Julián Hernández | Bramadero / 2007

the ballet of lust

by Douglas Messerli

 

Julián Hernández (screenwriter and director) Bramadero / 2007 [22 minutes]

 

Since 1992 Mexican filmmaker Julián Hernández has been writing, directing, and editing films so audacious in theme and so beautifully framed that he has come to be one of the major LGBTQ cinema masters, although to describe him as a primarily gay figure is to unnecessarily delimit his art. Influenced by directors as diverse as Michelangelo Antonioni, Robert Bresson, and Alain Resnais—among my favorites as well—his work no more needs the gay brackets around it than do these significant filmmakers need be described as heterosexuals—although Bresson perhaps was a closeted bisexual as well.

     And it is important to understand Hernández in the context in which he places himself, in the European tradition of serious arthouse filmmaking, as opposed to thinking of his work as being involved in the basically realist dramatic and comic traditions of many contemporary gay filmmakers. Hernández is a true Romantic at heart, embracing genres of science fiction, documentary art, and the popular romance genre itself.  And his films have the lush colors of film artists such Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Werner Schroeter, and Gregory Markopoulos.

      His early short film Bramadero, in fact, confused many viewers who immediately associated it with a kind of realism that we generally apply to pornography, albeit a beautifully filmed version of the usual gritty down-to-earth ménage of desire and copulation. That it was an arthouse-like depiction of gay sex, in fact, added to the critical furor, with as many commentators dismissing it as hothouse soft porn as others were outraged by what they saw as its straight-forward pornographic images. The film’s violent ending further put off many of its viewers who perceived the film as a kind of realist depiction of teenage gay lust, hinted at in its title, a bramadero being either a tethering post for tying up animals or a rutting-place of deer or other wild animals.

      The wild animals of Hernández’s film choose an unfinished high rise on the outskirts of Mexico City for their rutting spot, which contributes all the more to the notion that this is a real location where real gay youths come together to play out their desires.

      I think perhaps we might better understand this work, however, not as a serious LGBTQ film gone astray or even as Gay Celluloid described it, “a piece that boldly goes where no BBFC short has gone before!”; but rather as a cinematic ballet in the manner of Claire Denis’ 1996 film Beau Travail, or even before that, Norman McLaren’s 1983 dance performance Narcissus.

     It helps to realize that since his early 2000 film Rubato lamentoso, which consisted of two men dancing in the desert, the director has admitted to studying the code of dance as something to interpolate into his films. In his 2014 film, I Am Happiness on Earth, one of the three major actors, Alan Ramírez, is a professional dancer and a member of Mexico’s National Dance Company. And the central character of Young Man on the Bar Masturbating with Rage and Nerve is also centrally a dancer, the fact of which becomes central to the action of the film.

     One might indeed break down the episodes of Bramadero into descriptive scenes that are played out often in dance-like gestures, the two boys circling around, towards, and away from one another before meeting head-on each time for the rutting pleasures. Course phrases such as “The Encounter” or “The Meet-up,” “The Investigation,” “Topping,” “Rejection,” “The Suck,” “The Rest,” “The Fuck,” “Transformation” and “Death” might almost be used to chart out the various moments in this sexual dance. These Tristan and Isolde-like figures spend almost as much time investigating each other as they do in actual engagement. And although their sexual actions are highly erotic, their acts of fellatio and anal penetration do not share any of the grunt and grind maneuvers of a gay porn movie. In the midst of ejaculation, the camera itself becomes a character, spinning and twirling externally through space, taking us with it, as fully as the two figures Jonás (Sergio Almazán) and Hassen (Cristhian Rodríguez) must feel internally, a device that certainly pulls us away, as do other brilliant camera movements, from the formulaic close-up, rack focus, and loop tape tricks of a porn film.

     Behind Hernández’s sexual dance, moreover, is the issue of dominance, much in the manner that the male and female partners in a traditional ballet fulfill. But here, with two males as dancing mates, there is a constant shifting of the positions that lead ultimately to that violent S&M like ending.

     A bit like the director’s later 2016 short, Boys on the Rooftop Hassen and Jonás begin with one, Hassen, as the bottom or passive figure, but throughout their various sexual encounters, shift roles as bottom becomes top, passive becomes dominant as they shift back again for the final brutal strangulation and slug fest. One might say that, as on stage, position is everything.

      If we perceive this work as a balletic metaphor for gay male sexuality, the attacks on its violence and pornographic depictions grow quite meaningless. Yes, these two figures reveal their sexual organs and engage in actual fellatio and copulation—in an interview with Paul Julian Smith in Film Quarterly, Hernández argues “I think if you trick the audience with fake sex this produces a rupture in the text of the film”—the goal of Bramadero, it is clear from the beginning, is not to provide its viewers with an erection and a quick jack-off experience.

     This film, through its highly gestural actions, provides us instead with a layered statement about desire and lust, how the feelings of the individual shift into a physical and almost spiritual dual embodiment of sensation and love before returning us each into our own selves. Not so very different from Wagner after all, but strangely from a much more analytical perspective, Hernández reveals the fears, pleasures, and finally terrors of encountering, losing oneself, and finally losing the other that good sex ultimately entails.

 

Los Angeles, April 21, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (April 2023).