Tuesday, June 24, 2025

Juan Chappa and Martín Deus | Amor crudo (Raw Love) / 2008

just friends

by Douglas Messerli

 

Martín Deus (screenplay), Juan Chappa and Martín Deus (directors) Amor crudo (Raw Love) / 2008 [15 minutes]

 

This short film from Argentinian directors Juan Chappa and Martín Deus begins with the roughhousing of adolescent boys, these acts being quite self-conscious as they drag down one another, one by one to the ground, shoving a camera into their faces, their peers shouting out their statements to the girls like so many date apps or heterosexual chat room come-ons. They play as if they were compelled by force, but for the most part we can tell the boys enjoy their “tortures.” One younger member of the group smokes what appears to be his first cigarette, coughing on the smoke as his trickles down his neck.

     But two of the boys continue the wrestling even after the others have stopped, one, Jeremías (Valentino Arocena) struggling as the other, Iván (Juan Felipe Villanueva) hovers over the weaker also in false pretense, making it secretly apparent that they enjoy the homoerotic moment.


     Jeremías continues their mock wrestling even as Iván attempts to shower after, Iván pulling the fully dressed boy into the shower with him.

      The two boys soon share Iván’s bed—evidently a regular occurrence—sleeping close together on the narrow bed with their heads in opposite directions, that is until Jeremías asks Iván if he’s asleep; the other listening to headphones, suggests he join him, handing him one earbud as they listen together and for a moment…Iván looking dreamily into the other boy’s eyes.

     At the breakfast table Iván’s mother (Katja Alemann) attempts to pump information from Jeremías about her handsome son’s love life with girls—with no particular success, although it appears that Jeremías is willing to make up girlfriends for his buddy just to please his mother.

      There is more initiatory wrestling among the larger group the next day; it is after all almost the end of the school year. The two boys spend the night together again, but this time after Iván, along with the gang, has almost gotten drunk. Jeremías slowly undresses his friend, pulling off his shoes and finally his shirt before resuming his usual place. This time the younger boy, almost pleading, asks a slightly untoward question, but one he has been seeking to know all along, “Do you love me?”


      The answer he gets is only the expected one, “Of course. You’re my friend.”

       But obviously he has not answered satisfactorily for Jeremías who loves Iván, we realize, more than just a friend. Tears slightly well in eyes. “But what do you feel for me?

       “That.”

       “'That’ what?”

       “That you are my friend.”

       A commentator on the film, Katherine Fieldgate beautifully summarizes the situation:

 

 “Yet as harsh daylight streams into Iván’s cold, blue bedroom, Jeremías does not get the answers he seeks. They lie top-and-tail, their bodies as misaligned as the love of the film’s title, which seems not only raw, but also unrequited. The camera underscores the division: Iván reclines out of focus; Jeremías slowly blinks away his emotions in the foreground. We are offered a brief, bittersweet window to a formative relationship, one never openly declared, even as we move towards the eventual farewell.”

  

       The next day at school, Iván finishes his final exam, Jeremías begging him to stay on at school just a little longer. We’re never shown whether he agrees to hang around; we simply see him walking off, as from Jeremías’ point-of-view the film rewinds some of the roughhousing joys, including a shared masturbatory event we hadn’t previously witnessed.


      It is almost as if the young man is watching his lover leave his life forever. But it is, in fact, even worse for never having been spoken, the full extent and nature of the love never fully having been expressed.      

     Directors Chappa and Deus have created a subtle and emotive study of young love that perhaps occurs more often than we acknowledge, one boy remembering what might have been with the other for the rest of his life.

 

Los Angeles, December 10, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (December 2022).

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