René Pereyra | El Angel Azul night club (The Blue Angel) / 2024

the miracle: a film of the dead—and living

by Douglas Messerli

 

René Pereyra (screenwriter and director) El Angel Azul night club (The Blue Angel) / 2024 [35 minutes]

 

Mexican director René Pereyra’s 2025 short cinema The Blue Angel calls up many previous works of cinema: according to the director himself, the work was influenced, in part, by Peter Bogdanovich’s The Last Picture Show (1971); in the work’s setting in a gay bar frequented by macho homophobes attracted by its transgender singer/dancer, it calls up another Mexican-made film, Arturo Ripstein’s A Place without Limits (1978, based on the memorable fiction by Chilean writer José Donoso, Hell Has No Limits); and in its sudden appearance of an all-leather motorcycle gang that totally transforms the experiences of the bar’s owner and beloved dancer friend it vaguely reminds one of Marlon’s Brando’s effects on a café owner and its denizens in another dying town, Wrightsville, California, in The Wild Ones (1953). This movie also vaguely hints at yet another Mexican located masterwork, Malcom Lowry’s Under the Volcano, made into a film by John Huston in 1984—although in this case, there is no “bar crawl” since this “night club” appears to be the only remaining entertainment spot in the dying town of Torres Mochas in which it exists, unless you count the prostitutes hanging out nearby on the street.

     And, of course, I’ve not even mentioned its titular flash of the 1930 Josef von Sternberg classic starring Marlene Dietrich.

     It almost comes as a surprise, accordingly, when we finally realize near film’s end that this is actually a statement not only about the gradual devolution of social and cultural experiences by a homophobic, macho culture headed up by a corrupt and hypocritical Commissar, but, in fact, is a film about a miracle with regard to AIDS.

     That this work achieves all of this in about a half hour is something near to astounding. In part, it is able become a kind of echo chamber simply because of its lack of complex plot and its preference of deeply rich cinematic images over dialogue.

    Out of the past comes a native of the village who has been gone so long that even the local doctor doesn’t remember him. Porfirio (Roberto Soto) has come home to his mother to look after her while he himself, HIV infected, faces his own death. He begs the doctor (Juan Menchaca) not to tell anyone of his condition.

   And that seems almost to be the end of that story as our hero opens up the new bar El Angel Azul, featuring his dear transgender friend Lola Lola (Maurici Abad). The place, like the town, seems almost uninhabited except for two young macho cowboys who make fun of Lola’s quite frankly terrible performance, calling her a faggot and sissy. The new owner has no choice but to immediately toss them out in a fury, they, in turn, insisting that he will regret his behavior and that they will see to the closing of the bar.

     One could almost describe that as the entire “plot,” except for a few other matters, including the closure of the only other place for communal pleasure, the town’s movie house Cinelandia, now being closed down by Virginia (Ruth Rosas) after years of existence because no one any longer attends the movies. All the men are moving to the States, she comments, leaving the town open to violence. The prostitute Isabel (Diana Salgado) argues that the movie house was the most interesting place in the town.

      But this and all the following events might almost be described as “incidents” instead of plot, embellishments which shift the perspective of this film from being a movie simply about a small dying town by presenting it as a world of the ghostly lives past and present.

      Meanwhile, two other prostitutes pay the town’s Commissar (Jorge De los Reyes) a visit to complain about the “sissy bar.” Obviously sent by their two cowboy clients, the girls suggest that their guys were afraid the faggots might rape them.

      The Commissar listens to them with patience, but also with what appears to be almost comic cynicism. Although they want him to close down the bar, he argues that it will be difficult since the bar represents “progress,” suggesting that such a place is a benefit for the town, as he basically shoves them out the door.

     He himself is on his way to The Blue Angel. He appears to be friendly with the bar’s owner, reporting what the women have filed as a complaint. Porfirio explains that the only event they have had in the bar was when two cowboys offended Lola and he sent them packing. But the commissioner, nonetheless, explains that in this small town they are simply not used to “weird” goings on.

     “What weird events, Commissar?” he demands to know.

