Miguel Ferrari | Azul y no tan rosa (Blue and Not So Pink, aka My Straight Son) / 2012

an alternative to the hate

by Douglas Messerli

 

Miguel Ferrari (screenwriter and director) Azul y no tan rosa (Blue and Not So Pink, aka My Straight Son) / 2012

 

This Venezuelan / Spanish produced film, originally titled Blue and Not So Pink, but later horribly mistitled, My Straight Son, is a truly wonderful vision of early 20th century problems in the then truly lovely Caracas regarding the general homophobia of the society and the violence against gays, transsexuals, and women in general.

    It is true, as Jonathan Holland wrote in The Hollywood Reporter that “Director Miguel Ferrari packs in themes including homosexuality, fatherhood, adolescent love, domestic abuse, online identity, reality TV, homophobia, transgendering and more into an unsurprisingly schematic but also compact and slick package which would, however, have greatly benefited from a more unhurried treatment of any one of its multiple subjects.”

    Yet, I couldn’t imagine a more moving pictorial of those issues in the space of 110 minutes. The characters, sometimes bordering on stereotypes, are all so very loveable that we quickly identify with the plights, learn to care for them and in a few instances to hate them. If this is a world of extremes, reminding us somewhat of early Pedro Almodóvar films, so be it. There are certainly worse models, and the joy and sorrows with which this feature film provides us are worth its several thematic lecturettes.

    Today, after the dictator Nicolás Maduro and at a time when no one has any idea of what will transpire given the clumsy and empty-headed takeover by the Trump administration, the clear-cut choices for the future which this positive 2012 film projected, are now terribly darkened over, possibilities of which the film dreamed, cut off and denied. It is perhaps important to remember that this film was released one year before Maduro took over as President of Venezuela. Accordingly, this movie feels, at moments, like a rushed shout out for the causes and values that within months would be abandoned and lost.

   Almost bizarrely the viewings of this film and another interesting short cinematic work, an Argentinian production filmed in Venezuela in the very same year of 2012, El prisionero (The Prisoner) were purely accidental, having nothing to do with the shocking headlines of the USA takeover of that country. Again, as I have argued throughout my life, coincidence dominates my experience of life. Time and again the world of art punctures through to the real in my life to make me convinced that art is life, living is an art.

   This film begins as many a gay film has, with a successful homosexual, in this case a photographer named Diego Martínez (Guillermo García) who lives quite nicely as a professional photographer, appearing to have found nearly everything he might have been seeking. Not only does he have a successful career, but he has the perfect boyfriend, Fabrizio (Sócrates Serrano), a hospital pediatrician who specializes in water-induced births. Although the couple is just shy of marriage, Diego is still happily unencumbered with the ties that he clearly is not quite ready to bind him. But we suspect, almost immediately, given the love and patience Fabrizio shows hi, that eventually that will change, the two will happily marry, and they will become the truly perfect couple we have long been reading about and imagining in out thousands of post Stonewall and AIDS gay films.

    Among his dearest friends, and for whom we first witness him at work as a photographer, is a transsexual woman, Delirio del Río (Hilda Abrahamz) who irrepressibly summarizes her history for those who are willing to listen to her quick retelling of her life story—a requirement, it appears, to meeting her:

“Yes. Well my real name is Alejandra. Delirio is just my stage me. Delirio Del Río. Like Dolores but Delirio. Of course, before I started calling myself Alejandra I was called Alejo, but then I go my operation and changed my name. …I used to be a male dancer, but then I wanted to be a female dancer, and while I was doing the change I was neither one nor the other, so people called de Delirio and it stuck that way. Now I’m a choreographer because I’m too tall to be a female dancer. It’s a long story.”

 

    Diego also has a staff of two, Elvys, a rather campy gay man who serves as costume and make-up artist, and his most trusted associate, Perla Marina (Carolina Torres) who is constantly late to their in-house studio shoots because of physical abuse by her husband Ivan, which she tries to cover through sunglasses and absurd tales of taxi and subways crashes, Diego insisting that she leave her abusive mate.

