Nicolas Jara | Guardian / 2018

in order to survive

by Douglas Messerli

 

Ksenia Firsova and Nicolas Jara (screenplay), Nicolas Jara (director) Guardian / 2018 [15 minutes]

 

A favorite among the gay festival circuit, Nicolas Jara’s The Guardian is one of those tear-jerking films where a young boy comes of age without his loving mother and in the care of a machismo father who cannot tolerate his gay love.

    Manuel (Carlos Flores, Jr.), a gay Latino teen, has lost his mother Anna (Virginia Blanco) to cancer at five years of age, forced to live with an insensitive homophobic father (Roy Manzanares). Is it any wonder that when he is found making love to his beautiful young boyfriend James (Connery Morano) and his father thunders his disapproval, that he only wants to get away and find a way out through pills to escape the hostile world around him?

     It some ways, most gay boys and lesbian daughters grow up with so much self-hate and doubt that it our lives become, in so very many senses, scared, as we are forced to recreate our own personas simply in order to survive. We become imaginative and creative out of a need to be so in order to redefine and repurpose our own lives. If gays are inordinately drawn to the arts, theater, performance, dance, music, etc. in part because of our bodies, such a central force in our own sexual difference, but in the need to create a world in which we can truly exist.

     Manuel is not such a creative force, even if he shows signs of being a young artist; he is just a young teen who now grown up as a rather bland gay man in love with a very pretty gay boy. What are the chances of his survival, this film asks. And he almost offers himself up to death with a canister of dangerous looking baby blue capsules.

     But Manuel, unlike some of us, had a loving mother who dared, despite her position in Latina life, to provide her son with new possibilities and visions outside of her husband’s perspective.

     My mother had long ago learned to be a passive housewife whose views would always accord with her husbands—except, strangely enough, in her daily arguments she openly displayed to her family in the private rooms of our house.

      According to director Nicolas Jara, his own mother, whose own mother died of cancer when was only five years of age, “purchased a camera and intended to create tapes for me to watch throughout my life. However, she believed that if those tapes were made then she would be ultimately accepting the fact that she wouldn’t see me grow. Therefore, she tucked the camera away. After she passed, I was raised by my dad who tried to mold me into his own image, but my mom’s presence never left me. This film is an exploration of my memories of her and what I think she would have told me if she was still alive.”

      In this case, his character Manuel has created his own imaginary support and survival force in the form of an imaginary “guardian,” speaking out for his survival and right to be who he is, even after death, had she made the tapes.

      In the film, these tapes actually do get made and survive via a friend of his mother, Carol (Gretchen Klein), who magically calls and offers him up the voice from his past at the very moment he most needs it. Manuel survives from a mythical voice from his past, just as inexplicable as the millions of other reasons why the rest of us stumbled through without such voices in order to survive.

      It’s almost impossible to explain why many of us survive despite the abuse, the hurt, the daily shame with which we struggle, while others cannot, and chose the terrible alternative of death. I can’t image that these boys and girls are weaker that the survivors, only that they may have been unable to see some sense of alternative, of support, of others. I was lucky. My father drummed into my head the notions of Emersonian democracy of thinking for oneself. And when it came time that I had to face my parent’s own demands for behavior which stood opposed their antiquated values, I did precisely that: think for myself without any hesitation.

    Manuel packs his bags and walks out of his father’s house, to what destination we are not certain.

 

Los Angeles, April 17, 2026 | Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (April 2026).