Juan Sebastián Valencia | Café Perseguido (Chasing Coffee) / 2023

his date for the prom

by Douglas Messerli

 

Juan Sebastián Valencia (screenwriter and director) Café Perseguido (Chasing Coffee) / 2023 [20 minutes]

 

Columbian-born Juan Sebastián Valencia’s (Kisses for Kevin, Magico) is almost a tongue-in-cheek tribute to the famed Juan Valdez Columbian Coffee ads. In this work Joaquín (Andy Múnera) and Rubén (Mauricio Flórez) work together picking coffee on a Columbian plantation.

     Obviously, the two have worked together for a long while, Joaquín since childhood by the side of the elder Rubén, even as a child playing kissing games that have seemingly developed into what is now a strong gay relationship.

     The only problem is that Joaquín is about to graduate high-school, the evening of the day which we witness being his Prom night. Joaquín has been encouraged with the completion of his education and having saved up some money through his job to move to Bogotá. But having fallen with love Rubén, and loving the beauty of the landscape, what he truly wants is to stay on and buy up enough land that he and Rubén might create their own smaller coffee farm.

      Even more important on this particular day, when he is so alive and filled with the emotional feelings of love that he even claims to see colors across the landscape, Joaquín wants Rubén to be his date to the Prom.

     The elder tries to make him perceive that that is impossible, that it would destroy both of their reputations and probably lose the elder his job. He also attempts to make his young lover perceive that there is no future for him in the coffee fields, that he should move to  Bogotá—where he promises to occasionally visit him. If there were to begin a farm, he argues, the plantation owners would soon squeeze them out of the market.

     But Joaquín’s young enthusiasm and his pure love, both of Rubén and the countryside cannot be deterred. For several years, the two men have played a private game called “chasing coffee,” whose full rules and methods are never fully revealed to us. However, whoever wins the game gets to choose where he wants to be kissed, in a sense making a winner out of both parties.

     This time, however, Joaquín is playing for something much bigger. If he wins this game, he argues, Rubén must attend the Prom with him as his date.

     Since Rubén almost always wins their games, he finally agrees to the bet.

  Valencia’s works have almost always involved a sense of magic, and Chasing Coffee doesn’t disappoint as watching his young lover race through the fields with him on the chase, Rubén himself suddenly begins to see a hazy dust of colors that surround his beautiful young lover, blues, reds, and whites, all set against the endless green of the landscape.

     Joaquín wins the strange game. When the boy asks what Rubén wants him to do, the elder replies, go to your Prom—where I’ll accompany you. We need to celebrate the fact that we are soon buying a coffee farm.

     There is some silliness in this fantasy, of course, even its argument that gay liberation has found its way even into the hills of the Columbian coffee-bean pickers. But it is so charming that it is difficult in our laughter, not to wipe away a tear.

 

Los Angeles, July 16, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (July 2023).