     Things might have happily gone on in the kinds of frenetic-paced speed as the film takes in the first 15-20 minutes of this film where we also meet Diego’s rather liberal-minded but also somewhat homophobic mother, father, sister, and brother-in-law, who are fed rather obscene lies by their favorite Telemundo celebrity, Estrellita (Beatriz Valdés) who as Holland summarizes, who “basically treats [her] guests like freaks but which gets huge ratings, another example of the film’s obvious but perhaps necessary social critique.” In the first sequence which we experience she briefly challenges a gay man regarding his attitudes about gay marriage before allowing a priest to comment at some length about on the sins of such relationships. At times, it appears that the entire nation is tuned to her show each evening, a bit like a perverted and rightest version of the Ophrah Winfrey show which captured large audiences in its run on US television from 1986-2011.

    But even in the scenes with his slightly disapproving family, there is love and a great deal of respect for his recognized boyfriend, the doctor Fabrizio. The family scenes are more like tamped-down versions of Archie Bunker rather than deeply disturbing visions of everyday Venezuelan family life which are later played out by Fabrizio’s parents. Had the film simply continued the way the film was headed at this point, Blue and Not So Pink might have been a comedy about gay liberation and privilege, somewhat like a modern-day Brazilian or Argentinian telenovela.

     As often happens in such tales, however, since we all know gay men, transgendered women, and abused wives almost aways need in motion pictures even to this day to suffer more than they already have, the sins of the past are let loose upon Diego as if he were the biblical Job.

     First, we discover that in a moment of youthful confusion, Diego fell in love with a woman, Valentina, whom he married and with whom he had a son, Armando (Nacho Montes). She’s about to go to London to complete her Master’s Degree and has suddenly been told that she cannot be accompanied by her son. She insists that Diego care for Armando whole she makes plans for him to stay with her in London, and what’s more he’s already on an airplane set to arrive that very afternoon.

    Given the fact that Diego has been only erratically in touch with his son, Armandito, now a young man who refuses to be called by the diminutive, insists her father stop describing his as “pal,” and seems basically resentful of the unknown father has entered the life of the is man who is unable to make commitments on the very same evening that he has committed to attending Delirio Del Río’s return as a chanteuse at his local gay bar.

    Although he attempts to make spaghetti for his son, the boy refuses to eat and the pasta is left by accident to boil over. The first night of his son’s stay at his new home, Diego is forced to leave him to his own machinations.

      He makes his way to the bar where he plans to meet up with Fabrizio. Delirio is a great hit, but during the very moments in which she is on stage, we are shown a terrible scene that takes place outside of the bar where, arriving, Fabrizio’s car windows are beaten in by homophobic thugs as the pull him out and pummel him so completely that he falls into a coma. With his last breath, Fabrizio makes a call to Diego’s phone before he is silence, yet bringing Diego outside the bar to witness his beaten and horrible bruised body.

    Fabrizio is rushed to the hospital, with Diego behind him as his lover is hurried into an emergency operation, where they put him on an aspirator and other machines just to keep him alive.

     Diego calls his lover’s parents and his own friends who all arrive at all about the same moment, resulting in a strange showdown between Diego, Delirio, and Perla Marina with Fabrizio’s folks who are shocked by their appearance. And over the next few days, they refuse Diego even entry to Fabrizio’s room, the father expressing his feeling that he would rather see his son dead than believing he would have anything to do with one of the group of monsters with whom he now associates Diego. In one of the most moving scenes of the film, Diego faces him down, accusing him of being no different from the thugs who beat their son.

     Diego, moreover, has witnessed the queer basher, still with bloody hands, making obscene gestures at the moment Diego first discovered his partner’s body. He tells all he knows to the police, who know the thug, Rasco (Alexander Da Silva) who is the likely culprit. But without any visual proof and any witnesses to the actual act they can do nothing but free the terrible monster.

    Meanwhile, exploring his new home, Armando has perused Diegos DVD collection, encountering therein not only some of the usual films popular with the gay community, but a gay porn film. Watching it, he comes to perceive, obviously, that his father is a homosexual, angrily confronting him at their next meeting, suggesting that perhaps, his involvement in the gay life was the reason why he no longer had any time for him as he was growing up and so desperately needed a father.

