Robert Gauldin and Bryan Berrios | Leche con Cereal / 2022

falling on a roof

by Douglas Messerli

 

Robert Gauldin and Bryan Berrios (screenwriters and directors) Leche con Cereal / 2022 [14 minutes]

 

One of the oddest films of the New York Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Film Festival, (NewFest) this year was Robert Gauldin and Brayan Berrio’s comic hallucinatory trip, Leche con Cereal.

     Starring an almost Jerry Lewis-like awkward nerdy figure, Tobi (Justin Rodriguez) and a hunky countryboy-like electrician simply named as “the Visitor” (Ben Mandell) this 14-minute film immediately takes the viewer to territory he might never have suspected.

      Tobi is housesitting for an obviously very wealthy woman who lives in a magnificent house in the woods overlooking either a lake or river. Waking up one morning he watch him begin to masturbate only to quickly see a red-headed bearded stranger walk in front of the bedroom’s floor-to ceiling window and look in. He quickly disappears from sight but reappears soon after, Tobi gathering up a blanket and rushing clumsily to the door to demand who he is.

      Evidently the man is an electrician the owner has asked to check out a fuse; he’s a friend of hers he explains, and wonders just as insistently who Tobi is and why is he sleeping in his friend’s bed, easily explained by the fact that she has gone of vacation and Tobi is house-sitting.

     The visitor asks if he might come in just to check the fuse, which he quickly does, saying he’ll be back the next day after he buys a new one.

      Meanwhile, Tobi sits down to breakfast munching on what appear to be fruit-loups doused in milk spooned and sipped out of is surely one of the biggest cereal bowls ever witnessed on screen. Why he’s doing this, along with the film’s title commemorating the event is never explained.

      There is a great deal to be explained in this short work. Why would such a connoisseur of domestic architecture—as it is apparent the homeowner must be—ever entrust the care of her house to such an awkward, discombobulated figure such as Tobi? And mightn’t a more enlightened electrician, discovering such a terrified being in the house, wait until his friend returned from her vacation to repair the fuse?

     In any event, alone again Toby ruffles through his employer’s bedroom drawer’s until he finds a small bottle of dried mushrooms, which he immediately recognizes must be hallucinogens and swallows several of them up, apparently overdosing.

    By the time the hunky electrician returns later that day, having found a new fuse among the items in his workshop, Tobi is nearly incoherent as the visitor quickly repairs the socket and prepares to leave.   

     By this time, however, Tobi is clearly frightened of the distorted images cinematographer Gareth Smit has conjured up, and the boy pleads with the visiting electrician to stay on just a little bit longer to make sure he doesn’t “fall off the roof of something.”

     The electrician is prepared to do, he implies, with the proper payment, insinuating something we are not quite sure of. Tobi apprises it to be a request to ingest some of the mushrooms, and quickly obliges him, the two now seen sitting on the floor together, and soon after in various contorted positions around the living room couch.

      Before we can even focus on their hallucinatory gymnastics they are moving in and out of other’s articles of clothing and apparently engaging in gay sex.

      They awaken, somewhat sober, but clearly not entirely so since suddenly Tobi does really wander up to the roof and walk unsteadily across it, the visitor soon joining him as they sit at the apex of the roof overlooking the amazing view of nature spread out before them. 

      But whether or not they are witnessing the same view as we is not certain, particularly since the electrician wonders whether he might just jump over those trees into the waters in far distance.

    At the moment Tobi finally does fall of the room, just as he had feared, the electrician moving down to the lip of the roof to look at where he might have landed, responding with a “Oh shit,” before the credits begin to come up.

     Is Tobi dead? Has his uninhabited sexual pleasures resulted in a fatal accident? Eventually an image reappears, as the camera scans downs to the ground, where we see a picnic table atop which Tobi has evidently landed, he ever slightly lifting up his head in an attempt to determine where he might be and why.

     What US directors Gauldin and Berrios where attempting to say in this movie remains as one of the other unexplained secrets of this picture. Clearly the cinematographer had a great deal of fun fumbling with his lenses, and they may have gotten a good giggle out of the absurd adventures of their mentally confused hero. But whatever he and his momentary sexual partner have to do with one another is beyond comprehension. Illuminating, sexy, imaginative do not define this film; comic and quirky move closer to what its intentions must have been. But it is the words insignificant and silly which ultimately remain upon this reviewer’s tongue.

 

Los Angeles, October 20, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (October 2022).