sexual frustration
by Douglas Messerli
Roberto Pérez Toledo (screenwriter and director) La cuarta cita (The Fourth Date)
/ 2020 [6.22 minutes]
Pérez Toledo’s 2020 film was obviously shot
during the early months of the COVID crisis, and the two males of this film,
Rubén Bernal and David Mora, are forced to meet up on line for their “fourth
date,” only the first evidently having been in person.
They joke for a while, comment on one another’s clothing and appearance,
and express their frustrations for their situation, one of them even more anguished
than the other because he evidently cannot speak loudly, having either
roommates or family in the next rooms. He is also particularly dissapointed
that they didn’t have sex the first evening when they met. But both are
obviously in need of a full sexual encounter.
They finally decide to engage in sex on line, but feel it’s so outré in
this day and age, something someone might do in 2007, but not in 2020.
Nonetheless, they show off their packages, try to talk “dirty,” and attempt to
determine who goes first. But it all seems so ridiculous and removed that they
end up in giggles instead of orgasms.
Both are so attracted to the other, but the distance makes what they
really seek impossible: an exploration of one another’s bodies. The first
finally dares to tell the other why he wouldn’t have sex that first night,
whispering it before speaking the words for fear that his admission he feels
“that it’s stupid to have sex the first night with someone you really like”
might mean that the screen will go black. This is, after all, the age of one
night stands, of the Grindr world where you call up someone else, meet, have
sex, and return home sexually satisfied—not the world of dates and giggles
which these two have now been forced to “reexperience” like something from the
past.
But the second one, demanding once again to see his friend full face,
does not disappear, but sighs in despair, “Fuck! Why did I have to meet the
perfect guy just before having a national quarantine due to a pandemic?"
The
other bashfully responds, leaning forward: “Did you say the perfect guy?”
“Just don’t get too excited, eh?”
This is one of the first short films to directly confront the problems
of what in some countries amounted to a two-year or more hiatus in most gay and
heterosexual contact for the numerous younger unmarried individuals. If AIDS
meant entirely new ways of approaching sex, so too did the COVID crisis,
meaning that young people of now two generations have had to put a stop to
their normal sexual activities, a far more serious problem than the
self-censoring media will ever admit it to be.
Los Angeles, February 28, 2023
Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (February 2023).
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