a different light
by Douglas Messerli
Tavo Ruiz (screenwriter
and director) Se murió Juan Gabriel (Juan Gabriel Is Dead) / 2018
[15 minutes]
Mexican-born director
Tavo Ruiz who lives in Germany began his filmmaking career in 2008 with The
Godmother and 2014 with Earth, but it is his third film, the truly
charming Se murió Juan Gabriel (Juan Gabriel Is Dead) that brought
full attention to his work, and revealed a talent that has since been expressed
in six further short gay films.
Most US citizens perhaps do not know about the major Mexican pop icon singer Juan Gabriel, who died in Santa Monica, California in 2016. Although Gabriel never married, he had six children, four of them through his “best friend,” Laura Salas. Despite this, he was widely assumed to be gay, refusing to speak explicitly about his sexuality. However, as he got older he began to give implicit responses towards questions about his sexuality, saying to interviewers "Lo que se ve no se pregunta" ("what one sees doesn't have to be asked about"). Although most believed this was a confession of his gay sexuality, the deniers took this to be a further statement of his heterosexuality since he had had so many children. The presumption, of course, is that gay men are unable to have heterosexual sex or to bear children which throughout history has obviously proven to have been a myth.
Despite
the film’s title, however, Juan Gabriel plays only a minor role in the close
relationship of two lifelong high school teenagers, Beto (Giovanni Sandoval)
and Daniel (Ovido Noval). By the time we meet them in a kind of black-and-white
world presented primarily from Daniel’s point of view, Beto’s best friend has
already begun to perceive himself as a transgender individual, with long blond
hair which he brushes primarily to the right side. And despite their daily
discussions about the girls in their school—Beto has an on-and-off-again
relationship with Karla (Adriana Olmos)—it is clear that Daniel, now
self-defined as Daniela, is far more interested in Karla’s female friend than
in Gabriel’s buffed boyfriend Raúl (Andrés B. Durán), who someone
embarrassingly senses a female presence in the young boy that, even as they
await for Beto and Gabriela to return from meeting up with Karla, forces them
to opposite ends of the playground in one of the many stunning frames of this
short film.
Most US citizens perhaps do not know about the major Mexican pop icon
singer Juan Gabriel, who died in Santa Monica, California in 2016. Although
Gabriel never married, he had six children, four of them through his “best
friend,” Laura Salas. Despite this, he was widely assumed to be gay, refusing
to speak explicitly about his sexuality. However, as he got older he began to
give implicit responses towards questions about his sexuality, saying to
interviewers "Lo que se ve no se pregunta" ("what one sees
doesn't have to be asked about"). Although most believed this was a
confession of his gay sexuality, the deniers took this to be a further
statement of his heterosexuality since he had had so many children. The
presumption, of course, is that gay men are unable to have heterosexual sex or
to bear children which throughout history has obviously proven to have been a
myth.
Beto
returns to tell his friend Daniel that his relationship with Karla is back on,
and that he’s been invited to a party that evening. Strangely, or perhaps
utterly predictably, he invites Daniel to join him. The two, in fact, go for
pizza and a kind of cinematic sightseeing tour of Ciudad de México as they look
from the top of a roof out over the city, expressing their desires of love
which, for a moment or two, seem to reveal their love for one another, again
recreated in memorable images by the director.
The
party is the predictable torrid affair, with young boys vomiting into kitchen
sinks, girls and boys stretched out in sexually precarious positions playing
Twister, drugged-out couples enwrapped writhing each other’s arms, and boys and
girls (in this case Beto and Karla) sneaking off into bathrooms to quickly
engage in sex. Daniel sits it out uncomfortably on a living-room couch.
The
party is the predictable torrid affair, with young boys vomiting into kitchen
sinks, girls and boys stretched out in sexually precarious positions playing
Twister, drugged-out couples enwrapped writhing each other’s arms, and boys and
girls (in this case Beto and Karla) sneaking off into bathrooms to quickly
engage in sex. Daniel sits it out uncomfortably on a living-room couch.
Without ado, however, Beto suddenly suggests they should be leaving,
Daniel only too happy to join him at his house (Beto’s mother, it is
established early in the film, works for two-day shifts at a far distance,
leaving Beto alone to care for himself) for video games, a regular activity in
which the two engage. In the midst of the games, Beto receives a telephone call
from his mother, assuring her that all is just fine.
And
within those few moments, their world shifts from the black-and-white fantasy
of the reality of the now, as we see in full color, a young boy with a swath of
blond hair, but nothing like the long bangs that Daniel imagined for himself in
the previous black-and-white segments, finally deciding to make his love
apparent.
Daniel leans forward and kisses Beto on the mouth, immediately
suggesting he will leave if necessary and begging him to not let anyone else
know what he’s just done. Beto is more than a little taken aback as the
telephone again rings, this time reporting, improbably, that Juan Gabriel is
dead. He turns back to Daniel, and it is apparent that he will not at all send
his friend packing, but, as the film goes dark, may be more than willing to
return that kiss.
This
truly memorable short film places everything in a loving continuum for a
long-time friendship that gradually bloomed into a love that neither, least of
all Beto, fully imagined existed between the two individuals, an imagined love
that finally needs to be expressed in a different light.*
*A Different Life was the name of an important
West Hollywood gay, lesbian, and transgender bookstore with locations also in
New York City and San Francisco. The store began in the Silver Lake district of
Los Angeles in 1979 before moving to its West Hollywood location in 1990. The
New York store opened in 1980s and the San Francisco branch in 1985. The New
York store closed in 2001, the West Hollywood store in 2009, and the San
Francisco Castro branch in 2011.
Los Angeles, November 12, 2023
Reprinted from World Cinema Review (November 2023).
No comments:
Post a Comment