     The commissioner leans forward and whispers, “the sissines.”

     “I think they have informed you wrong,” Porfirio asserts. “Here we are very decent people, artists.

     He suddenly declares that he has some errands to attend to, but begs the commissioner to stay, calling out Lola to perform for him.

     Delighted by Lola’s performance, the town leader whispers in his ear that he should send the other three customers away, which Lola does, permitting the Commissar to invite his little “Lolita” onto his lap for a kiss and clearly other private entertainment.

     In the very next frame, we witness a gang of leather-clad motorcyclists moving toward the village, which, we fear, represents is further vengeance from the cowboys and the town’s other homophobes.

     Meanwhile, in what almost might be described as a terrible sad interlude, we see a handsome young cowboy (Milano Velarde) standing against a wall on the street, obviously a different kind of town prostitute. Isabel walks directly up to him, announcing that she has been told that he has been hanging out in this location every night.

     The boy answers that she’s glad she now knows it, her answer being not only surprising but a bit shocking: “Mothers always know everything.”

      She believes that the closing of Cinelandia has led him to seek out company at this spot, a fact which the obviously gay son does not deny. But she is frightened for him, that he will end up just like her, picking up drunkards from the street.     

    For his part, he claims he had a very good teacher; that he has known for a long while that his mother was a whore.

    Slapping his face, she explains that she had no other choices, having been raped when she was young and becoming pregnant with him. How else was she to survive and raise him up? You have me, she argues. You can make other choices, look for a job, study, and most of all respect yourself.

“I don’t want you to be a slut. Find someone who is worth it and be happy. Accept yourself and be happy who you are…don’t make this dirty,” she implores. “I don’t care if it’s a man you’re with.” There is no answer, but at least he promises her he will think about what she has said.

     This little melodramatic intervention gives us, perhaps, a view of what the most understanding and respectable citizens of this town are all about. Torres Mochas* is not only a hell-hole but is something very close to actually being hell.

   We now return to Porfirio, dressed this evening in drag with a cigarette at the end of a ridiculously long quellazaire. The head of the motorcycle gang drives up, “she” asking him for a light. The gang leader (Marcus Ornellas) explains that the name of the place caught his attention, particularly since his name is Ángel.

     Our friend invites him to see the place, to which the traveler immediately takes a liking, recognizing the bar photos of James Dean, Marilyn Monroe, and in particular Marlon Brando. When he asks why the barkeeper is dressed up like a woman, Porfirio explains that it is in homage to his mother, who recently died. She very much liked the movie, La Mujer del Puerto (the last movie showing at Cinelandia), and she would dress up like Andrea Palma, and act like her, pointing to the dress he’s wearing, “this was her dress.”**

   When Ángel asks who as Andrea Palma, Porfirio laughs, explaining that she was a very famous Mexican movie star, but first she was the personal assistant to Marlene Dietrich. So does that 1930 movie now circle back to the name of the bar, resonating with its friendly new guest’s name as well.

    Our friend turns the tables somewhat, asking what brings Ángel to his door in Torre Mochas; this town has nothing to offer; it is dead he explains. “Like me,” answers Ángel, reaching over for a moment to hold the barkeeper’s hand. Our hero shakes his head a bit in wonderment: “I feel like we’ve known each other for a long time.” He feels so free to speak, so confident of the newcomer that for the first time Porfirio tells him that he is HIV-positive and that the medications are not working.

     Finally, he offers Ángel a drink. They toast.

    In short, we have now discovered what we have perceived as a threat to be a friendly force. Ángel’s gang are not among the enemies but have shown themselves as friends.

     Immediately after, however, we are privy to further ancillary events of hate and revenge. A woman has obviously been forced to leave her home, walking the streets with her heavy suitcase. The Commissar and two of his men wait in a SUV to beat up Lola as he returns home.

      We observe gangs of individuals hurling rocks at El Angel Azul, finally someone putting a tape across the door so that no one can enter.

      Porfirio attempts to talk to the Commissar who no longer recognizes even his own signed documents, proclaiming that the bar’s owner took advantage of the agreement by bringing to town all that “faggot” stuff which is not permissible in his Torre Mochas, he shouts.

