poet of pleasure
by Douglas Messerli
Joaquín Górriz, Miguel A Fernández, and Sigfrid
Monleón, based on the biography of Jaime Gil de Biedma by Miguel Dalmau) Sigfrid
Monleón (director) El cónsul de
Sodoma (The Consul of
Sodom) / 2009
The lives of serious poets (I’m purposely excluding
musical lyricists) are not a hot topic when it comes to feature movies, even in
countries who have long traditions of respect for poets and for poetry in
general. There are a few exceptions, of course. In 2016 Jim Jarmasch made movie
titled Patterson, involving the life of William Carlos Williams; Chilean
poet Pablo Neruda made an appearance in Michael Radford’s 1997 film The
Postman and more recently in the 2016 movie Neruda directed by
Chilean filmmaker Pablo Larraín. Charles Bukowski was the featured character in
Barbet Schroeder’s 1987 film Barfly, but then the script to that work
was written by Bukowski and his character is named Henry Chinaski. Sylvia Plath
was the subject of Christine Jeff’s 2003 movie Sylvia, and John Keats
was the focus of Jane Campion’s 2009 cinema Bright Star. And there have
been a few others.
But by and large if you’re a poet who wants to
have a film drama written about you, you should be queer: Emily Dickinson,
Gertrude Stein, Alan Ginsberg, Reinaldo Arenas, Siegfried Sassoon, Gabriel
García Lorca, and Walt Whitman have all found their way to the screen. And then
is the wonderful erotic queer quasi-biopic
on Catalan poet Jaime Gil de Biedma.
And who is
Gil de Biedma y Alba you might ask? Well shame on US citizens not knowing him
better. Jaime (the way I shall address him throughout the rest of this essay
just for simplicity’s sake) (1929-1990) was a major Catalan poem of Franco
Spain through the 1950s and 1960s. One of the group of poets generally described
as the “Generation of ’50,” along with notable poets Ángel González, José Ángel
Valente, Francisco Brines, and, in the context of this film, Carlos Barral
(co-founder of Seix Barral publishing house), and the novelist Juan Marsé. This
group, while obviously still involved with the struggle to overthrow Franco,
brought new literary values to their work. Particularly in the case of Brines
and Gil de Biedma, influenced in part by the earlier poet Luis Cernada, they
also reinvigorated Spanish poetry with topics of homoerotic love and, in Gil de
Biedma’s case through his somewhat open homosexual lifestyle.
Yet,
under Franco’s regime it would have been impossible to be publicly described as
a homosexual, and what’s more in Gil de Biedma’s case perhaps scandalous since
he came from a noted and wealthy family involved internationally in the tobacco
business. Yet despite the fact that by day worked as a major figure in his
father’s company by day, by night he lived a truly unrepentant gay life, having
sex mostly with handsome lower class rent boys and participated in a long
affair with a divorced woman, in this film simply named Bel. Gil de Beidma also
partied nightly with members of the Communist party, with who he felt great
sympathy, particularly after his experiences with the poor in the Phillipines.
As he described himself, “I am a Sunday poet and with Monday morning
conscience.”
For much
of his life Gil de Biedma worked as an important liason for his father’s Compañía
General de Tabacos de Filipinas, where he became dubbed “consul of Sodom,” a
title which many of his wealthy friends seemed to find quite meaningless; but
in fact it may have been his lifestyle, even more that his poetry, at least if
you believe what the film argues, that most mattered to him; and although his
numerous love poems and sestina’s were generally addressed to a vague other who
could be either male or female, for anyone who new the poet well, his poetry
was very much centered around gay homoerotica.
The film
is most certainly focused on his homosexual activities, in part because
although his poetry was immensely influential throughout Spain, his body of
work, as he points out at several points, was quite limited. In English, a
single volume gathers most of his best work.
