by Douglas Messerli
David Mora (screenwriter and director) Dos veintitrés (Two Twenty-Three) / 2018 [4 minutes]
A handsome man sits at the end of a pool, seemingly alone. He tells of a
dream he had the night before in which he was at a party where he saw a
beautiful woman in a miniskirt. He was a little drunk and was shouting at the
DJ to play a song from Estopa. And as he turned, he spied yet an even more
beautiful girl, a goddess, “light eyes, blonde hair, and a couple of
considerable reasons.” And without hesitation he began to kiss her.
And suddenly of the four of “us,” appear here in his pool. And the “chicks”
begin to kiss one another, apparently being friends. The two males, “we,” were
stunned and joined in. “You take your brunette, and I take my blonde, and we
started to hook up.”
Everything is fine until he
notices that the girl has pricked him when kissing. He opens his eyes, “and
instead of her face, it was you….”
The man continues his story as
he sits at the end of the pool, while addressing apparently no one, as if in a
dream.
“You know what I did? I continued
as if nothing.” Indeed he was so horny that he forced his imaginary friend to
suck him under water, with him barely breathing.
But then the story suddenly
shifts, as if the narrator were coming through a fantasy and admitting to a
reality. “I lie. I didn’t dream this.” It was a fantasy that he added to his
Sunday afternoon “wank.” And he also thought of his male friend, he admits,
while jerking off on Friday after training.
And sometimes even when fucking his girlfriend
Elisa, he gets the smell of his friend. It’s all very strange, he admits,
because he’s not into guys at all. “Gross!” he proclaims. “But sometimes I
think about getting…the courage to let it go. But I don’t dare and get scared.”
Because what is even more frightening to him
is the possibility that his friend will not understand, the he doesn’t feel the
same, that it may be something that will change their current relationship. “Because
sometimes I think what we have is just perfect.”
Suddenly, out from beneath
the surface of the water, a beautiful man (Miguel Ángel Bellido) pops up, demanding
to know “How much?”
Our narrator looks at his watch: “Two twenty-two,”
he answers. He looks attentively at his delighted friend, who has just broken
his own record, a quiet smile remaining on the narrator’s face as his friend
swims off and the credits quietly role.
This short film by Spanish/Castilian
Mora might almost be seen as a rehearsal for a bisexual coming out, or, more
likely, a kind of audio-visual diary entry, shared with the viewer that will
never be heard by the cinema-bound friend.
Los Angeles, August 25, 2025
Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (August 2025).
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