      Citing the fact that Lola was beaten, Porfirio argues that the events have all been acts of homophobia. But the commissioner will not be moved. All Porfirio can do is beg to be allowed to enter the bar just to gather their possessions. As they leave the room, Lola turns and calls the Commissar a faggot.

      The camera pans the empty streets of Torre Mochas as Ángel and his gang come riding into town, parking their bikes outside the former Angel Azul. Ángel explains that he and his partners have come to town just to say goodbye.

      Porfirio is happy to see him and saddened that he won’t be able to maintain their friendship. But Ángel suggests perhaps destiny will bring to together again. Porfirio reminds him that he is ill and that he will soon die, yet oddly Ángel tells him that he is not at all sick, that he is cured.

      Porfirio tells Lola to go home and pack while he goes to the clinic to get his medicines and check up on his condition. There is discovers that a miracle has indeed occurred, there is no longer any sign of the virus in his body. He has been cured.

      The bartender rushes to Lola with the news and suddenly in a celebratory chorus the film presents us with a short visual necrology of famed figures who died of AIDS, a rush of numerous sad images that stand in counterpoint to Porfirio’s miracle. Here we truly do see the ghosts of the past which the movie has been hinting as if suddenly it were a reckoning like the “day of the dead,” the “Día de los Muertos” observed in Mexico when the souls of their deceased relatives return for a brief reunion that includes food, drink and joyful celebration.

      In the last frames of the film, we watch as the two, Porfirio and Lola throw their last packed boxes in the truck of their pickup. They get in and begin to drive off down the street on their way to an unknown future, but suddenly, in a scene that is the complete reverse of Thelma and Louise’s final expression of goodbye as they drive over the edge the Grand Canyon in the 1991 film, the truck backs up, returning to the very spot where it began.

      The two get out of the vehicle, Porfirio declaring, “We’ll stay here.”

      Hate and intimidation have failed.

     This is a truly remarkable short film just for all the cinema, literary, and cultural touchpoints it brings together in what adds up to be a statement of redemption for all those who died of the AIDS, so very many of them queer.

     Before the credits role, the film announces, what I have done several times before in the close my essays, the current sad statistics concerning the AIDS epidemic: “AIDS has killed more than 40 million people since 1981. In that first decade, the disease mean a social stigma and a death sentence. Currently 39 million people live with HIV; and 6,300 people are infected daily. 40% are young people between 15 and 24 years old.”

 

 *Torre Mochas translates literally into Mocha Tower, almost as if the village where a city of coffee. But the word “mocha,” the source of the famous Arabian coffee blend comes from Hebrew meaning “crushed” or “squeezed,” which quite readily explains the condition of this town’s citizens.

 

**That film, now a classic of Mexican cinema, has the following plot: “Rosario, a young peasant girl, gives herself to her boyfriend out of love, unaware that he's cheating on her with another woman. Disappointment and grief over her father's death force the young woman to flee to Veracruz and become a prostitute. One night, Rosario meets Alberto, a sailor with whom she falls in love. After spending a night of love together, fate reveals a cruel surprise.”

   The surprise is that Alberto, she discovers, is her brother. When she discovers that fact, she leaves the cabaret where she works and visits the wharf. Alberto goes looking for her, only to discover her shawl floating in the water, suggesting that she has dived in and has drowned. The plot was based on a story by French author Guy de Maupassant, but the director, Arcady Boytler, was born in Russia, and claimed that Eisenstein’s visit to Mexico a few years earlier had made him want to take on subjects previously not dealt with in Mexican film with the goal of creating a higher and more modern art form.

 

Los Angeles, October 1, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (October 2025).

