destroying the evidence
by Douglas Messerli
Cristian Riquelme Ripoll (screenwriter and
director) Hermanos (Brothers) / 2016-2017 [series with 4
episodes]
As Vito Russo might have put it, another
couple of gay boys bite the dust in Cristian Riquelme
Ripoll’s 4-part TV and web series from Chile, Hermoso (Brothers),
these boys being products of and unknowing participants in incest, which in
Chile is legal while still being cursed by the of the powerful Catholic Church
and conservative forces.
In
his absence, Ariela has attempted to call her fiancée all day, and his mother,
the conservative local political leader Magdalena, are equally furious by his
unexplained absence, Ariela in the meantime having lost their baby.
To
deny the impulses to which he’s just indulged, Ricardo not even believing in
the possibility of bisexuality, he further commits to an early marriage. But
when Ariela, rather understandably denies him sex, he gets up and seeks out
another woman, a former sexual partner, Pamela. When he can’t get aroused even
by her, Ricardo visits the local men’s sauna, having sex with the first man who
pays him attention.
Episode 3 is mostly devoted to the police investigation in which almost
the players are invited in for questioning. Obviously Joaquín,
became of his jealousy, and Ricardo because of his sexual indiscretion are the
most obvious suspects, and as the police hold them for questioning they gradually
strike up a friendship, without being totally open with each other about what
they know. Joaquín, for example, says
nothing about having seen Ricardo and Daniel engaging in sex and dare not
openly declare the jealousy he felt. But then, in the interim, his younger
sister has connected him up with Tinder, which seems to have calmed him down
somewhat. Moreover, it’s clear that he’s developed an interest in Ricardo, who
his two sisters also have continually declared as being “cute,” the younger one
having even become Facebook friends.
In
short, everyone in this episode is busy keeping secrets from the others, and
when Magdalena discovers not only that Daniel is dead but that her son is one
of the suspects, she is furious. She did not mean in taking care of the matter
that her minion should kill him, she insists. But he swears that he has not
killed the boy and did not have time to even encounter him before Daniel was killed.
But something strange evidently happened in the writing and direction of
the first 3 enticing works of the series and the last, which seems to basically
have forgotten the real villains of the piece, the story about family incest,
and Daniel’s death. Although the episode begins with Magdalena retrieving the
photographs we now believe to be of her son Daniel as a child, and later
burning them, the story quickly changes course.
Instead of focusing on the logical development in the plot, the three
younger figures of this work, Ricardo, Joaquín, and his sister Luna take off
for a day in the country. The boys get to know each other better and the three
of them end up at the ocean for a hug fest. In a sense, this new twist in the
plot seems to be attempting to introduce something like “normality” into the
lives of these characters who have already experienced a world far beyond the
heteronormative or even bisexual normality that the movie seems now about to
impose upon us.
Later the group visit a nearby gathering of amusement rides and food
stands, Joaquín bowing out of the rides, while Ricardo and Luna enjoy several
of them. Joaquín
meets up through his new Tinder app with a young boy and they have sex.
When the three of the reconnoiter it is finally time for Joaquín to
explain what he knows about the connection of Daniel to the Camus family, and
whatever bits and pieces missing, Ricardo has now been able to figure out.
He
returns home to take a rope and hang himself, a scene which we’ve already
encountered in the very first episode of the series.
Why writer/director Cristian Riquelme Ripoll felt he needed to kill off
the two young men involved with incest is rather inexplicable, and why the film
doesn’t end with a round-up of the two real villains, Magdalena and Alberto—who
have hidden the knowledge from nearly everyone—is equally unexplained. We can
only hope that Valentina, who has since heard the interchange between her
mother and Alberto and Joaquín will go to the police with the truth. But given
the odd direction this series has taken it is doubtful that they will even be
brought to justice. As Russo long ago might have complained, it’s far easier to
kill of the gay boys for anything that has gone wrong in the family.
Los Angeles, September 5, 2023
Reprinted from World Cinema Review (September
2023).
