picked up by an angel
by Douglas Messerli
Ruben Navarro (screenwriter and director) Of Hearts and Castles /
2020 [15 minutes]
Los Angeles director Ruben Navarro presents
his two quite knowledgeable sexual characters speaking a language of romance,
hearts and castles, love lost, all still inducing deep psychological scars.
Perhaps that characterizes the very reasons why these love-forlorn figures,
Marcus (Philemon Chambers) and Angel (Luis Carazo), are still suffering beyond
the time their friends believe they should. If both men fairly savvy and
resilient, they are also still wary and hurt, feeling alien from the “fun”
their own friends hope to engage them in at a local LA restaurant Akhbar, a gay
nightclub in the Silverlake region of the city.
They meet up outside the restaurant to where they have both retreated
from friends and the heated, sexy activities inside. Sensing a shared history
they feel comfortable with one another almost immediately and head off back to
Angel’s apartment on their own.
In Navarro’s fragmented telling of their stories, we discover that
Marcus is still recovering from a suddenly ended relationship—his former lover
demanding no further contact—which still haunts him, particularly since he felt
he was constructing a castle of his dreams but as with the children’s block
into which he had inserted a wrong piece it was inexplicably brought it all
down crashing around him. Angel attempts to minimize the romantic terms in
which Marcus is couching his life by suggesting that that process of what life
is all about, building up constantly collapsing structures that time and again
must be reassessed and repaired.
At
his apartment, the two begin their sexual encounter, Angel explaining that he
has a rare condition where his heart was shifted in birth to his right side to
his left upper chest, so that when he goes to hug Marcus the two him their
hearts do truly beat as one against each other.
Angel’s pain goes back even further to the time when he first told his
father of his sexual identity, which marked the moment that the man never again
spoke to him. He claims to have been able to see that now as a reasonable
response to someone who could never again hide his feelings about his sexual
life, but obviously it still is a deep loss which makes him empathetic for all
others.
If
both of their past lives seem intentionally vague and abstract, what is clear
is that whatever most ails them is healed by the other during that one night,
and Marcus leaves the next morning with no expectations of seeing his “angel”
again, but with the sense of something ended and a new beginning made possible.
If
it might be nice to imagine the two of them getting back together, that is
completely irrelevant to Navarro’s movie, through which an angel has swept in
to mark a transition in both their lives when they can move on from their past
hurts toward a new building up of significance. Even in the highly fragmented
and isolated world in which we all live today, the same romantic metaphors of
hearts and castles seems applicable to resolving life’s difficulties,
particularly in their case.
As
critic Ana María Enciso noted in her review of this film in BeLatina:
Of Hearts and Castles speaks to the audience in a broader sense:
It is not
a short film about a gay relationship or a film about interracial love –
despite being starred by a Black American and a Latino. The bottom
line is beyond that.
Regardless of your race or sex, you won’t be able to stop smiling, and
feeling that love is love and kindness knows nothing other than smiling
back.
Los Angeles, October 22, 2021
Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (July
2025).
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