Gabriel Motta | Dois Homens ao Mar (Two Men by the Sea) / 2020

a loose brick

by Douglas Messerli

 

Gabriel Motta (screenwriter and director) Dois Homens ao Mar (Two Men by the Sea) / 2020 [17 minutes]

 

Calling up the famous painting about the contemplation of the infinite by Caspar David Friedrich, Brazilian director Gabriel Motto’s Estonian-located Two Men by the Sea might be described as yet another “coming out” film in the manner of Carlsson’s film Night Train I describe above.

      

     The men who meet up here are also from very difficult cultures but find themselves immediately attracted to one another. However, these men in their mid-20s are not complete innocents, the local man Martin (Mauri Liiv) who works as a video game designer has already finished his required service in the Estonian military, and the man he meets one morning in a Tallinn coffee-shop, César (Gabriel Motta) is a street actor back in Brazil who has left his family and evidently a male lover behind as he goes in search of new experiences through travel. Why he has journeyed from Finland by ferry to Estonia is never quite explained, but his goal apparently is to take the train to St. Petersburg the next morning, and he is interested in exploring the Estonian capital in the meantime.

      However, once to two have met and begin their conversation they have only the afternoon left to work—Martin having been asked to pitch a new game to possible supporters—or, in César’s case, tour the city beginning with the Telliskivi (“Brick”) area of the city and extending his visit to several of the city’s noted mural wall paintings.

     The film focuses mostly on their morning conversation, interspersing it the Brazilian’s later roaming of the city. We don’t hear long segments of their conversation but the snippets we do overhear tell us a great deal about the two, that Martin, who did not like the military, did enjoy the company of so many males confined to small quarters, keeping in touch with only one, but ultimately losing touch with him as well; perhaps most importantly the fact that he now has a girlfriend. It seems pretty apparent that he had some special relationship with the other former soldier but that he broke it off, perhaps because it had threatened to become something more than a friendship or the very nature of that friendship, perceptions which are reified later as we shall observe.

      For his part, the far more adventurous César loves his job as a street actor who is able to introduce theater to many who have never encountered it before, turning the very everyday world in which they live into something ritually performed and reconceived, making it special. As I mention above, Martin discovers in their conversation that the stranger is gay, and that he has felt able to leave his friend since it was only a sexual relationship, missing obviously the kind of deeper relationship that César is seeking.

      Whatever other pieces of conversation that transpire between the two doesn’t matter as much as the fact that they have thoroughly enjoyed one another’s company and are startled when they realize so much time has passed that they must part.

      We have basically charted out César’s day through the fragments throughout their conversation. But for the latter half of the film we focus on Martin returning home to his girlfriend, obviously feeling somehow that something has changed or at least that he now feels uncomfortable about his life, his girlfriend even inquiring about his apparently unusual state of mind.

       Early in the morning Martin awakens, quickly dresses, and surprisingly hurries to the train station to see the stranger of the previous day off on his trip to Russia. Film has, obviously, a very long tradition of lovers rushing to see one another off on trains, so many that it has almost become a cliché to be satirized as in Young Frankenstein (1974) and Airplane! (1980). But we have not expected this rush by Martin to see César off as if he were a about to be lost lover.

     What we recognize in the act is not simply Martin’s feelings for the conversationalist of the previous day, but the possibilities of a different life that he represents. We recognize in this suddenly spontaneous act a sense of new possibilities for the previously normatively defined game designer, suggesting a new awakening if not of homosexual yearnings at least bisexual interests. The street actor has awakened a new possibility of behavior in his friend’s life, and the gesture of seeing him off is what precisely what was missing in the scene in which Oskar does not bother to awaken Ahmad to thank him in Carlsson’s Night Train. Clearly, Martin and César’s tentative relationship will now never be forgotten.

 

Los Angeles, October 22, 2021

Reprinted in My Queer Cinema blog (July 2025).