’s life and we all know how difficult it is to go home again, particularly if you’ve haven’t outgrown your childhood fascination with same-sex experiments. If nothing else, one can be sure that if Alex were to remain and try to retain a friendship with Jordi, Marta would be constantly checking up and keeping the two apart as much as possible. The tension remains in this film between what the writers and director are appearing so suggest is resolved when narratively it is not.

 

Los Angeles, February 11, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (February 2023).