 

Don Scardino | Advice from a Caterpillar / 1999

straight through the heart

by Douglas Messerli

 

Douglas Carter Beane (screenplay, based on his stage play), Don Scardino (director) Advice from a Caterpillar / 1999

 

As a self-defined bisexual rom-com, Don Scardino’s Advice from a Caterpillar, with a screenplay by playwright Douglas Carter Beane, was clearly determined from the very beginning to pull in every cliché from the genre it could manage, mentioning numerous popular culture references along with easily assimilable literary reference such as Alice in Wonderland, Thomas Hardy, etc. And just to make sure you knew it was truly and intentionally cute, the director demanded the costume designer come up with the very unfashionable and awkward attire possibly imaginable, particularly for leads Spaz (Andy Dick) and Missy (Cynthia Nixon). To demonstrate that this film was also just a little hip, Missy is cast as a video artist and Spaz as a gay performance artist now become a caterer just to survive—but don’t worry, he features all of the good old treats your mother used to cook up like fried bologna sandwiches, tuna casserole, and Campbell Mushroom soup with green beans topped by Durkee onion rings (or something close to it), now all making a comeback evidently at sheik gallery openings and even at an opening at BAM (the Brooklyn Academy of Music, for those not in the know).

      To make things even easier, each character is assigned a significant sexuality. Missy is a straight female who wants no strings attached, which means of course, at heart she’s a sentimentalist who can’t wait to find Mr. Right.

       Spaz, her gay best friend and confidant—don’t all gay men have a female bestie which used to be called, now obviously inappropriate to even mention (a “faghag!”; there! I’ve gone and said it)—who’s always witty and totally cynical, although we really know he wants a permanent boyfriend just like everyone else in this film except he’s simply not as cute as he used to be and god knows where he’ll find someone who wants more than a couple of rolls in bed with him.

       Suit, apply named, is the straight guy, a good-looking banker of course, who in this case isn’t “evil,” as Missy points out, even though he’s cheating on his wife; but she’s a suit as well, a real mean bitch, so it’s okay. Missy enjoys fucking him because it’s easy and fun.

       And then, just to spice things up and confuse everybody since nobody really knows what a bisexual is, there’s a self-admitted bisexual would-be actor named Brat (Timothy Olyphant)—what a lovely nickname—who somehow Spaz got into his bed, but is so cute we just know that by the end of the film he and Missy will discover they’re perfect for one another, although understandably she’s still a little afraid that someday he just might run off with a man; after all, isn’t what bisexuals do, spend their lives coasting from one sex to another?

      Of course, when you’ve got such a total core sample of the sexual possibilities—this film was long before transgenderism became popular—you’ve got to find a way to get all these folks together in one house to show off their differences and their abilities to all get along together. Conveniently, Suit has an up-state New York lodge on a lake and since his wife and daughter have just flown off to Paris….well.

      But even before that, the writer and director have to find a way to get the straight girl and the good-looking bisexual boy together so they can fall in love. I can almost hear them saying, “I’ve got an idea, let’s put them in a back room with big old parachute-like piece of fabric so that they flap it up and down and run fast under it to get to the other side!” One critic, named Heather from Mutant Reviewers claimed that she used to do that in elementary P.E. classes. It was so much fun!

      Of course, it just happens that both Missy and Brat are also diehard fans of 1970s TV sit-com trivia, you know, like One Day at a Time (1975-1984) with Ann Romano (Bonnie Franklin) and her daughters played by Valerie Bertinelli and Mackenzie Phillips, and the kooky janitor Dwayne (Pat Harrington Jr.). Boy do they have fun listing the actors and credits of those old TV shows! Sad to say, I do remember that series, and regularly watched it.

      Just as important, the author and director needed to find a way that Spaz would give his permission for Brat and Missy to get together, and yet not be too terribly hurt by their having fallen in love. But just to show he really did care some, they let him jump into a lake without knowing how to swim, which allows Brat to show off his life-saving talents, and gives the opportunity for Suit to put his mouth, for the necessary life resuscitation, over and over on a gay boy’s lips. Ha-ha, they sure tricked him!

      As in most rom-coms, the loving couple, however, just can’t come to terms with what they really know they want. The answer is to have them play it out in a diner in full voice, you know like in Nora Ephron’s When Harry Met Sally (1989) when she demonstrates in a deli how women pretend to have an orgasm, but in this case arguing about love and admitting their dilemmas, with Spaz accompanying them, so that it involves all the upstate bumpkins who turn out be just as fascinated by their sexual differences as we are, the black waitress high-fiving her fellow gay Spaz and the busboy taking more than a casual interest in the fact that he’s actually got an openly gay man sitting in front of him.

