Miguel Lafuente | Lo que quiero de ti (What I Want from You) / 2012

the stalkers

by Douglas Messerli

 

Miguel Lafuente (screenwriter and director) Lo que quiero de ti (What I Want from You) / 2012

[13 minutes]

 

As we approach Halloween again, my least favorite of holidays, I thought it might be time for a new gay horror film, my least favorite genre. As I ask elsewhere, don’t LGBTQ+ individuals have enough danger to face up to without having killed off by their own kind?

     Spanish director Miguel Lafuente’s short film of 2012 begins as a kind of throwback to the romantic films of the late 1930s and 1940s, or even to the kind of world described in Knut Hamsun’s fiction Hunger of 1890, wherein men, becoming suddenly obsessed, followed women—or in this case men—in an attempt to get to know everything about them and, ultimately, to meet up with these fantasy-like figures. Today we call it stalking, as the stalker Daro (Jaime Astuy) describes himself late in the film.

      Daro has first encountered his beautiful “victim,” Victor (Juna Luis Peinado) at a film showing of Nosferatu, an appropriate venue for what we soon discover about Victor. For if we might feel sorry for Victor—who early on, through Daro’s surveillance of him, we observe getting locked out of a lover’s apartment—we soon discover that Victor himself is a handsome psychopath who the minute he ejaculates wants to immediately rid himself of his newest lover.

      Victor, in fact, might be described as a stereotype of the old school queer, men who never getting enough of sex quickly move on to another. That was, after all, why AIDS so quickly spread throughout the gay community, so the legend has it.

      But Victor is a more complex figure, he two stalking his companions for long periods before he finally moves in for sexual contact. And if, after that moment, he becomes absolutely disinterested in his “victim,” he realizes that his compulsion is quickly developing to not only “love ‘em and leave ‘em,” to torture them and send them off. Particularly with one young man, he plays a bondage game which turns nasty when he suddenly becomes a kind of vampire figure, stabbing his sexual companion in the next and sucking up his blood (actually, he doesn’t like the taste and spits it out) before further torturing him and sending him off into the horrible night.

       Having had wonderful sex previously with his own private stalker, Daro—the two naturally share a love of classic movies—he has simply ignored him since the event. But Daro has continued on, creating cinematic scenarios, as he did the first time he encountered Victor (see above), following him closely and almost daring him to arrange for a further meet-up.

       When the two finally do meet up again, perhaps Victor, more smitten by the young and beautiful young Daro than he admits, and Daro, in turn, explains his own compulsion, when things take a different turn.

     When Victor asks Daro what he wants from him, the possessive romantic youth immediately responds, “I want you. I want life.”

        That is, of course, perhaps the very worst thing to say to someone who wants only to move ahead, like Don Juan, in search of his next sexual conquest. As Victor admits to his psychiatrist, when he told me we wanted my life, I took his.

         Perhaps the lesson we learn from this fascinating metaphorical short work is to never match up a possessive individual with a man who wants total sexual freedom. In the late 1990s and early 2000s young would-be married men were not truly compatible with gay boys of the pre-AIDS days. 

 

Los Angeles, October 27, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (October 2023).