o sad night!
by Douglas Messerli
Andi Nachon (screenplay), Papu Curotto (director)
Matías y Jerónimo (Matias and
Jeronimo) / 2015 [9 minutes]
This beautiful short movie
begins with two young boys, Matias (Rodrigo Coutinho Da Silva) and Jeronimo
(Gabriel Rost), friends perhaps from birth, stomping through the mud where the
beach meets the sand. The mother of one of them calls out, suggesting that it’s
time to leave. They rush into the shallow waters to wash off.
Permitting them to ride in the open hatch
back of the car’s trunk, they are whisked off home, where the charming kids
take a real shower together, spraying soap upon each other’s head in a game
they obviously regularly play of “designing” each other’s hairdo, as if they
were somehow competitive hairdressers attempting to outdo one another in their tricks
of styling. It is all innocent, these children being at the age when their
same-sex love, as Belgian filmmaker Lukas Dhont recently reminded us in his Close
(2022), is natural for young boys and girls, although soon-to-be mocked by
peers and parents.
These two boys are not
necessarily two gay boys in the making; they are simply in love with
themselves, openly and selfishly enjoying another of their sex in a manner
which may or may not soon shift to the opposite sex or remain with them for the
rest of their lives, transforming into the kind of love we have witnessed in
the numerous short gay films wherein when a young man coming of age discovers that
he feels most sexually comfortable with his best friend.
In this story, alas, the boys quickly come
to witness what can become of those who continue to love other men. Although
they have no name for it and would not be able to identify what “it” is, they
soon after, when taken to a local Carnival Madi Gras celebration in rural
Argentina, become avid spectators of a series of instances both lovely and
dreadful.
There they are wowed by the lights and
costumes, and, in particular, the dancing of what we as adults recognize as a
gay man in drag (José Sandoval), displaying his graceful and somewhat
outlandish movements.
Together they watch with
open-eyed wonder, pleasure and joy: but like children whose eyes capture scenes
that adults often miss, they also see the young man leave the celebration,
walking down the long narrow path behind the bleachers in which they sit.
Their eyes widen as they watch
several hooligans follow the gay man, overtaking him, and beating him—perhaps
to death. As adults, we unfortunately know that the beating involves homophobic
rage, but for these boys there can as yet be no explanation for why the event
has happened unless it be for his rather flamboyant behavior, not unlike their playful
exaggeration of each other’s hair.
As Stephen Sondheim warns us
in his song “Children Will Listen,”
“Careful the things you say
Children will listen
Careful the things you do
Children will see”
What these young boys interpret of the
behavior they have just witnessed, we are never told; Curotto’s film is presented
to us almost entirely from the boys’ point of view, a largely unspoken space
that does not yet perceive the need to evaluate what they observe. But we can
be sure that what they have just seen will long remain in their minds, helping
them later to discover a cause-and-effect relationship that may alter their charmingly
narcissistic behaviors for the rest of their lives. Excitement and
exaggeration, an aspect of childish response, may be tamped down or obliterated
from their daily repertoires, emotions held within—all because of the terrible
act they have witnessed on this particular festive evening. The tragedy of the
events are felt not only by the survivor—if he is a survivor—but by he
empathetic and wise film-goer who recognizes just what these boys have lost in
their lives through their careful observation of adult behavior on this sad night.
Los Angeles, August 11, 2025
Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (August 2025).
No comments:
Post a Comment