     All the others, young and old, sit with baited breaths to find out what is going to happen to this straight video artist and her hunky bisexual beau. Will he promise to go straight till death do them part? Can he convince her to give up her career, at least superficially since she claims that having fallen in love with him she can no longer do her nasty satiric videos about family life? And lord knows what they’ll do for money, although she lives in a lower Manhattan loft so large that we just know in a couple of years it will be able to sell for several million! As he makes clear, their role as rom-com heroes, after all, is simply to hug one another close for the rest of their lives. The people in the diner sure got their meal’s worth as Missy and Brat speed off on his motorbike, and Spaz comes out followed by the busboy, Spaz now probably intending to spend a little more time in the Adirondacks or wherever Suit’s lake cottage sits before he drives Missy’s maroon-colored rental car back to New York City. As Heather summarizes: “This is a cute little romantic comedy.” Better cross it off your serious LGBTQ+ list.

 

Los Angeles, September 25, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (September 2023).

  

Gerardo Vera | Segunda piel (Second Skin) / 1999

the end of the sea

by Douglas Messerli

 

Ángeles González Sinde and Gerardo Vera (screenplay), Gerardo Vera (director) Segunda piel (Second Skin) / 1999

 

The critics, in general, did not like Spanish director Gerardo Vera’s film Second Skin, and I don’t blame them. This 1999 work, I should warn sophisticated fiction readers, has nothing at all to do with the US writer John Hawkes’ 1964 fiction Second Skin; pity.

     Some commentators, such as David Ehrenstein, writing in the Dallas Observer, compares this movie, in passing, to Arthur Hiller’s 1982 film Making Love, but to do so, I suggest, brings up the serious problems with Vera’s work and sidesteps what I think is a far more compelling issue about bisexuality that the film attempts, somewhat unsuccessfully, to explore.

      Indeed, on the surface, the successful aeronautical engineer Alberto García (Jordi Mollà)—blessed with a loving wife who works as a graphic print artist Elena (Ariadna Gil) and an almost too-perfect to be believed son—seems to be hiding a heterosexual affair. At least, that is what Elena first believes when she discovers a receipt from a hotel and sundry other pieces of paper her husband has left in his suit coat just returned from the cleaners. 

   Their relationship has apparently seemed so perfect that she is even hesitant to bring up her discovery, but when he also begins to go missing for hours from his job and she cannot reach him for long periods on her cell phone, Elena, like Hiller’s character Claire Elliot, perceives that Alberto has been lying to her. But when she attempts to have a discussion about it, even suggesting that she herself might seek out the help of a psychiatrist, he refuses to even begin a conversation let alone join her to talking to a “shrink.”

      So intractable is Alberto that she finally calls the hotel and confirms that her husband has indeed been a guest there a few weeks earlier. When she angrily reveals what she has discovered, he admits to having an affair with a woman he had met years earlier, but assures Elena that it was for one night only and reiterates his love for his wife alone.

     An even longer spell of inexplicable absences, including at one point, his own son’s birthday party, along with the repeated voice of a male caller on his cell phone, reveals to her that the one-night stand with a woman he has confessed was actually a much more recurrent relationship with a man. Accordingly, we have it appears entered into the territory that Making Love so precociously explored decades earlier.

      Yet by this time the viewer already knows that Alberto is lying, not only to his wife but to his male lover, the beautiful and sensitive orthopedic surgeon Diego (Javier Bardem)—observing them as well in a hot gay sexual scene outside the covers—to whom he has failed to inform that he is married with a child.