And often even that work reads like an
apologia for not being able to live his life more fully, torn as he was between
his privileged life with family responsibilities and his rather scandalous
night life, his quick wit, and rapier tongue. In a sense, Gil de Biedma served
Spain as a more cautious Oscar Wilde, wealthier than Wilde and certainly more
sexual in bed, but almost just as self-consciously witty, although perhaps with
a greater sense of camp than the far more pompous Irishman. Although he was never
brought to trial, his father’s cohorts and his brother had several times to
bribe those who threatened with photographs, and at the very moment when Gil de
Biedma was determined to take over the company for the sake of his father’s
health, board members were sent incriminating photos which forced them to choose
a new CEO outside of the family. Late in his life, moreover, Jaime was
diagnosed with full-blown AIDS, and died of related diseases on January 8,
1990, at just 60 years old.
The very
first scene of this movie has since found its way into several porn sites. It
begins at an embassy-like party in the Philippines, with a lovely singer
performing, while several shapely women ogle Jaime (Jordi Mollá) who stands
looking over the festivities from a floor above.
One of the young woman greets him by asking him if, as she’s heard, he is the famous poet. His answer is a quick quip that utterly baffles her empty head, “I would like to think of myself as a poem.” While she turns to another friend asking what to make of his comments, Jaime is already off to a legendary erotic nightclub where he is apparently well known, since he is immediately given a seat near ringside. The stage is, in fact, a kind of boxer’s ring, only on this stage is a large bed where a truly beautiful young man, Johnny (Marco Morales) is attempting to fuck a woman, the crowd around egging him on. Evidently the contest is to see how quickly or even if he can satisfy her enough so that he can reach an orgasm. But upon seeing Jaime he appears to lose his concentration, and the woman he’s fucking calls him out, another stud replacing him.
Johnny dresses and heads off into the night,
Jaime following to his hovel of a home, the boy stopping to further entice the “consul”
before actually leading him to the shack wherein his mother is sleeping behind
a cloth curtain which separates the various rooms. Johnny encourages Jaime to
enter, while warning him to remain quiet so that they don’t awaken his mother.
Asked what he prefers, Johnny undressed, gets down on the bed on all fours and
waves his ass in the air, Jaime proceeds to fuck him.
In the morning, he awards the entire family
a large wad of cash.
But this
is not porn; although Monleón revels in the beauty of the naked body, we see
basically a soft eroticized version of their acts, no camera focus on their body
parts or a long view of their sexual activities.
In fact,
it is the quick flow of episodic events that defines this film which is also its
major flaw. We presume, from what he later discover in the film, that Jaime has
gotten to know Johnny better than the one-night stand we have just witnessed.
But Monleón has undertaken such a broad swath of the poet’s life that he has
little time for details, presenting us with only major events along the way,
which certainly reveal the poet’s wit, sexual prowess, and business and social
acumen, but leave the inner character basically a secret which we have to glean
for ourselves.
A few frames later, after attempting to close
a deal as director of Philippine Tobacco Company, Jaime has already returned to
Spain, where he has been warned by his brother that he has had to pay off a
blackmailer for some pictures. His father, Don Luis (Juli Mira) from whom Jaime
has been hiding his homosexual activities, also apparently knows of his
sexuality and pleads with him to keep a lower profile, fearful that his mother
might hear of his notorious behavior, and warning him that he is putting their
company in jeopardy.
That seems
only to lead Jaime to be more active in their meetings; but he is kept at arm’s
length from knowing their internal actions, his poet friend finally revealing that
the party has turned his request for membership down because of his queer
activities, which they seem to be find more dangerous in Franco’s Spain than their
own Communist views, an irony not to be understated, yet perhaps somewhat
accurate given the previous disappearance decades earlier of the gay poet Federico
García Lorca.
Jaime
seems rather dismissive of the rather “romantic” work, but helps his new friend
with some of its language nonetheless, and the character described as a “pijoaparte”
is, in fact, the very kind of man with woman Jaime continual falls in love.
