by Douglas
Messerli
Juan Felipe
Restrepo (screenplay), Amalia Ramírez Atiles (director)
Hijo Pródigo (Prodigal Son) / 2017 [9 minutes]
In so many of today’s films, such a revelation generally results in some difficulty at first while the parents deal with the issue before coming finally to realize that they love their son more than the difference of sexual behavior that has come between them; or, increasingly, they declare that they had long known of his sexual identity, but felt they could say nothing until he brought up the subject. In film upon film, accordingly, the situation is generally resolved, the tension between the family members overcome. Of course, there are numerous exceptions, this film being one.
If, at first,
Andres’ parents in Prodigal Son appear to be loving parents, happy to
have their son home again, as they sit down to dinner they immediately begin to
denigrate his best friend Diego. Andres asks why they are against him, only to
hear them suggest that their friends have
hinted that he is gay. And immediately the formerly “nice”
mother goes into a rant against homosexuals, attacking them for their general
behavior, seeing them as carriers of AIDS, and extending the myths surrounding
LGBTQ individuals we all know, that they soon become rapists and criminals, all
the disinformation the uncomprehending employ to justify their ignorance.
When Andres
attempts to correct their thinking, they go even further until finally he can
take it no longer, standing up in anger declaring that the Diego of whom they
are speaking is his boyfriend, his lover, and that he, himself, is gay.
The father
immediately leaves the table in horror, while the mother musters the standard
artillery with which to attack things outside of comprehension, drawing on
stock expressions such as “Do you have any idea of what people are going to
say?” before extending that banal sentiment to “What are your dad’s colleagues
are going to say? How this affects us?” questions that generally lead to the
final retreat into a total disjuncture from the other “How could you do this to
us?”
It is not long
after that she attempts to invert her selfishness by describing her son, for
his very existence, as being selfish, which easily leads to her complete
condemnation of him, her denial of him being her son, and the final hurling of
the deprecating expletive “fag,” which turns him from a human into something,
the perverted logic that has long ruled such rants.
But Restrepo’s and Ramírez Atiles’ mother
takes her obvious homophobia even further. When a month later Andres returns,
once more the prodigal son, this time with Diego (Jonathan De La Torre) to back
him up, a bottle of wine in his hand to celebrate the father’s birthday, the
father comes to the door, greeting his son once more with a hug, to tell them
that the mother will not come down and, accordingly, he cannot let them in.
This Prodigal son is again rejected without even being heard, and certainly without
any evidence of love.
Fortunately,
the two lovers, who perhaps will always remain outsiders to Andres’ family, are
of an age with other possibilities that we know they will survive. But the pain
of these homophobic rejections can never be healed, while we strongly suspect
that the actor/writer is speaking from a somewhat autobiographical perspective.
The film itself
functions like the Biblical parable, an irony turned on its head. Yet the
original parable is problematic if it had been extended in this short work,
since returning to the father in the original was also represented as an act of
repentance, an act we hopefully imagine is not in this case possible or
necessary. It is the mother, who here symbolically performs the role of the
other brother, who must repent.
Los Angeles, March 2, 2022
Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (March 2022).
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