another story of love and dying
by Douglas Messerli
José Luis Torres Leiva (screenwriter and director) Vendrá la Muerte
y Tendrá Tus Ojos (Death Will Come and Shall Have Your Eyes) / 2019
Chilean director José Luis Torres Leiva has
created a work in his Vendrá la Muerte y Tendrá Tus Ojos (Death Will Come and Shall Have Your Eyes)—the
title based on a poem by Italian writer Cesare Pavese—that might easily have
slipped into good-willed sentimentalism given that its characters, Ana (Amparo
Noguero) and María (Julieta Figueroa) are two late-40ish lesbians, one of whom
(María) is suffering from terminal cancer and the film is basically a tracing
of her progression into death. Even a few years ago, a standard Hollywood
production would have drained any sexuality from their lesbian relationship in
order to show how queers suffer just like heterosexual women, allowing them
only a few sweet kisses while carting in and out their numerous straight male
and female friends to wish María a well-deserved goodbye, perhaps with even a
bit of sanguine pleasure in the fact that all LGBTQ figures just have to go
before the camera shutter closes, and hinting, accordingly, that perhaps Ana
may find a way back into the “wider” community (i.e. hook up with a sensitive
straight guy who she’s always admired since “before” her sexual exploration).
But
Torres Leiva nearly bans all “well-wishers,” except for Ana’s quiet and
profound-thinking sister, and dismisses any male admirers. This is a woman’s
world where the two lovers can remain precisely that, two women expressing
their love and regrets so openly and with such mixed feelings of hope and fear
that at moments it is hard to believe this film isn’t a documentary.
Ana, who works as a nurse, is perhaps the perfect companion, moreover,
for her lover who has determined to cease all further treatments; and the two,
choosing to spend the last few weeks or months of María’s life in an intense
and quiet solitude where they can focus simply on one another, move to a hut in
a forest still close enough that Ana can commute back and forth to work.
In
this special retreat, they face their own fierce love for one another,
sometimes let loose their tears, and at other moments, particularly in María’s
case momentarily release her anger and frustration for having to be treated by
her companion almost as a child. They listen to the sounds about them: the
wind, the birdsong, the sea, and their own breathing, adding to it only their
gentle comments during sometimes painful dressing and eating sessions and
stories, two of which become central in reinforcing Torres Leiva’s
LGBTQ-centric approach, pointing up distinctions that his film makes from so
many hundreds of earlier films made by homophobic bigots or well-intentioned
liberals, both of whom found ways around truly facing their characters’ and
others’ queer sexualities.
If
there is any flaw in this beautiful work in which the director allows his
camera to focus for long periods of time simply on the faces and bodies of his
central characters, it may be these signifying stories, both of which have no
central role in the lives of the lesbian characters upon whom the film focuses.
Writing in The Guardian critic Cath Clarke argues:
“Two sizable digressions in the middle spoil
the film a little. One dramatizes a strange fairytale María tells about a naked
feral girl living alone in the forest; the other is a family story about her
uncle. Both felt a bit generically arthouse, slightly awkward experiments.”
But I would argue that these two unrelated episodes, not only help to
reconnect these otherwise temporarily isolate figures with the larger community
around them, but sets up paradigms for LGBTQ storytelling that might be useful
to future directors whose works include queer figures of any kind.
Late in the film, moreover, when Ana’s sister joins them for one of
their last nights in retreat, she suggests that the eerie light, the sound of
María’s heavy breathing, and the wind around them reminds her of the many
nights they spent as children in the days of military dictator August Pinochet
under curfew, during which outside they would hear occasional gunshots and
screams, each telling one another stories to help them get through the
frightening nights. It is often to storytelling that must turn turn when we are
have no answers of how to face the horrifying present and the unknowable
future. And both of the stories told in this film seem somewhat like mythical
tales that present an extraordinary occurrence that helps to heal and salve our
fears.