    Accordingly, if Elena isn’t yet fed up with Alberto’s lies, the film’s audience certainly is, and the sexual focal point of this work, Alberto, who apparently with great difficulty and pain pivots between the two, is either having an inordinately difficult time in coming out as a gay man or is a hidebound bisexual unable to give up his lovers of either sex. It also thrusts Vera’s film into the realm of soap opera, as the viewer increasingly begins to think of the lying coward as a villain as opposed to a more passive hero (Diego is presented as what in what old-fashioned gay jargon as describes it,  a “bottom”) and the wife, both attempting in their near adoration of Alberto to allay any dramatic confrontations and forgive him for his unpredictable fits of abusive absence and silence. 

      Both Elena’s sagacious mother, María Elena (Mercedes Sampietro) and Diego’s co-worker Eva (Cecilia Roth) despise Alberto and advise their daughter and colleague to end their relationships. Apparently both the otherwise smart and loveable Elena (who has a brief fling with her handsome co-worker Rafa in revenge) and Diego (who is having difficulty concentrating on his patients and surgical operations) seem able to “dump the creep,” the words I am sure had I seen this film in the theater the audience might by this time be chanting. After a night or two in the sack where Alberto performs, after his previous performance with Diego, rather tepid sex, Elena is about to give the guy another try; but when at a celebratory dinner, she asks him a simple but crucial question—“How long have you been sleeping with men?”—he storms out of the restaurant (without even paying the bill), tears welling up his eyes as he bleats out a cry to Elena, “Help me!” she finally recognizing that if for her son’s sake if not for her own sanity, she has to obtain a divorce.

     Diego goes so far as to visit Alberto at his airport hanger-contained spiffy offices, where he mostly gets the cold shoulder before his lover promises to meet him at the astoundingly specific day and time: Wednesday at 4:00, as if it were an execution instead of a date for making love or even talking about returning to his bed.

     When Alberto is too busy to show up even for that specifically parceled-out moment in time, Diego turns up again in Alberto’s office, this time bearing a gift of a book just to show there is still no hard feelings. One begins to feel that Diego is far too dense of mind to be a skillful surgeon; but when Alberto refuses to even unwrap his present, he too knows it is time to wave a final farewell.

      Now that he is freed of his heterosexual responsibilities, however, Alberto again shows up at Diego’s door, and the two continue their affair, this time mostly in Alberto’s new apartment. There are still things, however, that Diego needs to talk about: for example, why did a boy repeatedly answer Alberto’s cellphone, and why wouldn’t Alberto return those numerous calls? Finally—far too late in the plot to be slightly believable—the inveterate liar admits he is married with kid. In fact, he is ready for another, and finally we hope, a truly cathartic breakdown. He admits to having lied throughout his life so often that it seemed like the truth. As he finally admits, he hates his work, hates his life. His life has been lived entirely to please his father and grandfather. “I’ve spent my entire life passing everyone’s tests.”

     If one might think that this is the moment our unpleasant hero is finally ready to admit that he is gay and, as Diego proposes, to live out his life on his own terms, you picked the wrong worm. When Diego argues for their love, Alberto cryptically responds “Neither of us feel right.”

    At least, Alberto seems to be admitting to his total schizophrenia. It is not that he prefers one life, whether forced upon him or not, better than the other. He remains a truly split personality, a true bisexual unable to come to terms of accepting the full consequences of either of his identities.

    Even Diego now knows it is time for his exit, but Alberto cannot even accept that fact, insisting instead that he will leave—his own apartment!

    What he truly means, we suspect, is he will leave life itself behind. He quickly mounts his motorcycle, spinning out of sight around the corner and into a coming rush of traffic, dying soon after from injuries in the crash.

      Vega’s film had it’s chance to truly explore Alberto’s bi-polar bisexualism, but seemingly abandoned it at the last moment, a bit like its central character has throughout.

      A tacked on epilogue where the two ex-lovers meet up to share their inexorable grief in having loved this despicable man makes both of these fine actors seem like foolish dolts. No wonder Bardem, about to brilliant perform as Gay writer Reinaldo Arenas in Julian Schnabel’s Before Night Falls—for which is was nominated for an Oscar—fought against the release of Second Skin!

