sometimes you can never go home again even for a visit
by Douglas Messerli
Marco Laborda and David Velduque
(screenplay), David Velduque (director) No Place Like Home / 2017 [7.10
minutes]
I have to admit that I have grown
exceeding tired of contemporary gay films that use narrative to cover over the
fact that the filmmaker has chosen faces over actors.
What generally happens is that all true characterization disappears, as
it does in this film by Spanish director David Velduque (the film is in
English), in which the logic of character gets completely lost in an absolutely
unbelievable narrative arc.
Niko (Marius Praniauskas) has obviously moved away from his eastern
European homeland to seek out freedom and sex in the city. Apparently he not
only discovers it, enjoying his new liberation, but has dozens of new friends,
including a female, Alex (Alexandra Prokhorova), who loves him for whom he is,
as opposed to trying to make him over as a sexual partner. Evidently, he has
even found a boyfriend (Christian Escuredo) who we see making love to our
narrative hero.
Quite inexplicably, particularly since we are not allowed any
development of character, our vague “hero” decides to return home, despite the
forces that led him to his escape, because of his mother’s presumed illness.
The monstrous mother (Gillian Apter), whom only a dumb and struck-blind
son could still love—and in this case even forgive—is not at all sick, but has
apparently lured her son back to so that she might call up the local homophobic
goon squad of cousins and other relatives, who beat him, perhaps sexually abuse
him, and even possibly castrate him. In such narrative documents, however, the
actual dramatics are simply symbolized, and never fully revealed.
“Home sweet home,” if there ever was
such a place, has clearly become a location of torture and destruction. What a
dumb kid Niko must be to have believed it possible after having lived the life
of gay Madrid to even imagine that he might return home to some remnant of love
and repatriation.
I this movie teaches anything, it is the sage warning of hundreds of
fictions and films before it, “You can’t go home again.”
I guess our gullible provincial never
heard those stories. But since we haven’t developed any true empathy with him, presented
as he is as only a narrative presence, how can we even be expected to truly
care? We watch in horror, but we almost knew what was coming before it happens.
Sorry, Dorothy, if you believe after Oz
you can go back to Kansas, well good luck to you. The patriarchal Eastern European
culture is even worse. Poor Niko was a fool to be so hoodwinked.
It is hard, alas, to even feel sorry for
him. If your mother and father sent you running from your home, surely it’s not
worth trying to reconcile. No parent feeling true love could possibly let that
happen. Of all the provincial love films I witnessed, this is surely the most unbelievable.
Los Angeles, June 25, 2026
Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog
(2026).
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