Alejandro Beltrán | Lost Years / 2016

the rape

by Douglas Messerli

 

Alejandro Beltrán and Samuel García (screenplay), Alejandro Beltrán (director) Lost Years / 2016 [21 minutes]

 

Felix (Samuel Garcia) has just been shipped off to boarding school after the death of his mother and is tense in meeting his cynical new roommate Leo (Jack O’Neill), who tells him if he wants to survive in this school he will have to relax. Immediately after, Leo pulls out a bottle of whiskey and pours his new mate a drink, only to realize that this is Felix’s first taste of alcohol.    

     When Leo discovers that Felix is reading Magnus Hirschfeld and His Quest for Sexual Freedom,* they suddenly become fast friends, Leo sneaking him illegally out of the school on a bicycle trip, which ends up, as do so many films about young teen boys falling in love, with the two of them cavorting in some stranger’s swimming pool, and with Felix’s first gay kiss.

     The two quickly become lovers, but the fact that Leo will soon be graduating and the Headmaster of the school can be seen lurking around the showers and locker rooms do not bode well for Felix. Some of the boys soon begin heckling him, knocking books out of his hands as he walks down the halls, and generally stalking him.

      Leo finally presents Felix with a gift of tickets, telling him that he wants him to go away with him so that they might begin a new life together, Felix being delighted with the prospect. The two finally join together for sex, but Felix, for whom it is the first time, is too nervous to go through with it. Nonetheless, they do share their love for one another, and snuggle up in bed comfortable with one another’s bodies.    

    Soon after, the two boys who have been stalking Felix rape him in the shower, the Schoolmaster watching, obviously approving of or even having instigated the act.

     Felix goes into a kind of depression, afraid to talk about the incident even with Leo, and now fearing to even be touched. While he assures Leo that he still wants to go away with him, he basically pushes Leo away in the manner that rape victims often do with their loved ones, perhaps inwardly blaming himself or just being now terrified of intimacy. And soon after Leo leaves the school without his friend.

     Four years later, Felix now a businessman, reads in the paper about the Headmaster of his former school, now accused of rape. Felix shows up suddenly at Leo’s door, a voiceover stating that he had spoken to no one over the years about what had happened, but finally it was time to come forward. The fact that he visits Leo suggests that it may have been Leo who made the charge, that he too was raped long before Felix had he arrived, but had simply dealt with it differently.

      Spanish director Alejandro Beltrán’s beautifully filmed short movie is a powerful statement on how rape can alter an individual’s life. But if there is any criticism I might make about this film is how it seemingly fetishizes the sexual act as something so special that Felix allows it to destroy him.

     One might have imagined that after that first kiss, Leo and Felix would have immediately jumped into bed and into one another’s arms and other orifices as their youthful hormones dictated. The fact that even after scenes of heavy kissing, sunsets, and everything that goes with teenage gay love as portrayed in the movies that they still do not have sex and that, when they first decide to, Felix is too nervous, doesn’t register with my youthful experiences. Sex was not something one planned for but was an almost immediate expression of the excitement and pleasure of being with the other good-looking person of one’s age. The important thing, the relationship came after, not before. But, of course, we know not every young man or women behave in the same manner. Felix may have highly religiously educated or simply shy and fearful about the sexual act. But it is that worshipful attitude toward sexuality, I would argue, that helped to make it nearly impossible for him to have even physical contact after being raped, while obviously Leo didn’t have that problem—although we can see throughout that he is certainly bitter about his school life. This film reveals once again how rape is related to and an aspect of sexual hate and violence.

 

*Magnus Hirschfeld was a German philosopher, philologist, and medical authority who argued for homosexual and transexual rights throughout the Weimer Republic, establishing Institut für Sexualwissenschaft (Institute of Sexual Research) in Berlin and fighting for what would eventually become LGBTQ+ rights. The Nazis destroyed the institute, its extensive library and research data in 1933, sending Hirschfeld into retreat to France. I discuss his immense effect on queer life throughout these volumes.

 

Los Angeles, July 9, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (July 2023).