Luis Fernando Midence | Dejá que fluya (Let It Flow) / 2022

disconnected

by Douglas Messerli

 

Luis Fernando Midence (screenwriter and director) Dejá que fluya (Let It Flow) / 2022 [12 minutes]

 

Two estranged brothers meet at the family vacation home after their father’s recent death, the elder disturbed by their having to meet so far from the city in the hot weather, and moreover, irritated by the fact that the lawyer has not yet shown up and only he has the keys.

      They greet briefly, obviously having not seen each other for a long while. The younger, Andre, attempts to hug his brother, with a somewhat cold response. He enquires whether his brother is still with… “Santiago,” interrupts the elder, five years now.

       So it is established that the one is gay, and Andre, more like his father who obviously disapproved of his elder son’s behavior, is at least uncomfortable with the fact.

    The younger asks about whether his brother Nelson has gotten yet more tattoos, the elder immediately reacting that Andre is just as judgmental as “your” father, the other attempting to correct him, “our” father. But the heat has forced Nelson to try to find a way into the house. He jumps a wire fence and goes around to back, but that too is locked with no way to enter. Distraught about trying to break in during full daylight, Andre suggests that they’re demonstrating to the thieves the way to enter. His brother responds no one is around on a Monday, and again is disdainful of their having to meet there.

       Andre reminds him once again that it was their father’s wishes, Nelson responding that even after 10 years in Europe, his brother is still “kissing ass” to his father.

        Evidently there is a grounds keeper who also has a key, but he comes on Thursdays.

        So why didn’t we meet on Thursday, the elder asks. It turns out that Andre is returning to Spain on Wednesday which causes further rancor, Nelson accusing him of organizing everything around his own schedule.

     The brothers carry on, back and forth, repeating their dislikes as to how the other lives and behaves. And it doesn’t take long before once again Andre is dismissing his elder brother because he’s gay and, as Nelson himself puts it, “likes to suck dick.”

    And finally it comes out, as is often the case, that the elder son has had to put up with intense criticism from the father all his life, while the younger was allowed to be who he was. Those who are first born are so often the rebels, reacting against the expectations and the strictness of their upbringing, while the younger children, when the parents realize that they needed not to worry so much about protecting and shaping their daughter or son’s life had an easier time that allowed them to more easily assimilate. At least Midence seems to argue this fairly standard point of view, even though we all know hundreds of examples that don’t fit the pattern. Certainly, in my relationship to my own siblings, I fit that pattern myself.

     Nelson has become so heated that he strips off his clothes and jumps into the pool naked, Andre startled by his behavior, asking what the neighbors might think, his brother reminding him that there are no neighbors. And how is he going to dry off? He asks. By sitting in the sun, Nelson suggests, his brother worried about the reaction of the lawyer if he should show up. The difference between the two is nearly laughable. As Nelson repeats, his brother Andre is the “incarnation of our father,” Andre cracking out a laugh for having finally forced Nelson to admit that the man was his father as well.

       Later, as Andre sits on the beach, soon joined by Nelson, he reports that traffic has been so bad that the lawyer has turned around and returned to the city. Their meeting has been for nothing.

       Finally, Andre admits that their father has left the house to both of them.

       Nelson suggests that he never even imagined coming back to the beach house again. Taking his brother’s hand, he forces him on walk down a nearby path to remind him that that are completely different from another, in both looks and personality. If he seems to be hinting at something, it’s immediately lost as Andre again insists, “But we’re brothers,” Nelson reiterating that for 33 years they not have communicated except for brief telephone calls on their birthdays. We could write one another more often, Andre pleads, as if it might truly mean something to him to imagine a family that has never existed.

       But Nelson summarizes the issue, he should let it flow, let nature take its natural course. If they are meant to become closer it will happen, otherwise…. And we’re sure it will be otherwise, as Nelson suggests that his brother keep the beach house for himself, as he abandons all rights to it.

       When Nelson leaves, Andre stands alone by the pool, looks quickly around him as if to check out the scene, pulls off his clothes and enters the water. For a moment he has learned how to “let it flow,” has taken the advice of a man obviously more comfortable in his own skin and with his life than he has ever been. The occasion, after all, has given him something at least to remember.

      Guatemalan director Luis Fernando Midence’s film is not profound, and neither character is established in enough depth for us to glean anything but their general dispositions and Nelson’s alternate sexuality. Does Andre even date women? What does he do in Spain? What will he even do with the inherited beach house far from the place he now calls his home? We can’t even imagine answers to these questions because the figure remains a cipher.

      But this short film nonetheless expresses a moment in the lives of these two men which may offer a turning point for them, a recognition at least that even brothers often turn to be so very different that they might as well have been born of other parents, which he only suspect is what Nelson is attempting to hint at. Perhaps he was someone else’s son. It doesn’t matter truly since his father apparently did not behave as a real loving father should have. Nelson has survived. Now Andre must accept his own heritage is not necessarily his brother’s.

 

Los Angeles, January 18, 2023 / Reprinted from World Cinema Review (January 2023).