     The summaries of this film all describe Armando as being “closed minded,” implying that he himself may be somewhat homophobic, but in fact, as a teen unsure of his own body and appearance and inexperienced in the affairs of the heart, his hurt is more than justified. He has long needed a father to balance his perhaps doting but also busy mother.

     And when, from friends, Armando finally learns what has happened to his father’s boyfriend, he begins to realize that he is not the only one who is now facing serious problems. Noticing that Armando has been communicating on an internet site with a young woman named Laura who wonders if he can dance the tango, Diego calls in Delirio to teach Armando how to dance, Perla Marina and he learning the steps simultaneously.

     Watching his father during a photo-shoot, Armando sees his father film a handsome young movie couple, male and female, selecting the photo of the male as the image he choses to post to Laura as representing his appearance.

     Meanwhile, Diego finally is able to convince Fabrizio’s hospital colleague to let him sneak in for just a few moments to his room, despite the parent’s demand that no one else be permitted to enter. There he explains to his friend, still in a coma, that the night they were to have met at the bar he was planning to finally propose to him and as a gift, agreeing to accompany Fabrizio to the town of Merida where he had wanted to plant a tree given to him by one of his patients as a sign of their future together. He takes out the small ring that he had planned giving Fabrizio that night and puts in on his finger, taking out the other ring and putting on his own finger. Bending down, he kisses the unconscious mean on the forehead, a symbolic wedding a viable almost as the wedding performed by Tony and Maria in the dressmaker’s shop in West Side Story.

      Later, when nurses attempt to remove the ring to hand over to Fabrizio’s parents, the patient’s hand inexplicably curls up into a ball, making it impossible for them to remove the ring.

      Soon after, Diego is called with the news of Fabrizio’s death. Sadly, he, Delirio, Perla Marino, now joined by Armando mourn in their own manner, while the body is taken away by the hateful and unfeeling parents, a situation that gay men have witnessed time and again when a lover is kept away from the funeral of his companion by the parents who cannot accept the fact of his homosexuality and the possibility that he died more in love with someone outside the family walls, a situation most memorably expressed in cinema through in 2009 film A Single Man.

      Still angry that the police cannot charge Rasco for the murder, Diego decides to return to the bar on the look-out for the thugs, having purchased a gun to accomplish justice. Realizing that his father is missing, Armando calls Perla Marino for the address to the bar and takes a taxi to the street, hoping to stop his father from behaving rashly.

      The cab driver, however, refuses to go around the block to enter the one-way street, leaving him off a few blocks from the bar, and as Armando makes his way toward the place, Racso and his gang stop him en route, threatening to repeat the deathly beating they gave Fabrizio.

      Once again, Deliro is about to begin her act. But this time Diego leaves the bar after hearing from Perla Marino that Armando has called her, and discovers the boy’s plight. He pulls out the gun willing to use it on Rasco unless he admits to the previous murder, but Armando’s attempt to get his father to put away the gun, restores the gang to their place of power, the duo of father and son proving no match for monstrous trio—that is until, dressed in towering high heels, Delirio suddenly appears pointing a gun at Rasco and shooting it just over his head as a warning, threatening the other two with equal treatment if they dare ever return to the neighborhood. If this scene is somewhat unbelievable, we have to believe that, like the example of the transgender woman Bernadette played by Terence Stamp in the 1994 Stephan Elliott film The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, Deliriohas learned to be tough in a world in which she has been so hated simply in order to survive.

      Later, a young man from the bar, obviously in love with Diego, gets the bar strip-tease performer to show Diego his taping of the terrible beating Rasco gave Fabrizio. Diego delivers up the tape to the head of the police investigation which results in Rasco’s rearrest.

      Now, finally, Diego is convinced that it is time to take the long ago planned trip to Merida to plant the tree in memory of Fabrizio, which coincidentally is also where Amando’s internet sweetheart Laura lives. Armando, Diego insists, will finally be able to dance the tango with his girlfriend.

     The strange band of cowboys, Perla Marina—now pregnant but determined to break off with Ivan—Delirio, Diego, and Armando make their way to Merida and attend the tango, where, in fact, Armando meets up with Laura, dances beautiful and even kisses her before she sadly dismisses him for having pretended to be the movie star whose pictures in a cinema poster line the street walls.

