Francisco Lupini | TÚ. YO. BAÑO. SEXO. AHORA. (You. Me. Bathroom. Sex. Now.) / 2015

getting down to basics

by Douglas Messerli

 

Francisco Lupini (screenwriter and director) TÚ. YO. BAÑO. SEXO. AHORA. (You. Me. Bathroom. Sex. Now.) / 2015 [17 minutes]

 

This witty comedy, a Venezuelan-Spanish-USA production, is not really a film you can describe by talking about the plot. Everything in the work depends upon the endlessly campy, witty dialogue between Roberta (Puy Navarro), the bartender and owner of the dive, and her long-time customers Pepín and Antonio (Miguel Belmonte).

      Tony has just broken up with his lover after arriving home one evening to discover him “eating out a beautiful piece of ass.” Now he’s so depressed that he doesn’t even want to talk about it, but of course he does nothing else but babble on about his failed relationship throughout the film.

      Enter a stranger, Nacho (Bautista Duarte), a German, it seems, who can’t speak a word of Spanish and who Pepín takes an immediate disliking simply because he’s German. Even ordering up a drink without knowing a world of Spanish here is nearly impossible. Nonetheless, he manages to write out a message on a napkin he asks Roberta to hand over to Antonio, a message which cuts through all the problems of the unnecessary deviations of conversation: “TÚ. YO. BAÑO. SEXO. AHORA. (You. Me. Bathroom. Sex. Now.). A moment later he gets up and walks into the john.

      Tony is unsure about the invite; should he really follow the stranger into the dark bathroom which Roberta somehow can’t even imagine being a location for fornication? But finally, she insists it’s the only way for him to get even for what Ramon, his former lover, has done to him and the best way to cure his broken heart.

       The two have great sex, Tony giving the stranger a blow job and both fucking each other despite the fact that Antonio endlessly spills out his sad story from beginning to end. When everything is over, Nacho—who is actually from Argentina and speaks fluent Spanish, although Antonio argues he can barely understand a word of Argentinian Spanish—wonders if his friend ever stops talking, explaining the German act was all a ruse to escape the necessity of getting to know one another and dealing with all the past that comes with that process. Without language, he argues one can just come to essentials without be forced to hear the other’s terrible problems. But, of course, he has had to go through just that given Tony’s endless conversation to basically himself, since his sexual partner, so he believed, couldn’t understand a word he said.

     In any event,  Antonio is a new man, ready to try the experiment out on another stranger who has just entered the bar, Chico (Mauricio Pita), caught up in the world of his cellphone so it seems. Tony writes his message on a napkin and suddenly the distracted Chico perks up and smiles—although how Tony will hold up to a new round of such intense sexual pleasures is not explained.

     As I began this essay short commentary, however, the plot isn’t what really matters in New York-based Venezuelan director Lupini’s film. It’s the patter that most matters here, almost in the way that the hysteria of language works in the earlier movies of Pedro Almodóvar. Here’s a brief example:

 

[As Roberta pours out a glass a special Greek wine for Antonio, Pepín enters]

pepín: What a relief. Another second would have been too late.” (Looking over a Tony) What’s

   up with her? She looks like she just came back from a funeral. Did your pet parrot die?

roberta: All I know is that she’s had it.

pepín: Me too! All those years of sharing my ass left me without the power of retention. A sad 

   story.

roberta: Worthy of an old slut! (Turning back to Tony) This one’s diagnosis is heartbreak.

antonio: Heartbreak is for pussies!

toberta: If we are talking pussy, look no further. Mine’s a work of art since the doctors made all

   my lips match.

pepín: Listen, after I came out of my mother’s vagina, I never saw another one. Talk about trauma.

antonio: So if you already know, why do you ask? I devoted my body and soul to that son-of-a-

   bitch! And how does he pay me?

pepín: With a killer fuck, I hope. One of those I haven’t had in decades.

toberta: Not a boyfriend either (throwing a piece of popcorn at Pepín), frustrated, bitter bitch!

pepín: They are useless anyway.

 

    I haven’t heard such clever dialogue in ages, particularly in the preachy, proper, sanitized film school offerings of so very many US freshman filmmakers. We need more of such gutsy, nonsensical, blabber of the old school which spoke in a coded language to the real love behind these individual’s seeming self-centeredness, and at heart it is yet another way to get around the sad daily discourse of personal life.

 

Los Angeles, June 20, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (June 2023).