Jaime Humberto Hermosillo | Doña Herlinda y su Hijo (Doña Herlinda and her Son) / 1986

becoming the someone you were looking for

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jaime Humberto Hermosillo (screenwriter, based on the fiction by Jorge Lopez Paez, and director) Doña Herlinda y su Hijo (Doña Herlinda and her Son) / 1986

 

Mexican director Jaime Humberto Hermosillo’s 1986 comedy Doña Herlinda and her Son broke new ground in several ways. For one, as critic Vito Russo described it, “Doña Herlinda is a film about compromise and the subversion of machismo.” As the director himself noted, “A previous film I did, Deceitful Appearances, was a very shocking piece about a hermaphrodite who marries another man and takes the masculine role. It upset audiences but at the same time it was easy for them to rationalize it because they saw it as an extraordinary—something which could never happen in their lives. The only homosexuals portrayed on Mexican screens are flamboyant effeminate characters from whom the audience can be distanced because such portrayals cater to their prejudices. In my film it’s just two handsome men who love each other. This doesn’t happen in Mexican films. One of the actors I hired told me he couldn’t do the role because his father hates homosexuals. ‘He could understand if I were drunk and fucked with a boy,’ he told me, ‘but to be tender with another man…impossible.’”

    Both the older neurosurgeon Rudolfo (Arturo Meza) and his college-age French-horn-playing lover Ramón (Marco Antonio Treviño) are beautiful men who regularly hook up for sex at Ramón’s boarding house. But the fact that the boy is popular among the other boarders and their afternoon encounters are constantly being interrupted by neighbors knocking at his door to ask for or to return borrowed items, along with calls from Rudolfo’s constantly intruding mother Doña Herlinda (Guadalupe Del Toro) are beginning to disrupt their pleasant daily encounters.

    Indeed, one might describe Rudolfo as a mamma’s boy, who cannot say no to anything his forceful mother suggests. When she calls and asks for his company at her weekly visit to a local lakeside dancing and dining spot, she expects him to be there, although she has no difficulties if he shows up with Ramón on his arm. Doña Herlinda has created a world comfortable for her through accommodation despite her determination to remake that world over as she prefers it to be.

     Although the film never declares what becomes obvious by its close, Rudolfo’s mother quite clearly perceives the sexual deviations of her beloved son, and even, early in the film, solves the boys’ problems of finding a quiet space to engage in sex by inviting Ramón to come live in their home. There’s plenty of room, she argues, and he might even share Rudolfo’s gloriously oversized bed.

     She takes in the boy, who she nicknames Moncho, as if he were also her son, which indeed he becomes in some senses when she begins to also manipulate her easy-to-be-manipulated birth son into a heterosexual marriage with the woman of her choice, Olga (Leticia Lupercio).

   Even as the men are enjoying their first night of blissful sex in Rudolfo’s multi-pillowed sleeping quarters, we watch her flipping through the pages of magazine featuring wedding dresses.

     And although the boys might almost be seen as luxuriating in one another’s bodies during their nightly sessions, their early morning work-outs, and their sweaty naked relaxations in his home sauna, it takes Doña Herlinda no time to get Rudolfo engaged and married off to bear her grandchildren.

     It begins seemingly slowly and slyly, as when Rudolfo misses a movie date with Ramón, Doña Herlinda quickly slipping in as his replacement. But Ramón is not blind and is terribly distressed by the fact that his lover will do anything to please his mother. As he tortuously suffers the alternatives he discusses with his female friend, Ramón wonders should he leave and possibly loose Rudolpho forever or continue in a fairly open sexual relationship where he is fit into Rudolfo’s now bi-sexual schedule? Certainly, the stunningly beautiful Ramón has plenty of others willing to take Rudolfo’s place.

     In this rather slow-placed movie—at some places one might almost describe it as dragging in its extraneous detail of luncheons, museum visits, and family discussions—everything moves around Doña Herlinda, from which no one seems to be quite able to escape her magnetic force field. Even Ramón’s parents who show up to her house, worried about their son’s quite obvious involvement with Rudolfo are totally satisfied by the time they have spent a day or so with Doña Herlinda, who assures them that their son is being carefully looked after and that Rudolfo is soon to be married, despite the fact that even during those reassurances the two men are mooning over one another as their observe objects in a craft museum.

     Even after the marriage and a long honeymoon in Hawaii, Ramón remains in his lover’s home, now entertained and doted on by Rudolfo’s mother. And when Rudolpho returns home, it is almost as if nothing has changed, even though Rudolfo and Olga are setting up house somewhere else. Ramón pays a visit to his old boarding house, now having been retrofitted into a rather successful series of short rentals for tourists. But he cannot bring himself to leave Rudolpho and his mother. 

     We observe that there has been a shift in Rudolfo’s role in both his relationships with Ramón and Olga. Discussing her husband with his best friend, Olga suggests something we may have previously missed because of the homosexual perspective. Rudolfo is, in fact, a patriarchal sexist, the kind of man, as Russo nicely puts it, “who expects his mother to do the cooking and both his wife and lover to remain feminine.” A new unspoken alliance, in fact, is made between Octava and Ramón.

     And just as Doña Herlinda schemes for a new way to bring both wife, lover, and herself into a new house she works to hold them close to her, Olga—an independent-minded woman—plans to go away for a year to Germany to study, possibly leaving her baby in the care of Rudolfo’s mother.

     Named the newborn’s “godfather,” Ramón suddenly appears to be the perfect adoring papa for the soon-to-be-abandoned baby; and moreover, in a scene that Rosso suggests is missed by most viewers, he gives a birthday gift of lubricant to the mamma’s boy and in one of the last scenes of the film can be observed fucking Rudolfo, whereas in earlier scenes Ramón was most definitely the bottom. Russo summarizes: “Rudolfo is about to become the smiling wife he always wanted.”

    In some respects, this film reminds me of Harold Prince’s 1970 movie Something for Everyone, without that “something” being perceived necessarily as a kind of evil that justifies for the hero’s being locked away in a relationship with an awkward and gangly teenage girl for punishment. Here everyone does seem rather nicely to get want they want and perhaps want they deserve, the irony being that in Rudolfo’s case he never quite knew that he himself might become what he wanted from others.

 

Los Angeles, July 13, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (July 2023).