Jose A. Cortés Amunarriz | Desnudos (Naked) / 2013

abandoning the house of the lord

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jose A. Cortés Amunarriz and Lordus Rodriguez (screenplay), Jose A. Cortés Amunarriz (director) Desnudos (Naked) / 2013 [11 minutes]

 

This Spanish morality tale begins with two handsome young men, Javier (Carlos Guerrero) and Fran (Victor Ramos) in a bedroom, presumably in Fran’s apartment since he is distraught that now he will have to wait another full week before seeing his lover once more, Javier returning to his conservative parent’s house. He insists that Javier reveal his sexuality to his parents, and jokingly even grabs his own phone—with which Javier has been taking pictures of his nude body sprawled out of the bed—out of his lover’s hands with the intention of calling his parents.

    In the next frame, however, that action, quite unintentional, has already taken place, as Fran has telephoned his lover on his cellphone just to express his love without the realization that Javier has left his phone behind on the family couch.

     Javier’s patriarchal father (Nacho Marraco) demands that his wife (Rocío Mostaza) answer the phone, but when she discovers it is his son’s phone he grabs it only discover from Fran’s message of love that his son is a “pervert.”

     At dinner he displays the phone, calling up Fran on the number of the phone and telling him that his son will no longer be permitted to engage with a “faggot.”

    Javier requests his phone back, and when his father won’t return it, stands disobediently, insisting that he is leaving the house forever.

     If so, demands the father, he must hand over his keys and all other things paid for his mother and father. In a daring display of what he is suddenly willing to abandon in order to be relieved of his father’s homophobic world, he does just that, taking off his shirt and pants, and finally even his underpants, standing before his parents naked as he threatens to walk out of the house.

     But before he can even leave, his mother calls out to him, she also standing and disrobing, even handing over her wedding ring and beginning to remove her earrings before she recalls that they were given to her by her mother. She too is ready to abandon her husband’s misogynistic treatment.

    Together the two, holding hands, walk like a kind of reverse Adam and Eve out of the garden and into the world, there only to discover that there are other naked individuals much like them who have also clearly abandoned a world determined by others who provide their dress and possessions.

     It is, so suggests director and writer Jose A. Cortés Amunarriz and Lordus Rodriguez a kind of brave new world, wherein they will determine whom they love and what kind of lives they choose to live, if nothing else, freeing of the restrictions of the patriarchal society which they have been forced to endure.

     This is a simple and raw narrative that has little to do with the psychological realism of most queer cinema. The issues here have nothing to do with why the mother and son have for so long been in bondage to husband and father, or even how the two gay boys met and what will now happen to them. The message is all in the metaphorical act of stripping themselves free of all that has previously bound them to the “civilization” to which they no longer wish to capitulate.

 

Los Angeles, August 11, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (August 2025).