Rafael Jardim | Conflitos (Conflicts) / 2021

standoff

by Douglas Messerli

 

Rafael Jardim (screenwriter and director) Conflitos (Conflicts) / 2021 [12 minutes]

 

Another Telemilênio offering from Brazil, Rafael Jardim’s 2021 film Conflicts, is a rather heavy-handed short that suggests that all gay men are hysterics or simply bad news to their women friends.

     Yuri (Gustavo Cesca) has just recovered from a suicide attempt over a boyfriend who has apparently cheated on him or simply left him. He tells his best female friend, Natalia (Bella Russo) that he’s recovered, which as his roommate, she’s happy to hear.

    She too has broken up with her boyfriend and already met a new guy who she’s just begun to date, suggesting that Yuri join them at the local amusement park the next day.

     In a very short episode in the next scene, we observe a guy being razzed by his friends for being a “faggot,” which he denies and tries to laugh off. We have to assume this is Natalia’s new friend.

      At the park, the three of them collide in bumper cars and the boys enter the gate to the Ferris Wheel, Nathalia holding back to make a telephone call. Yuri takes the ride together with her boyfriend, Daniel (Nicholas Garanhani), staring away most of the time from Yuri as if the dare not make close contact; clearly there is little communication between the two. Back on ground, Dani’s homophobic friends stop by to hint that they’ve seen him alone with yet another boy, while he simply pushes them off.

       Dani, with Nathalia and Yuri are back in the latter’s shared apartment watching TV and eating popcorn. When the two boys accidentally touch hands in the popcorn canister which sits on Nathalia’s lap, Yuri senses something is amiss and declares that he’s off to bed. Dani suggests to Nathalia that her friend is “strange.”

        By this time, we fully recognize that the boyfriend is the kind of guy who finds it so very difficult to accept his own sexuality that he puts all of his energy into kissing and hugging the woman he is currently with, using her almost as a life raft. The “strangeness” of which he speaks, is a perfect description of his own behavior.

     And only a day or so later, as Nathalia goes off to shop, leaving Yuri alone, Dani shows up, declaring it’s really Yuri to whom he wants to talk. Suddenly he shoves Yuri up against the wall and commands him: “Look, I want you as far away from me as far you can get, got it?” Startled and not knowing what he even means, Yuri agrees at the very same moment that the boyfriend kisses him intensely, pulling away only to return to a deeper kiss.

      Nathalia returns a moment of so later, as the two pull away, Yuri disappearing into another room while she is surprised by Dani’s unannounced visit. She enters her room to shower and dress for their evening together. But a tear running down her eye suggests she suspects something that she doesn’t want to admit.

       At the bar, the three get drunk, particularly Dani who professes his love for both of them. Later that night we see Nathalia and Dani laying together in bed. He awakens, carefully moves her hand from where it had been around him, before slowly rising and entering Yuri’s bedroom.

       By the time that Nathalia gets there, the two are already making love. Her anger seems to be bent mostly on her friend Yuri, as he attempts to explain that her boyfriend entered his room while he was sleeping.

       We see Yuri in the shower suffering for his non-complicit crime, attempting to eat the soap with which he is cleansing his body. In the very next shot, Nathalia arrives back in the apartment to see Yuri’s body on the floor where he has fallen after overdosing on pills.

        Once more Yuri comes through, and we observe the two of them sitting on the beach. Dani walks by with a new girlfriend in hand. Both Nathalia and Yuri look at him after he has passed, while he looks back to the two of them, all frozen in a permanent standoff as long as the one of them insists on living in his world of lies.

        Gay males in this world are clearly unstable, and both perhaps unworthy of Nathalia’s love.

      This film belongs mostly to the genre of the gay male who, unable to admit to himself who he is, attempts to smother his same-sex feelings with love and often marriage to a female, which generally ends in disaster for the both the male and his girlfriend/wife. But why director Jardim felt he had to combine that with a gay man who punishes himself for the failures of other gay men is rather inexplicable. Unfortunately, both types do indeed exist in the otherwise fairly rational gay community.

 

Los Angeles, December 13, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (December 2022).