how to survive living
by
Douglas Messerli
André
Leão and Vitor Rocha (screenplay), André Leão (director) Nesta Data Querida
(Many Happy Returns) / 2025 [27 minutes]
A
young 25-year old man, André (co-screenplay writer Victor Rocha) suddenly
turning 25, is under a Peter Pan-like syndrome, terrified and frustrated that
suddenly he has gone beyond the age when he might be described any longer as a
prodigy, or a young genius. As he sings in a brief ditty in this Brazilian
comical-fantasy musical film, he has now entered the world of politics and
elections. His youth has been squandered, and he is depressed. His best friend’s
visit with a cake and his mother’s call wishing him the happiest of birthdays
does nothing to qualm his apprehensions.
The film begins with a view of him lying on
bed, ass up, not at all a truly beautiful odalisque.
Others arrive with joyful greetings, but
all André can do is sing “From here on, it’s all downhill.” “No room to be rebellious, No time to discover
myself.” We all feel that way, of course, when we are young—although I admit at
that age I was perhaps still too busy in discovering myself to worry.
“Next year it will be worse,” he sings, “Just
like each and every day.”
His good friend Sofia (Leticia Helena)
suggests they can start paying for his coffin tomorrow, but today they’re going
to celebrate!
André argues that he doesn’t want to be “real,”
“I want to be Peter Pan. I want to believe that the boogeyman’s coming to get
me if I’m not a good boy.”
His friend João (Lucas Drummond)
reassures him that it most definitely won’t happen since he’s gay.
Sofia,
on the other hand, can’t wait for things the change, to be married, have her
own house, a daughter. She believes she was born to be a mother.
André argues that society simply put it
into her head.
João dreams of leaving his agency and
starting his own.
But none of these comments help André,
who has no intentions of adopting a family or starting a company. João suggests
that as a gay man he can simply adopt a cat a be happy.
And André asserts that nobody with a cat
is happy. And moreover, Leo, his boyfriend, is allergic to cats. The others can’t
comprehend what he sees in Leo.
“Wouldn’t Leo like everyday to be like
today?” queries André. No, suggests Leo as he moves to ward André, what he would
really like….André holds his breath…is “a gin and tonic.”
They all sing happy birthday, and André,
like all children throughout history, wishes before he blows up the candles.
We know what André’s wish is, and almost
like Dorian Gray, this wish turns out to come true.
In the very same position as he was in the
first scene, André hears his doorbell ring. João returns, bearing cake that he
jokes he found in the hallway. Once again his mother calls to wish him a happy
25th birthday. Suddenly, all the others return to again wish him a 25th birthday.
All seems to be repeating. They are disturbed by his memory of the year before
and his repetition of the events. They still wish for many of the same things,
but something has changed. They are a year older, although he is not. He again
attends the party, remembering almost everything from before, including Leo’s
order of a “gin and tonic,” which when André beats him to his request of “gin
and tonic” he ascribes to déjà vu. But yet again, nothing happens between the
two of them.
And suddenly as everything repeats
itself, André discovers, quite to his pleasure, that his wish of the previous
year has come true. He is still 25. Nothing has changed.
As he now sings, waking up the
following year, everything as changed. He is no longer afraid: time can’t get
to him anymore. “Every day is a party, and we’re just gonna have fun.”
Again, as he sings in a dark dance with
his friends, he no longer has to worry about the past. “No more wrinkles, no
distress.” Imagine the possibility of “living without having to thank about the
future?”
But things have changed. João leaves the
party early because it’s going to be a big day at the agency, particularly as
the boss. André has no idea about what he is talking.
Sofia, now quite drunk, explains that he
has indeed opened up his own agency. She, it turns out has discovered that she
cannot get pregnant, and has become quite an alcoholic. Women best friends of
gay boys often do not turn out well in gay movies. She is now 38, too late for
children, while our Dorian Gray hero has remained 25 years of age. Leo
introduces André to his fiancé Denis.
Things have changed for everyone else, while
André has remained a young 25-year-old ready to party every night.
Time
and again he blows out the candles celebrating his 25th birthday while everyone
around him changes and grows older.
The new 25th birthday begins with a now
much older João arriving with his annual cake, complaining of André’s usual
grumpiness. But what André has now wished for, than things return to normal,
has not been granted.
Like the Harold Ramis’ 1993 movie Groundhog
Day every day since his magical wish, André wakes up to celebrate his 25th
birthday, which by this time is no longer a matter at all to celebrate. João
announces that he is now 39. “Time flies, doesn’t it?”
His mother calls again to wish him a
happy birthday, but reports that his father in now well. “He woke up confused
the morning.”
Life and death are going on around this
Peter Pan that no longer includes him. Has his own life traveled to a closet of
old memories? Suddenly André realizes that he must break the cycle, only to
have his best friends, Sophia and João sing an old song-and-dance number about
how whatever the problem is “it will pass in no time.”
Another call from his mother reveals his
father has died. No, time is not kind to others, and suddenly André realizes he
is losing out to the experiences that, for better or worse, all his friends are
suffering. It takes an old man to realize that despite the pain each death of a
close friend tortures you, you comprehend the meaning of their death which the
young cannot even imagine.
He discovers yet another cake, this one
actually lying in the hallway, suggesting through a note that it might indeed
grant all his wishes. But this year, on his actual 52nd birthday anniversary,
he realizes something has gone terribly wrong. His whole life has passed and he
didn’t even notice. He is stuck in the same year forever, the curse of many a
gay fictional figure like Dorian Gray and Peter Pan. How to escape?
The real question, of course, is whether
any of us really notice how quickly our lives pass. Is it truly possible to
perceive that each time we blow out our birthday candles we are suddenly wishing
ourselves, without us imaging it, into a future which will suddenly haunts us
as old men and women in just a matter of what seems like moments later?
This film makes those young boys
desperate to turn of age for gay sex at 17 or younger that I commented on in in
my 2000 essay, “Crossing the Divide,” about young teenagers who couldn’t wait
to grow to age of permission in order to engage in gay sex to be absolute
fools. But, no, they are not. They are young and eager without any possibility
of knowing their beauty, their desires, as passing by at the very moment when
they recognize their possibilities. Perhaps their very eagerness suggests that
they are only too aware, without actually knowing what that actually means.
Time is beyond human comprehension.
André explains to his invisible god that
“I just…liked my life. And I wanted to be the way it was forever. I didn’t want
anything to change. I didn’t want anything to threaten or ruin it.”
The gods tell him that he can’t go back,
he cannot change his decision. The secret, so the cellphone god reveals, is
always to look forward.
I realize now that perhaps that has
been what made be a proselytizer of change, even if along the way that role has
not always been so very comfortable and has been mocked often by those around
me.
André once again, this time all alone,
lights the candles on his cake, this time inverting the 25 to read 52. He
lights the candles and blows them out, wishing for another future.
Suddenly, he has become so appears, a pianist
playing the melodious song we hear at film’s end while the credits scroll up a
quote by Mario Quintana:
“And if one day I were given another
chance, I wouldn’t even look at the clock. I would just
keep
moving forward. And I would toss along the way the golden and useless shell of
time.”
Time and again we are told by the
sages, presentism, the moment of the now, is the only way to move through life.
Life is survived only by living it. There is no other possible solution.
If André Leão’s comic short film Many
Happy Returns is not a particularly profound work, it certainly offers
something close to it.
Los
Angeles, June 28, 2026
Reprinted
from My Queer Cinema blog (June 2026).
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