Manu Morales Contreras | Sombra de ojos (Eyeshadow) / 2019

the witness

by Douglas Messerli

 

Manu Morales Contreras (screenwriter and director) Sombra de ojos (Eyeshadow) / 2019 [21 minutes]

 

The Chilean director Morales Contreras’ Eyeshadow begins with a young man, Pablo (Luis Pinto), standing on the edge of a cliff, looking down into the roiling waters below. He is about to leap, but is pulled back at the last instant by Mirna (Claudio Diaz), an older drag queen who evidently lives nearby and takes the boy to her house, serves him tea, and invites him to stay with her.

    Soon after, we see her collecting money from a prostitute and making a call to meet up with someone else for more money, so that we suspect that perhaps she herself is also a prostitute. But over the weeks or days—the film is purposely vague about time—we hear how so many of her drag queen friends have simply died or “disappeared,” presumably during the military junta rule and the cruel dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, likely helped to power by the US in reaction to the Marxist Allende. Several times we see were watering flowers on a wall shine for the dead.

      They used to call one of her best friends Marilyn, Mirna tells Pablo, and when she disappeared Mirna sought some memento like the dolls she has about her house. Unable to find any talisman to represent her missing friend, she found a picture of Marilyn Monroe in a magazine, cut it out and pasted it to her wall.

      As they lie together in bed one night, Pablo admits that he has AIDS, which is the reason, among others, why he tried to kill himself obviously. Mirna reports that she is also a “carrier,” but sees it less as a wall or a cage, but as a place of carnations and syringes. Clearly she has been taking medicine to help her, as evidently Pablo has as well. She declares she knows someone who can get it for him cheaper. And it now becomes evident why she has so desperately needed the money from earlier scene.

      At one point, she helps cheer up the sad boy, who is utterly fascinated as he watches her put on her makeup in preparation for those days she appears in drag—she protects herself by not appearing in drag when they go shopping—by putting make-up of his eyes, lips, and cheeks as well. Soon after they dance to a sad song about three and then six black tears, each colored by mascara.

      Most of all, however, she advises the young man not to become a victim, a brave statement in a world that has victimized its own people. And even though they both have been sickened by the drugs, she demands that she wants to help him continue to live. I’m an old person, she declares, but you’re still young.

     We see Pablo, soon after, vomiting, sickened again by the disease or the drugs that he’s taken to help prevent it.

        In the penultimate scene, Mirna returns home and calls out to her new friend, but finds him no longer there. In the last scene we see her standing at the same cliff from where she has pulled him back from suicide, suggesting that Pablo, in despair, has finally jumped to his death. Mirna stands once more as witness to the deaths of queer individuals in her country.

       This short film is a painful picture of a world that has suffered so very much, particularly the queer community who found no welcome in the Pinochet regime, and suffered as did most of the world with rise of AIDS in the 1990s, when this drama supposedly takes place—although today Chile is considered one of the most progressive of South American countries regarding LGBTQ rights.

 

Los Angeles, March 8, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (March 2025).