by Douglas
Messerli
This film might be described as a kind of exorcism for a
sexual enchantment; yet the movie itself is also a kind haunting, being
something that the viewer takes home with him long after the actors, Leonardo
Castell and Paulino Razo in this instance, have faded from screen, making one
feel that there is no possible recovery from the enchantment of that long ago afternoon.
One of the young
men (Castell) returns to the roof of his Mexican apartment building to confront
the ghosts of that long-ago event, the day on which his best friend (Razo) had
just broken up with his girlfriend, Mary.
The friend, obviously
suffering from the breakup was, at least as the haunted man remembers it, crying
when he kissed him, something magically occurring between them that at least possibly,
resulted in sex. At least in hindsight we see the friend almost naked, walking
off only in his underpants.
Our memory-haunted
young man evidently wrote a love letter to his friend which got into the wrong
hands, resulting in a brutal beating from his father, ending in the horror of
never being able to meet-up with his friend again.
That poignant
afternoon on the decaying rooftop, filled with rusting sinks, wired lockers
that make the scene look more like a prison-cell than a rooftop with a city
view, and with long winding paths that led to stone walls, was obviously a kind
of surreal manifestation of the real city below, where the magic of that event
could never have occurred.
With tenderly ethereal
music by Alejandro Karo and Mayra Lepró, writer/director Ruiz’s memory piece is played out with a kind of
eternal longing, the magically enchanted young man running off after the kiss taunting
his new lover with words, “if you find me, I’m all yours.” The fear is, of
course, that he might never be found, that love will disappear after the rooftop
experience. And, in reality, the fear has come true. Yet for that boyhood lover
the real cures is that the experience will never leave his mind: as he puts it,
“I see you everywhere.”
Just as in his 2021
production of Eden, Ruiz in Memory of an Afternoon has given us a
glimpse an Edenic world from which his characters have been ousted and to where
they can never fully return, but are forever haunted by their memories of it.
Los Angeles, December 15, 2025
Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (December 2025)
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