Eloy de la Iglesia | Los placeres ocultos (Hidden Pleasures) / 1977

the right to be what we are

by Douglas Messerli

 

Rafael Sánchez Campo, Eloy de la Iglesia, and Gonzalo Goicoechea (screenplay), Eloy de la Iglesia (director) Los placeres ocultos (Hidden Pleasures) / 1977

 

Gay Spanish director Eloy de la Iglesia is one of the most important of LGBTQ directors of the 1970s and 80s, of the stature of Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Luchino Visconti. De la Iglesia’s works are far more politically concerned than either Fassbinder’s or Visconti’s, and his subjects in his gay trio of films in the early 1970s, Los placeres ocultos, El diputado, and El sacerdote and in quinqui and films of adolescent street delinquents in the 1980s (Navajeros, Colegas, El pico, and El pico 2) seem far more psychologically and narratively complex and nuanced than many of Fassbinder’s works. The later de la Iglesia films are often compared to the 1960s films of Pier Paolo Pasolini and to the earlier Mexican based film by Luis Buñuel Los olvidados (1950).

     Certainly, de la Iglesia does not have the rich textures and images of Visconti, nor did he have the resources of the incredible acting team with whom Fassbinder regularly worked, and his his output as not as monumental as Fassbinder’s oeuvre. For 15 years after La Estanquera de vallecas in 1987, de la Iglesia stopped making films as he struggled with heroin addiction before making his last work Los novios bulgaros in 2003. But his importance as a gay, communist activist, and filmmaker, particularly in the early post-Franco days, is extraordinarily significant even while it has been basically ignored by many in the film world. De la Iglesia made it possible for a director such as his fellow countryman Pedro Almodóvar to come into being in the late 1980s, the very period when de la Iglesia grew silent.

     Perhaps the first Spanish film to deal head-on with homosexuality, Hidden Pleasures centers upon a handsome middle-aged closeted gay man Eduardo (Simón Andreu) who picks up barrio school boys such as Nes (Ángel Pardo), who work the streets at night to pick up money for their personal expenses and families. Apparently, he has been stalking another schoolboy, Miguel (Tony Fuentes) whom, one day, he “accidentally” encounters outside a motorbike shop, with the boy eagerly eyeing the bikes through the window.

       Given his position as head of a major bank, Eduardo quickly arranges for the boy to be hired by his former protégé Raúl (Antonio Corencia), now an adult gay man who, unlike Eduardo, is involved as a gay activist who attends liberation meetings, to whose invitations Eduardo repeatedly rejects.

    Gradually discovering that Miguel is heterosexual with a girlfriend Carmen (Beatriz Rossat), Eduardo, nonetheless, becomes nearly infatuated with the boy and attempts to keep him close to him by offering him a regular job in his apartment to type up a manuscript upon which he is supposedly working. He also takes him to a gay bar, which Eduardo finds to be fun (“fags always make me laugh”) and in response to that attitude, takes him instead to a straight pick-up bar where they bring home two prostitutes, Eduardo paying more attention to the sounds of his young friend with a girl in his bedroom than he does to his own female partner, who he pays extra to declare their sex (which never happens) was pleasurable.

      Soon, Eduardo has also bought Miguel the motorbike in the window, and when Miguel returns home with it, the local boys who gather round naturally presume Miguel has provided plenty of sex for the gift.

      Things are made even more complex given the fact that a married woman, Rosa (Charo López), has long been regularly inviting the boy to her house to help with “plumbing problems,” keeping him as a kind secret lover who weekly satisfies the sexual needs which obviously her husband cannot.

       As Eduardo grows more and more obsessed with Miguel—and simultaneously is sexually frustrated by the situation—Miguel comes increasingly to admire the man who almost inexplicably has chosen to help the willing and hardworking young man, who refuses the alternatives chosen by many of his neighborhood classmates. Indeed, we observe that gradually Miguel has turned his patron/mentor, perhaps unknowingly to Eduardo, into a father figure.

       Meanwhile, Eduardo’s elderly mother grows ill, confessing on her deathbed to her son that she has long known he was “different” and pleading with him not to remain alone. Eduardo’s brother Ignacio (Germán Cobos), also an executive in the bank, knows of his brother’s homosexuality, and is willing to ignore it as long as it does not become obvious to any of his business associates.

       Finally, Eduardo, unable to control himself any longer, confesses his love to Miguel, expressing his guilt for having long lured him into the situations, jobs, and other involvements in hoping to seduce him. Understandably angered with what he learns and crushed by the fact that he has lost his fantasy father, the boy leaves Eduardo, vowing never to return.

     Eduardo has no choice but to turn back to his old patterns, jacking off boys in public lavatories, sucking off boys in movie theaters, and picking up Nes on the street one night. But this time, mostly in anger for his many months of rejection and Eduardo’s preference for Miguel, Nes has planned with his hustler friends to rob and loot Eduardo’s apartment, beating him before they leave.