      The next day they plant the baby pine in the woods near the ocean and return to Caracas, each of the central figures leaving something behind in Merida as a symbol of what they needed to shed before moving on with their new lives.

     And Armando, now appreciative for the whole new world his father has opened up to him, must say goodbye, since Valentina is ready for him to return. It is a sad and teary moment for all, including the audience who, by this time have come to love the film’s eccentric characters.

   But where is Delirio? Why hasn’t she shown up to see Armando off? They soon discover that she has taken over Estrellita’s talk show. From now on, announces the new host, there will be no mockery of people who are different, no cards telling the audience to laugh at the words certain guests speak. The Venezuelan world of the film has moved clearly into a new enlightened era.

     We can only wonder, however, where just a couple of years later the Diegos, the Delirio’s even the Perla Marinas ended up. If they escaped to the US, have they since been rounded up the Trump-Noem controlled ICE thugs and shipped off to penal colonies in Honduras or even in Africa?

      Things have not changed. Being blue, not only sad and depressed but in many cultures another word for gay boys, unfortunately still means that you are not “in the pink,” not so happy or well off.* The Estrellitas threaten to return to US TV and the Racsos under the banner of ICE roam the American streets.

   

*The title also ruminates the idea expressed by Perla Marina that she no longer cares to know ahead of time whether her child will be a boy or a girl, is longer interested in buying blue or pink outfits or other color coded clothes. She eventually gives birth to a boy.

 

Los Angeles, January 11, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (January 2026).   

 

Bryan Singer and Dexter Fletcher | Bohemian Rhapsody / 2018

the champion

by Douglas Messerli

 

Anthony McCarten (based on a story by Anthony McCarten and Peter Morgan), Bryan Singer and Dexter Fletcher (directors) Bohemian Rhapsody / 2018

Director Bryan Singer’s and, ultimately, Dexter Fletcher’s biopic of the amazing British musical group Queen, might have been—and accordingly to many, still is—a kind of cinematic disaster. The major figures in the cast kept shifting, from Sacha Baron Cohen to Ben Whishaw, and finally Rami Malek playing Freddie Mercury, with major shifts of screenwriters from 2010 to the final release in 2018, along with numerous changes in the supporting figures in the cast. It’s almost amazing, looking back, that Bohemian Rhapsody, as the film was eventually titled, got made, let alone that it was a financial hit, loved by thousands of its audience members.

      Many of the critics simply hated it, The New York Times reviewer A. O. Scott summarizing, early on in his review:

 

“A baroque blend of gibberish, mysticism and melodrama, the indiefilm seems engineered to be as unmemorable as possible, with the exception of the prosthetic teeth worn by the lead actor, Rami Malek, who plays Freddie Mercury, Queen’s lead singer. Those choppers may give you nightmares. And some of you who venture into the theater will surely be inspired to exclaim ‘Mama mia, let me go!’”

 

The usually reliable Justin Chang, of the Los Angeles Times attacked the film along the lines of numerous other critics, who dismissed its theatrical inaccuracies:

 

“…There is something woefully reductive, even pernicious, about the narrative shorthand used to elide Freddie’s sexual relationships with men: a glimpse of leather here, a truck-stop montage there. There’s also something oddly moralistic, even punitive, about the way Freddie’s increasingly debauched, hard-partying ways drive a wedge between himself and his bandmates; it’s not that Brian, Roger and John aren’t allowed to react with cross-armed disgust, but that the movie too often seems to share their attitude. Even more irritating is a wholly inaccurate later scene in which Freddie tells his bandmates in 1985 that he has AIDS, a fabricated detail that feels like an attempt to tidy up the obligatory reconciliation narrative.”

 

      Howard and I, who grew to adulthood in this period, had not ever known of Queen. Sure we heard of the group, but, as Howard reports, we presumed that they took over the seemingly “gay” moniker to simply mock it, that perhaps they were just a grunge group, rock-a-billy singers (we did know, obviously, the clap along songs “We Will Rock You” and “We Are the Champions”; you’d have to have been dead to never have heard these), knowing nothing of Mercury’s history, let alone of the crazy, psychedelic operatic song “Bohemian Rhapsody,” with the high counter- tenor reaches of “Galileo.” Had we known, we might have loved it!