     Yet this film did haunt me, making be ponder a bit more than usual what bisexuality might really represent. When I was young—I suspect to help allay my own outsider feelings for having identified as homosexual—I argued that all men and women were born equally open to all possibilities for sexual satisfaction, but that societal pressures and personal relationships ultimately narrowed those choices not always expected ways. Well, I was young and believed in pansexualism even if it turned out a few years later that, despite heavy heterosexual dating, I entered a basically monogamous gay relationship that has lasted 51 years—without my ever having had sex with a woman. I certainly enjoyed the company of women but simply, I now realize, was just never sexual aroused by the female gender. I was born a homosexual.

     In retrospect, it seems to be that identifying oneself bisexual is a youth-oriented act. A recent Gallup poll almost suggested that an increased 15.9% of Generation Z individuals (those born between 1997 and 2002) identified as LGBT as opposed to 78.9% describing themselves as straight, and 5.2% having no opinion (perhaps the Q factor of the LGBTQ gathering). Of that almost 16% of the population, however, a staggering 72% of the LGBT-identifying individuals describe themselves as bisexual, with means at 11.5% of the US adult population claim to be bisexual at an early age, while only 2% identify as being gay, lesbian, or transgender.

     While the total number of youths identifying as LGBT may be on the rise, accordingly, the gay, lesbian, and transgender portion of that population is still an astounding minority of young US men and women.

      Youth, as we have long known, is a time of discovery and exploration, and being bisexual represents some of that in terms of sex. And that’s absolutely fine when one is seeking only sex without the commitments of a longer-term relationship.

       But what happens to bisexuals, I need to ask, as they grow older. If they wish to continue without making long term relationships, they perhaps will do so, simultaneously, or alternately seeking out same-sex and opposite-gemder experiences. But as relationships begin to develop, as they often do, or, to put it in somewhat archaic terms—but which remains at the heart of the vast majority of gay, lesbian, and transgender cinematic narratives—when one falls “in love,” choices are necessarily made unless one can find partners of either sex who are nonplussed by an open relationship with partners of varying genders. It would be fascinating if in another few years from now we discover that people in relationships show no jealousy or concern about open relationships involving others with different sexual identifications.

       Any traditional notion of marriage, however, represents some rather severe shifts in identification. If a male determines to maintain a permanent or long-term relationship with another he might now he begin to define himself as gay, or in the case of a woman seeking a long-term relationship with another woman define herself as a lesbian. Choosing someone of another gender suggests that no matter whether you’re male or female, you’ve “gone straight.”

       An attempt to live simultaneously in relationships with both, as this movie suggests, demands total honesty and acceptance on the part of all parties. And I should think it would represent a fairly difficult and demanding lifestyle as well. To live both in a closeted manner, in the way Alberto did in Vera’s film, would end up surely hurting nearly everyone involved.

       That may explain why in the next youngest group of polled individuals, the Millennials (1981-1996) only 2.0% identify themselves as bisexual, 0.8% percent as gay, 1.2% as lesbian, and 0.4% as transgender (the same amount as in Generation X). By the time you get to my generation, the Baby Boomers (1946-1964), only 0.3% claim to be bisexual, 1.2% as gay, and 0.4% lesbian, with the same 0.2% identifying as transsexual.

      Somewhere along the line, a lot of LGBT individuals dropped out and entered the straight world, or perhaps, never fully explored the other possibilities as they might today.

       Early in Vera’s film, Antonio describes himself as a child who, when he reached a beach, would immediately rush forward into the sea, much to the consternation of his parents, to face the rush of rolling waves and turbulence. Diego asks him why, since apparently he was unable to swim. “I was trying to get to the other side,” he explains, “to the end of the sea.” But there is no end to the sea, Diego reminds him.

      That is Antonio’s problem in a nutshell. He has attempted all of his life to escape the dangerous tide and turmoil of human relationships by speeding toward them, hoping to find peace and acceptance within a force that always remains in violent flux. Encountering other human beings is the very definition of danger and possible drowning; the only way to escape is to live, metaphorically speaking, alone in some isolated inland village or to seek out death. Or, perhaps, learn to swim with the tide or to keep someone at your side to save you.

 

Los Angeles, March 4, 2021

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog and World Cinema Review (March 2021).