Erick Salas Kirchhausen | El amigo (The Good Friend) / 2017

one night of passion

by Douglas Messerli

 

Erick Salas Kirchhausen (screenwriter and director) El amigo (The Good Friend) / 2017 [19 minutes]

 

This short Peruvian film is from its first frame forward with homoerotic longing and desire. Esteban (Óscar Meza) and Marcos (Sebastián Rubio) have long been best friends. And apparently Marcos realizes that his “amigo” is now gay. But that doesn’t stop him from often sleeping over on Marcos’ couch.

     Marcos has a girlfriend, whom he talks to somewhat lovingly on his phone, but later admits to Esteban that they no longer have good sex, since, in particular, she now finds fellatio disgusting.

      Throughout, Esteban looks at his friend with a deep sexual desire that might as well be represented as electrical waves transmitted throughout the room as the camera scans Marcos’ body when the two put out the sheet on the couch. As Marcos sits on the couch in his underwear almost exuding his bodily allure to Esteban, it is as if the two men are destined that night to have sex.

     The event begins with Marcos entering his friend’s bedroom to ask if he has any weed left, which he enjoys through a bong. The host suggests he look in his bottom drawer, wherein Marcos discovers a large dildo, teasing him about his private enjoyments. He returns with a fresh bag of the drug. But soon after he returns to having gotten a splitter in his foot, sitting at the side of the bed, like a teenager gradually inching his hand over to touch the leg of his friend, Esteban motionless and almost stunned that it is all happening so quickly. Their hands finally meet, Esteban grabbing his with full force as he kisses him, not sure what will happen in response. When Marcos responds with his own kiss, an outpouring of love follows that is, quite frankly, one of the hottest non-porn sexual scenes in a regular gay film that I have ever witnessed.

      Esteban not only sucks his friend off, but they go further, although the film does not show their full activity, we can imagine that they even fuck. And they wake up in bed together like two gay lovers.

     But all of that quickly changes as Marcos dresses to leave, refusing even to discuss to incident. He cannot admit to this night of special passion without betraying his own attempt to retain his heterosexual status. Like so many “macho” men he is a true coward who simply cannot break the confines taught to him by his culture. Surely, he will be trapped in an unfulfilling sexual relationship trying for the rest of his life to forget how joyfully sex can be experienced as a gay man.

     Esteban realizes, in fact, that he may now has lost his friend permanently for the one wonderful transgressive night.

     This story has been often told in films scattered throughout the My Queer Cinema volumes, but perhaps never so passionately and clearly.

 

Los Angeles, October 15, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (October 2026).