Adrià Guxens | Un instante (An instant) / 2017

the image caught in his lens

by Douglas Messerli

 

Adrià Guxens (screenwriter and director) Un instante (An instant) / 2017 [20 minutes]

 

Spanish director Adrià Guxens short film is a wonderful portrait of an innocent young man, Hugo (Adrià Sánchez-Campo), who may or may not be gay, but is suddenly taken by the look of another handsome boy, Cosmo (Marc Joy), who intrigues enough that he seeks him out, both as a subject for the photographs he snaps everywhere he goes and as a friend.

 

     The film follows the four seasons, beginning in Fall as we presented with each season with a marker photo of our young hero student taking the train into Barcelona where he is a university student. That first season, he spots Cosmo and takes a photo, “the instant,” to which the film’s title draws our attention.

 

     In the city late, he runs into the boy again standing outside a bar with others, Hugo literally stopped in his tracks as he observes him. A girl, Julia (Victòria Llena), who appears to be a prostitute, lounging against the wall in wait, observes his stares and invites him inside the bar, introducing him to Cosmo.

      Hugo, who they immediately recognize as a student, does not even seem to know where he is; immediately the girl orders him up a “rum and coke,” recognizing him as someone not even quite able to consume a real drink. And Cosmo, although friendly, slightly challenges the young kid with a couple of questions, particularly when Hugo asks what Cosmo does for a living. Cosmo is coy, throwing the question back to the kid who suggests that he may be a “rock musician,” and then noticing Cosmo’s sly smile, adds “hard rock.” But Cosmo, apparently, also comes with the  bar, and is probably a male prostitute, which explains why Julia has brought in Hugo to introduce him. Even if we are wrong, his question and statement, further implies that the bar is off limits for such innocents: “You really don’t belong here, do you Hugo?” And soon after, he adds, “I said you don’t really fit in.”

       He is not telling the kid to go away, but is simply attempting to establish Hugo’s intentions, recognizing that the boy hasn’t a clue about his life or where he has suddenly found himself.

        Yet, we can only suspect this, for nothing is established; and soon after Cosmo, who shares the boy’s interest in photography befriends him, the two joining each other for photo shoots, Cosmo one day in the Winter season taking him to an isolated cargo storage place that seems to attract Hugo, who likes to shoot spaces rather than faces, despite the fact that his best photo of the film is one in which he catches Cosmo as he turns, snapping a beautiful head shot.

     The friendship begins to shift slightly as we perceive that Hugo is truly attracted to Cosmo, wondering at times where Cosmo is when he doesn’t answer his messages. What he perhaps doesn’t understand is just how amazing it is that Cosmo does answer the messages of a boy is not a “client.”

        In the Spring season they are caught in a rain shower, and as they wait in an underpass for the squall to let up you can feel the tension, Hugo emanating sexual desire, with Cosmo certainly aware of the situation, but refusing to fulfill the boy’s urges since Hugo may not even know what precisely what he wants. In other words, Hugo might be truly frightened if Cosmo were to touch or kiss him. There is no way to tell what Hugo’s mind is really thinking, even if we suspect his heart.

      These meetings between Hugo and Cosmo are interspersed with scenes from Hugo at home with his mother, who appears that she may be developing some dementia, telling stories mostly about a complaining neighbor or relative when she was young, and asking him to remind of her of his grandmother’s birthday so that she will not forget.

     Yet he seems comfortable and pleasant equally at home, a truly fine son who has given his mother no problems. Waking one morning to the ringing phone, Hugo is surprised to hear Cosmo on the line, telling him that he just outside his door.

     There he meets his friend who tells him that he’s going away. The time has come for him to move on. Hugo covers for his distress, but Cosmo seems to sense his feelings hugging him deeply for a moment or two, before motorcycling off.

     Summer begins once more with Hugo on his way to school, pondering life: “I have taken this train all of my life. Usually it takes me to places, but sometimes it takes me to instants.” And the film ends with him returning to the very place, a graffitied wall, where he first glimpsed Cosmo. There, he wistfully snaps the final photograph.

       I have "read" this film as having some possible gay content, but in fact we might just as well read this film as a narrative about a young boy making friends with a slightly older, attractive young man who he finds intriguing, just as the other enjoys Hugo’s innocent idolatry and his lack of real demands. Cosmo may as well be involved in drugs, be a petty thief, a pretty boy living with a woman like Julia who supports him, or her pimp. He may have a part-time job for all we know, although would be truly reading in to a film that does not at all suggest that alternative.

         And as much as I have interpreted Hugo’s silences and eye movement as sexual attraction to Cosmo, it may also simply be the kind deep love that heterosexuals who slightly idealize their friends share with one another. The longing I see in his eyes may simply be a deep curiosity, a slightly lonely boy’s desire to spend more time with his friend.

         In short, this is a gay film only if you want it to be. Any “clues” to LGBTQ issues are so diluted or mixed that no one might read this as a coded film or as a film that is suggesting something that it is not openly expressing.

         The writer/director’s own description of the film simply reiterates the fact that these two boys come together briefly to develop a close friendship that changes somewhat changes their lives (Cosmo, for example, actually gives up smoking after Hugo asks about his habit), nothing more or less:

 

“A year. A boy. An instant. Hugo is a boy who lives anchored in the routine, focused on his tasks and responsibilities. Unable to look forward, he lets opportunities pass, stalling in the past. On the contrary, Cosmo is a free soul that lives without looking back, always going from one place to another no matter where. One summer afternoon their gazes cross by chance. It is only an instant, but it will be the birth of a relationship that will make them stop for the first time to live the present. An Instant is a story about friendship, love and the importance of the small moments that endow our lives with meaning.”

 

       Why describe this work then, as IMDb does, as well as Vimeo and YouTube, as having gay content, as representing something described as “LGBT plus”? A film about two very different young men who find, in an instant, something that brings them together as friends for a short while, doesn’t need to be described as gay or LGBTQ-oriented to make it of interest or to validate it. If it were less reticent in its presentation of their relationship, it might in fact be of greater interest to me as a gay critic, but then it would lose the very charm it holds and become yet another movie about the slow process it sometimes takes individuals to determine their sexuality. This film, to its benefit, is about friendship, not about sex.

 

Los Angeles, May 1, 2022

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (May 2022).