Roberto Pérez Toledo | Los amigos raros (Weird Friends) / 2014

echoes

by Douglas Messerli

 

Roberto Pérez Toledo (screenwriter and director) Los amigos raros (Weird Friends) / 2014

 

 The last of this collection of Pérez Toledo might almost seem out of place with the others included. Certainly, it is very different from the short works which proceeded it. An hour in length, Weird Friends is more a litany of the directors’ closest acquaintances—the word “friends” does not quite define their relationship to him—than being an expression of queer love as were the others. In this work, 8 years before the director’s death, he explored the life and relationships of a film director named Sam (Adrián Expósito) who quite suddenly and inexplicably commits suicide.

     Although the character is clearly not Pérez Toledo, who, unlike the beautifully trim and physically healthy Sam, spent his life in a wheel chair. Yet, like the feature’s director, Sam has won many awards for is direction of short films, and seems to have the special ability to attract and captivate individuals, events and qualities that we can also ascribe to Pérez Toledo. Sam, like so many of Pérez Toledo’s figures is also gay (bisexual in this case), and is imbued with a sexual mystique that makes him popular with both men and women. And like Pérez Toledo he directs the film that serves as a kind of wake while he is still living—thus living out the desires of so many individuals at least as far back as Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn who wished they could attend their own funerals.

       Yet the would-be lovers, fellow directors, and actors who gathered around Sam, were certainly not all complementary—at least as how the director himself describes his substitute echoes. Sam seems to hold within a deep sadness, perceived particularly by the women of the group, Lídia (Laura de la Isla), Paloma (Andrea Duro), and his friend from childhood with who is willing to father a baby, Chris (Violeta Orgaz). Indeed, Chris’ relationship with Sam appears to be the healthiest because, as primarily a lesbian, she demands less from him, even assuring him that he won’t be expected to care for the child she bears. Lídia and Paloma seem particularly oppressive in their demands upon him, Paloma even searching through his cellphone to determine if he’s seeing Lídia on the side.

      Both of these women are sent away, but keep coming back, unable to control the love they feel for him. And some of the men, in fact, feel similarly, certainly Óscar (Ventura Rodríguez) and Rod (Dani Herrera) are disappointed. if not as demanding, that he will not see them for sex on a regular basis.

     Gero (Nestor Losán), who most of the group imagine is also in love with Sam—Lídia going so far to force them in a sexual threesome for a night—discovers that he is not really that physically attracted to Sam, which perhaps allows him to work more felicitously with the director and serve as conduit to him for others. And Gero also realizes that it is impossible to compete with Sam. “I was content with whatever he didn’t want.” He continues with one of the most profound comments about relationships with famous friends: “Over time, you realize that there are people who were born to shine. And then it’s the rest of us, who perhaps are lucky enough if we can help those people shine.”

      The actor Gabi (David Mora), perhaps because he is more openly critical of his friend and less overwhelmed by him, receives more attention and is cared for far more tenderly by Sam than are most of the others. Clearly, they do not a sexual relationship, Gabi announcing to him that he just discovered that he has AIDS, probably transmitted through an orgy at a Villa that he has attended a year before that sounds a great deal like Pérez Toledo’s later 2017 feature film Foam Party.

      But all of them sense his sadness and his attempt to cover his fears and sorrows with a shield of disinterest in deep commitments, despite the fact that he draws people to him with precisely that promise of neediness in his demeanor.

    In some respects, Weird Friends—“weird” perhaps because they are loyal to him despite the diffidence with which he treats time—is a character study, not only about Sam but about the figures who populate his world, Rod, Lídia, Gero, Óscar, Paloma, Gabi, Cris, Joan, and Manu, who are all willing to perform as well in a drama but a dead friend still very much living who has put their own descriptions of him into their mouths. At one point, we see Sam asking one of them, in an outtake, to describe what he feels about him, promising to use at least some of the lines. And one wonders if Pérez Toledo also engaged his actors in such a manner, telling them something about him which he reworked into the descriptions of his characters Sam.

      If nothing else, the layered referentiality of this work creates a kind of echo effect wherein we’re not sure whose voice we are hearing, Sam’s friends, Pérez Toledo’s script, or the real director’s actor friends reflecting on the qualities of the man who manipulates their words and actions.

      And, in that respect, this is a perfect work to close a series of short works about love, since this piece reveals a love that far transcends the issues of sexual relationships, tracing as it does why we remain with people with whom we sometimes find it difficult to even be in the same room with, let alone to sit down and attempt to communicate with them, or share their bed. In watching this film, one thinks of figures such as Federico Fellini, Werner Rainer Fassbinder, or Orson Welles, where dedicated friends served more than simply actors, but lived their lives with one another and shared the mess of the director’s life.

 

Los Angeles, March 8, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Reivew (March 2023).