Both also take place is a wild outland such as that to where Ana and
María have retreated. In the first tale María tells, an old woman one days
spots a wild child who has apparently been surviving like an animal in the
jungle around her. Gently awakening the sleeping girl, the woman lures the
animal-like child into her house through gentle strokes and words, offering her
food,
One terribly rainy night, the old woman worries for the well-being of
her new “friend,” placing a lamp in the window and also peering out to see if
she might find her trying to make her way back to the protection of her house.
What she does observe is the girl joyfully engaged with the heavy pelt of the
raindrops, completely covered with mud but laughing and crying with pleasure
for the natural downpour. It is an ecstasy that a so-called “civilized” person
might never even have imagined, but so beautiful to observe that one might
almost describe it as pleasure akin to sexual orgasm, so overwhelming enjoyable
for the individual that one almost wants to pull one’s gaze away in shame for
observing something so singularly meaningful.
One only has to recall François Truffaut’s film of 1970 about another
wild-child, Victor of Aveyron who, taken in by the equally well-intentioned Dr.
Jean Itard, instead of being left as he is, is gradually transformed into a
version of the paternalistic, normalized boy of French society who cannot help
but feel tortured and fragmented from the being he was before his discovery,
the same structures and concepts played out again in Werner Herzog’s Kaspar
Hauser (1974) which, in this case, perhaps succeed in destroying the gifted
child of that film.
In
the second story told by the two women of Torres Leiva’s film concerns María’s
uncle (Ignacio Agüero), somewhat of an adventurer who always brought her gifts
upon his many returns. A married man with three girls, the story tells of his
awaiting his family’s arrival in a woodland vacation home, as he takes
exploratory forays in the deep woods only to uncover a younger man (Edgardo Castro) swimming naked. Suddenly overcome with lust for the
stranger, the two walk together in the woods for a while before engaging in a
passionate sexual encounter, which the uncle later admits to his niece—the only
one which he seems comfortable confessing his long-held secret—was a completely
transformative sexual experience which he never before or again encountered.
The two men corresponded in secret for a long while before losing linguistic
contact and the memory of their intense touches.
Why, one wonders, in a work almost entirely focused upon the love of two
women and in which there are no other significant male figures would the
director have chosen to introduce a gay love scene, particularly one
representing such passionate lovemaking.
In
an interview with Cédric Succivalli for the ICS (International Cinephile
Society) asks:
“There is a gay sex scene right in the middle of the film that comes a
little bit out of nowhere, which I really liked, but I would like you to expand
on it. How did it build up? Why did you want to incorporate that gay encounter?
JLTL: For me this subplot is important because
it talks about desire and the discovery of love and desire.”
Still, one might ask, why chose a gay scene to show the love and desire
that the ailing lesbian couple can no longer demonstrate having obviously
occurred perhaps 20 years earlier in their life which has become the basis of
their relationship?
But
then, the true wonder of Death Will Come and Shall Have Your Eyes is
that it is not simply yet another lesbian film made by a male, but that its
central figures seem so true to life because they are not defined by their
sexual desires—just as María’s uncle was not—but upon the love between two
bodies, one healthy and one ill, who come together to help and save each other.
As the director himself summarized it elsewhere:
“It’s a film which stresses bodies (healthy
and ill) and faces like landscapes of human nature,” Leiva Torres commented.
“It’s a film about love, death, family, the need to create close bonds which go
beyond any condition or gender.”
What is perhaps most interesting is not simply that Levia Torres was
able to capture a beautiful lesbian relationship in action, but chose to
represent his ideas about love, death, family, and bonding firmly outside of
the heteronormative majority which has always felt that it defined this
territory, posting it firmly instead in queer territory.
The stories Ana and María tell one another, accordingly, are not just
gratuitous tales but life-affirming stories that take away the fear of what we
all know, that the true importance of living a life of love is that when death
finally comes it is always through the vision of the other’s eyes.
For everyone death has a
look.
Death will come with your
eyes.
It will be like
terminating a vice,
as seen in the mirror
a dead face re-emerging,
like listening to closed
lips.
We'll go down the abyss in
silence.
Los Angeles, October 28, 2021
Reprinted from World Cinema Review (October 2021).
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