by Douglas Messerli
Roberto Pérez Toledo (screenwriter and
director) Admirador secreto (Secret Admirer) / 2015 [7
minutes]
Carla (Sandra Martín) is getting messages from
a secret admirer, someone who loves her and apparently knows a great deal about
her, but will not provide his name. Her three male roommates (Miguel Ángel
Bellido, Yerai León, and Ventura Rodríguez) have varying notions of what to do about it. One
suggests it’s gone far enough that it’s reportable; another thinks that it’s
certainly not dangerous, given the friendliness and love expressed in the
letters. The first friend believes that she’s being stalked and that all secret
admirers are ugly.
The
second friend wonders whether she recognizes the handwriting as being one of
her classmates’. But he writes in capital letters, obviously, to change his
handwriting.
The second thinks that overall, it’s nice: “He knows your name, he could
add you on Facebook… He could text you on Whatsapp and be a nuisance. However,
this guy is gentleman, he writes nice things.” He likes him.
But the first friend disagrees, arguing that it makes no sense to write
how you feel.
The second argues that they’ll simply see what happens when it happens,
the first, obviously a man of strong negative feelings, adds, “Let’s see when
the gentleman threatens to chop your neck off.”
Carla notices that he has failed to note his apostrophes, contracting a
word without putting in the proper punctuation.
At the fifth letter the secret admirer suggests Carla may not hear from
anymore, not because he doesn’t continue to admire her, but it hurts more each
time. S(he) signs it “love.” The negative friend again finds him “annoying.”
But this time, their female roommate observes, it wrote the letter quite
beautifully, without any missing apostrophes. The second friend suggests that
perhaps he is the fat neighbor and has been listening into our corrections. The
first friend wonders if perhaps the secret admirer is “here, in this room.” The
third, who has said very little up this this point, suggests in must be Javi,
who’s a mess at spelling. Javi—the one I refer to as the “second
friend”—responds, “Well, I know how to write “fuck off.”
The next day, there are no letters, just a water bill. Facing the three
again as they sit upon the couch, she asks them again whether it was one of
them who has hassling her. But each one responds, “no.”
She’s mad at herself, she confesses, for being disappointed that a man
she doesn’t even know has stopped writing.
The next day Javi is laying alone on the couch when Carla comes in
announcing that there has been another letter. Javi is curious: another from
her secret admirer? But the letter, this time, is addressed to him. It begins,
as he reads to the whole group, with the writer feeling that when the letter is
put into the slot that all is “irreversible.” The writer goes to say that he
has heard that when you feel something for someone, it is better to say it than
to hide it—words appropriated from the very first letter we have heard read
out.
As he continues reading, the camera pans to the young man I have been
describing as the negative friend, who mouths the words as they come out of
Javi’s mouth, including the last line: “I’m in love with you, Javi.”
Now
you also have a secret admirer, Carla adds, as Javi contemplates the letter he
has just read aloud. “What the fuck is this?” he asks, looking up into the
faces of his friends, as the third, more silent of their members, declares “I
always get confused with apostrophes.”
As the camera pulls back, we see that for the first time the four are
now paired off, face to face with their secret admirers, lovers they did not
know they had and perhaps do not even desire. What they’re going to do about it
is left to our imaginations.
Los Angeles, February 25, 2023
Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog
(February 2023).
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