      Perhaps our very ignorance, and our lack of knowledge about Mercury’s actual history freed us from all the pre-judgments that the critics could not resist.

    Yes, Bohemian Rhapsody often plays with many of the tropes that musical biopics are based on; the unloved hero finding his own way to reveal his talent and moving toward a love you know that he can’t ever sustain. In this case, obviously, Mercury’s apparent love for a young woman, Mary Austin (Lucy Boynton) can never be consummated, which she herself quickly perceives knowing he is not only not bisexual but “desperately” gay, and in this case that is the proper word. Freddie may not have even perceived it himself, but he was destined to seek out an underworld of truly transgressive gay life that would end up with his death of AIDS in 1991

     True, as well, this film spends far too much time with his infatuation with Austin, his determination, despite their inevitable break-up, to keep her in his life, winking with lights off-and-on between the neighboring mansions he was able to purchase after his amazing musical success. But you’d have to be an idiot not to realize that Freddie has long before been slipping in and out of backroom bathrooms to be fucked or to fuck others. If the movie is perhaps a bit too discrete, it doesn’t exactly hide his “dark” sexuality, and when he finally settles into life with his perverse second manager, Paul Prenter (Allen Leech), we are in on the radical sexual orgies in which he must have participated—even if the film doesn’t want to draw our attention to them. Only the blind need claim that this movie doesn’t cover Mercury’s gay world. This is definitely not the Cole Porter of Cary Grant’s sanitized film biography.

      In fact, Malek, with his implanted incisors, gives us a view of a highly, highly sexualized being at fight with the world in which he inhabits, even among his mostly heterosexual band-members, who married, but nonetheless, allowed themselves to collectively portray the kind of faux gay sexuality in their guitar playing, Brian May (played by Gwilym Lee), bass guitar, John Deacon (Joseph Mozzello), and drummer, Roger Taylor (Ben Hardy) roles. They knew who their lead singer was, and encouraged his open sexuality, despite the times, while keeping their personal distances. This is not simply the story of Freddie Mercury, but of the lives of the strange family named Queen. I kept being reminded of Sister Sledge's "We Are Family." So why should the movie haunt the alleys of Freddie’s sexual indecencies—I’ve been there, and I can tell you it’s kind of boring.

      Of far more interest is their inter-relationships, even if the film also fictionalizes them. So, now we know, the group never actually broke up, that Freddie didn’t reveal, just prior to the remarkable Live Aid concert that he had AIDS. Well, that’s dramatic license which actually makes sense. Even if he truthfully told them about his illness much later, and wasn’t suffering deeply during the concert itself, and didn’t meet his new “friend,” Jim Hutton (Aaron McCusker) as a one-night waiter, but as a nightly hairdresser, who cares? It’s all good drama, and the tea-party with his estranged Farsi family is right out of a fantasy like that of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland (his Red Queen-like father demanding the family turn on the television to watch his son’s performance) even if it is something that only the seasoned writer Peter Morgan (who has written about a real queen), who helped write this story, might have imagined.

      What’s more, all critics agreed, Rami Malek did the best imitation of Freddie Mercury that might be possible, singing some of those songs himself, while lip-synching others, while dancing in a way that Mercury surely would have approved of. And the music, the heart of this film, is not to be ignored. I cried, wishing I had encountered Queen in my youth instead of my old age. Today I watched the entire YouTube feature of Freddie Mercury’s Live Aid concert performance, and literally cried again and again. Well, when a movie can make you do that, how bad can it have been?

    When Malek picks up the extended microphone, employing it as did Freddie as a kind of extended cock that spelled out to his audience what a true rooster he was, you can’t help but love him (and Mercury). He was a showman, even in his Presley-like performance, that you simply can’t forget. Bowie, the Beatles, Mick Jagger, John Elton, so many others, are there in his performances; so you simply can’t ignore Mercury. He was the champion.  

 

Los Angeles, November 14, 2018

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (November 2018).