    Hearing of the beating, Miguel quickly returns to Eduardo, after beating Nes severely for his treatment of the banker. Eduardo promises to accept the boy as a heterosexual without attempting to ask for any sexual involvement and even encourages Miguel to introduce him to Carmen, the three of them playing out a different kind of family unit as they party and travel on short day trips together, offering the older man, for the first time in his life, a sort of replacement family unit.

      What no one might have imagined is the anger and ultimate determination to revenge the loss of her Sunday lover by Rosa, who first comes to Eduardo in his bank office, pleading for him to release Miguel so that he might return to her. And when Eduardo righteously refuses to involve himself in that way in Miguel’s life, she plots with Nes and his gang for Miguel’s fall.

       Together they spread the rumor throughout the barrio that Miguel is gay, and she personally visits Carmen’s father, convincing him that his daughter’s boyfriend is queer. Nes and the others cut the tires of Miguel's motorbike and, soon after, while the other’s hold Miguel, he beats the boy severely.

       Without anything and cast as an outsider, Miguel feels justifiably punished and abused for having done nothing but love Carmen and appreciate the largesse of his older friend. What he now learns is a bitter lesson that every decision one makes in one’s life has consequences, whether one’s actions were well-intended or not. And in anger the boy shows up to the bank lobby, meeting up with Eduardo and appearing to accost him, shouting and insulting the boss in front of his employees by insisting that he preys on young boys as a homosexual.

       For both man and boy, the worst that can happen has. And the film, which surely might have already disappointed LGBTQ audiences for its presentation—yet again, centered on the abuse or failure of gay life as well as presenting its audiences mostly with heterosexual love scenes instead of gay action—superficially appears to be yet another well-intended film that displays the failures of gay life. Indeed, many commentators have described de la Iglesia’s work as a sort of more pallid Death in Venice.

       But, in fact, those comparisons, I’d argue are mistaken. Unlike Gustav von Aschenbach, Eduardo makes his interests and eventually his desires for his Tadzio quite known, and accepts the consequences. At least a couple of times along the way, moreover, when first Miguel and later Carmen confront him about his sexuality—Miguel asking if there were a shot he might take to cure his homosexuality, even if it cost him everything he had, wouldn’t he immediately take it?

    Eduardo answers quite straightforwardly: “I wouldn’t take it even if it was free. When I was your age I would’ve paid anything. It hurts to realize that you look at other things than most boys. Or when sexy women on the screen don’t turn you on. Or when you’re ashamed of last night’s dream. You suffer a lot. …We all have a right to be what we are. And nobody has the right to change us.”

     And it is at that point that he promises Miguel that “Rest assured, I’ll never try anything with you. I don’t have the right to change you.”

      Eduardo’s statement may not be the positive cry for equal rights that his friend Raúl might propose; but it certainly sounds something close to a manifesto for gay rights, particularly in Spain in 1977, with the old Franco fascists still attempting to regain their control of the country.

      The original working title of the film was La acera de enfrente, which means literally, “the other side of the street,” a pejorative expression for “homosexual.” The title, perceived as far too controversial, was changed upon release, but even then the picture was initially banned by the Spanish censors. When it was finally released the critics, opposing censorship one year after Franco’s death gave it mostly positive, if hardly gay-friendly reviews—El Pueblo, for example, observing that the film focuses on “the sad problem of homosexuality, but with little scandal.” Far more importantly, gay liberationists gathered in the streets for massive pro-demonstrations on the film’s opening night, de la Iglesia commenting, “It was the first time a Spanish gay group came out in public, with its banners and presenting its demands.”

      And finally, unlike von Aschenbach, Eduardo does not die in Madrid or even suffer in silence for the public revelation of his sexuality. The film ends with Eduardo back in his apartment. There is a knock at the door, and he goes to it cautiously, first peeking out of the peep-hole. Suddenly, his face expresses great joy as the screen goes black.

     We can only imagine that such a look of pleasure can be provided through the reappearance of Miguel. But if it is Miguel, we have to ask, for what reason has he returned? Is he simply ready to resume his chaste friendship with Eduardo, and what might or can their relationship now entail? Or has Miguel accepted, far more problematic if so, the role to which he has been assigned, a faggot who is willing, now without any alternatives, to begin a sexual relationship with the older man? Surely that could not be among the writer’s intentions. Yet, we have to imagine all the alternatives, or at least we are encouraged to. Of course, those possibilities say more about us than about any character in the film.

      In any event, this film does not end in a gay death. Both Eduardo and Miguel are permitted go on to define their own lives in whatever manner that they are afforded. If nothing else, we can say that Hidden Pleasures ends with nearly endless potentialities, pleasure appearing where you might least might have expected it.

 

Los Angeles, September 28, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (September 2023).