Rodrigo Bellott | Unicornio (Unicorn) / 2014

on the town

by Douglas Messerli

 

Rodrigo Bellott (screenwriter and director) Unicornio (Unicorn) / 2014 [31 minutes]

 

Even before the credits in Bolivian director Rodrigo Bellott’s startlingly beautiful Unicorn (2014), we realize just what lengths the members of the German/Bolivian Mennonite religious community at the center of this film will go to punish those members who break their interpretation of Biblical laws. The police and an activist-reporter (played by Lorena Sugier) arrive to force the release of the grown young man, Isaac (Doug Porter), who has been locked away in a padlocked box for more than 8 weeks, so his father insists, for stealing a chicken and using a cellphone. He also describes his son as mentally ill, a far more telling appellation.

     But once we see this strapping hunk of flesh released from the small box, we realize that there are deeper reasons for his parents and the community’s fears. He is truly like the mythical symbol of difference, a stunningly beautiful man who might represent all the gay boys featured in International Male and the Abercrombie and Fitch catalogues. 

      Once freed from the box, Isaac is no better off, his entire family refusing to speak to him. Indeed, much of the film is silent, luxuriating instead in the beauty of the landscape and the picture-pretty farm life which is a pure expression of this community’s hard work and faith, despite their obvious bigotry and, in this case, outright homophobia.

      From a trip into the nearest city, Santa Cruz, we get a glimpse of the lovely unicorn’s dilemma. All about him in Santa Cruz are lovely young boys who are equally attracted to the plain dressed Mennonite who speaks only German, while they speak only Spanish. But they know better than to interact with him, actions that would lead perhaps to their own punishment, but even more certainly in further punishments for him.

     At one point while a brother naps, our beauty runs off into a field where he retrieves hidden treasures, a magazine and urban clothing buried deep in the soil. If we suspect that the magazine Hommes might serve the purposes of masturbation, we soon learn it is even more sacred to him for its demonstration of various male haircuts, which the moment he attempts to escape he shows to a barber.

      A local milk dealer has helped him escape, and his first stop is the social activist who helped get him released from his home imprisonment. But she is rightfully nervous that they will find him in the hotel in which she puts him up, and promises to meet him the next day at noon to get him transportation to a further destination.

      For his one night in town, the beautiful boy not only gets a haircut, but visits a Santa Cruz dance bar, there encountering desirous eyes, but where no one dares approach, not only because of the language difference but the cultural chasm that also exists. Finally, it is the local milk-dealer’s son Fernando (Eric Robles), to whom he has given his room number, who approaches him. For one evening, the two spend a truly sumptuous night enjoying the delights of the flesh.

      But the next morning nearly the entire male Mennonite community descends upon the city, and our innocent, perhaps imagining that his new “urban” attire and haircut may hide his identity, but more likely simply daring his family and the others to kidnap him, appears on the street. They not only capture their missing member, but string him up and hang him upside down on a tree near where he had buried his treasures of clothing and the magazine.

 

   Death usually occurs in such hangings after about 20 hours. It appears at one moment that his sexual friend returns, unable to bring him down from the tree but at least comforting him. And if so, perhaps he will go for help in order to save his new friend. But it is just as likely that the scene we observe is the hanging boy’s hallucination, the one thing he has of true love in his life to remember as he suffers his way into a terrible death by brain hemorrhage.

     The film ends with such a terrifying image of beauty captured and destroyed that if it weren’t for the cinematic wonder of it, we would have simply to turn away.

      Bellott, a leading force in the small Bolivian film industry, has directed several films in the past few years, Sexual Dependency, Who Killed the White Llama?—an odd road comedy—Blood-Red Ox (a queer horror film), and Perfidia, his first feature in English. Unicornio appeared throughout the world in LGBTQ film festivals.

 

Los Angeles, December 1, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (December 2023).