Jaime also
returns to his former lover, also a kind of pijoaparte, Luis (Alfonso Begara)
who appears in a new brown suit, quite obviously the gift of another
benefactor. As Jaime celebrates the visit of a young American writer, Jimmy
Baldwin (Othello Rensoli) in a sexual foursome, Luis with a female street whore,
we recognize that any love Jaime may have felt for Luis has dissipated during
his absence, and soon after Luis leaves him.
Jaime
proceeds to get soused, while Bell, seemingly in her own quiet trance of
regret, goes for a drive, swept up in the waters of a flood from several days
rain, and drowning. Hearing the news, the poet tries to take is own life, and
is only gradually brought back to life through hospital care the visits of his
literary friends. He insists that he is through with poetry.
Once again
in this episodic work, we shift back to Spain where Jaime now hooks up with a
photographic assistant of one of Jaime’s female photographer friends, Toni,
another beautiful pijoaparte who confesses that he does want to learn how to
become a refined person of the upper classes, much as in Marsé’s book. But it
is also clear that Jaime is now feeling older and somewhat despondent, having
now lost so many of his past loves.
At a beach party with some of his poet
friends he watches Toni dance with one of the poet’s young daughters, and
noticing the absolute gracefulness and innocence of the boy becomes aware of
his own decadence as well as his advancing age. Throughout this film, the few
inner thoughts we get are taken from loose reiterations of Gil de Biedma’s
writings, this one summarized by the lines: “What do you want now, youth, you impudent
delight of life? What brings you to the beach? We old ones were content until
you came along to wound us by reviving the most fearful of impossible dreams.
You come to rummage through our imaginations.”
To relieve his ailing father from his administrative responsibilities, Jaime has attempted to become the CEO, and with his father’s support it is certain that he will be named the CEO. But, as I mention above in my brief biographical sketch of the poet, once more Jaime’s sexual past comes to haunt him as one of his closest confidantes, the man who has bought off most of the bribes against Jaime, betrays him by sending the purchased photos to the other board members, allowing himself to become the CEO.
Now Jaime’s
father has died. He has purchased yet another country house for his and Toni’s
love nest. But as he and his friends celebrate there in a birthday party on his
behalf, we see Toni serving almost as a slave. Before the night is out, not
only has Toni alienated most of Jaime’s poet friends, but grows violent with
Jaime, throwing him out of his own house.
Jaime slips and falls in the snow, severely injured and near death when a village priest finds him and goes after help.
Jaime
nearly dies, and left in the hospital, now with only a handful of friends to bring him back the joy he once experienced. The movie quotes one of his most
memorable poems, which a few years ago I just happened to have attempted to
translate:
I’ll Never Be Young Again
I’ll never be young again.
That life was serious one begins only later to comprehend.
Like youth everywhere, I was born to take life head-on,
to leave my mark, excite applause
—aging, dying, was simply the shape of the play.
But as time passed a disagreeable truth
emerged: growing old and dying
was my entire role.
In the last episode, Jaime is now living with an apparently loving young stage actor when he learns that his has AIDS. His friends, knowing of his impending death, organize a recital at Madrid’s famed Students Residence which becomes a celebration of Gil de Biedma’s oeuvre as his life comes to an end.
The very last scene, returns to the
earliest one wherein once again Jaime has bought the services of a young man
ready to have sex with him, but since Jaime cannot join him, dances to The Pet
Shop Boys’ song Always on My Mind, sung before in a great tradition of
balladeers, namely Brenda Lee, Elvis Presley, and Willie Nelson, among others.
The Pet Shop Boys transform the country-western ballad into a sad song of gay
breakup and remorse, surely Jaime’s own point of view as his life comes to an
end.
While terribly flawed, what this film gets
right is the sensuous and glamorous world of Jaime Gil de Beidma’s world, and
the sexual allure of the beautiful boys and the one woman he loved. If we don’t
discover the real essence of either the poet or his work, we do perceive his
attractions to the beauty of life in all its detail.
Los
Angeles, December 9, 2025
Reprinted
from My Queer Cinema blog (December 2025).
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