Gustavo Nieto Roa | Mariposas Verdes (Green Butterflies) / 2017

leap of faith

by Douglas Messerli

 

Katalina Boham, Gustavo Nieto Roa, Mauricio Pichardo, and Idania Velesquez Luna (screenplay), Gustavo Nieto Roa (director) Mariposas Verdes (Green Butterflies) / 2017

 

I must admit, I’m a sucker for political movies, particularly ones in which the underdog is righteously battling the authorities. It must certainly stem from my own strong anti-authoritarian personality, a knee-jerk reaction to all those years of being a such a well-behaved child who grew up to discover all the joys he had been missing, reiterated in the fact that, except for a few years of teaching in a university which I left for those very reasons, I remained self-employed for the rest of my life.

     Columbian director Gustavo Nieto Roa’s 2017 film Mariposas Verdes reads a bit like a high school-level version of a good Eloy de la Iglesia film of the 1960s, this time involving the entire LGBTQ contingent and a few abused others fighting not only the neglect and bigotry of the own parents and their abusive school mates but, in this case, the entire school administration typified by the school principal, Bárbara (Cecilia Suárez) who embodies the conservative attitudes as well of the Columbian church and government.

      Indeed, the adversaries of the outsider world that this film argues for, led by a beautiful gay couple, Mateo (Deivi Duarte) and Daniel (Kevin Bury), are so powerful and the attacks come so fast and furious that the film has some of the suspense of political thrillers such as Costa-Gavras’s 1969 movie Z, Alan J. Pakula’s 1976 All the President’s Men and, yes, de la Inglesia’s 1978 homosexual-driven fight against the oppressive government in The Deputy.

      Yet the very age of these battlers leaves them far more vulnerable, even after they have seemingly suffered so much. Both Mateo and Daniel have grown up in unstable and abusive households. Daniel’s father is a violent patriarch who regularly beats his wife and fights with her every night, holding entirely machismo values. Mateo, the best student in the school, is the son of a money-driven mother who has kicked out his father for not being able to provide sufficiently for the family although he offers the love for the boy of which she is incapable. In short, these children, along with their peers, generally cannot look to their families for support.

     The so-called LGBTQ contingent, consisting of Ángela (Victoria Ortiz), bullied simply for being overweight); Lorena (Juliana Rendon), Mateo’s female confidante; Gabriel (Edward  González), who is moving towards being a transsexual; Daniel, who early on admits his love to Mateo and is Mateo’s strongest protector; and Mateo, who throughout the film is the major spokesman for this group and moves to bring in the radical politics he is learning from the world outside of the closed community, must almost daily do battle with Lucas (Andres Cardona), the principal’s nephew, and his gang of friends. They do battle with Mateo at every moment possible, ending almost always with Mateo and Daniel being punished instead of the bullies themselves. One of their worst activities consists of first brutalizing Ángela and later actually raping her simply as punishment for her not acknowledging Lucas’ mockery of her.

      Gabriel is such an outsider that basically Lucas can do him no harm, but the school makes up for it in finding ways to punish every small infraction, including his wearing earrings. That act of public embarrassment for a boy who regularly puts himself on public display is so tortuous that he whimpers in pain as he is stood up and condemned before the entire school and is suspended for a week. And we realize that the bullying of Lucas is condoned simply because Bárbara’s administrative policies are very similar.

      And far worse than the bullying of their classmates is the support for the bullies themselves by the school director along with her personal vendetta against anything non-normative, which Mateo represents on several levels, including his very intelligence.

      When finally, Mateo and Daniel are caught kissing in the men’s room on camera, Bárbara turns it into horrifying situation in which she uses Daniel’s intolerant and brutal father as a tool to oust Mateo from school during the last days of his senior year, and to break all relations between the two boys, suggesting the father file a lawsuit against Mateo for having corrupted his son.

      Mateo’s sense of injustice by this time is beyond the breaking point, and he can perceive no other way to set the situation straight than himself becoming a performer of a political act that, having now had one suicide and a rape on the school’s record, will surely close down Bárbara’s evil reign, while possibly changing the entire way the authorities think about the intrusion of school leaders upon their student’s personal lives.

   That act, foreshadowed in the very first scenes of the film, consist of the most horrible and unforgiving action possible: Mateo leaps from the top level of the building to his death face-first.

      It is such a gut-wrenching event—one that is played out in smaller, less significant ways by so many and transgender students each year—that it seems almost impossible to forgive the excellent writers and directors of this film for not having presented a more positive solution. Yet we know in our hearts that given the hundreds of ways that the voices of youths still underage go unheard, we comprehend that any major protest or action on their parts would have simply resulted in the same reactions, silence and their suspension and the end of their future educational goals. When the system is out to end the education of their best student, one realizes that there is no justice available because there is no logic involved and few would believe it even possible. And in this sense, we also realize that nearly everyone in this film has been in some way responsible for Mateo’s death, both for acting and refusing to act or even speak out.

     The movie, accordingly is a painful one, with some simplistic presentations, admittedly, of perhaps far too obvious villains; yet we all know that the bullies who daily wear down the energies of gay, lesbian, and transgender children continue to exist in the form of both their peers and often the systems of administration themselves through faculty, school leaders, government, and others in control. This film simply admits a reality that we don’t truly want to face; that the very institutions that we rely upon to educate and protect our children sometimes work toward goals that are at odds with that role.

 

Los Angeles, July 16, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (July 2023).