Peeter Rebane | Firebird / 2021

everyone loves roman

by Douglas Messerli

 

Peeter Rebane and Tom Prior (screenplay, based on the memoir by Sergey Fetisov), Peeter Rebane (director) Firebird / 2021

 

Peeter Rebane and Tom Prior’s 2021 film Firebird which I saw the other day on a virtual broadcast of New Fest (New York Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, & Transgender Film Festival), is the kind of movie represents the US and other countries’ maturation with regard to gays, lesbians, bisexuals, transgender and other sexual alternatives to heterosexual identity, and in this context, we can now see, would have been a wonderful late 1950s or early 1960s romantic film in the style of Three Coins in the Fountain (1954), Sabrina (1954), All That Heaven Allows (1955), War and Peace (1956), or An Affair to Remember (1957)—except, obviously, that none of these events from the 1970s cold war as viewed from Estonia through the Russian occupation of that country had yet to take place.

    Although we know that for two gay men to fall in love on an Russian air force base being caught having sex as the young Sergey Serebrennikov (Tom Prior) and Roman Matvejev (Oleg Zagorodnii) do several times in this film, would have meant punishment by five years of forced labor and perhaps worse for the air pilot Matvejev—whose career most definitely would have been destroyed; they nonetheless superficial seem to have to face many of same kind of dilemmas as do the characters of the straight romantic films I’ve named above, where both men and women must often hide their loving obsessions from family, friends, casual observers, and often from one another. Sergey and Roman’s clever sneaking in and out of the senior barracks to visit local lakes, Tallinn, and elsewhere, are outwardly not so very different from the wartime romances of Here to Eternity (1953) or even later works such as Robert Altman’s M*A*S*H, which is supposed to occur in the early 1950s. And the problems they face in their age and cultural differences is played out in Sabrina, All that Heaven Allows and numerous other works.

       Even the fact that Roman finally feels compelled to further cover up the possibility of his affair with Sergey by marrying their mutual best friend, Luisa (Diana Pozharskaya)—who once might have thought of herself as marrying her younger colleague Sergey—should come as no surprise for anyone who has seen or read the dozens of English works such as Brideshead Revisited and Maurice and the known of the scores of real-life Hollywood “bearded” marriages and rumored love-affairs between the likes of Charles Laughton, Spencer Tracy, and Rock Hudson. Surely, in retrospect, we should not be surprised that a military man in Roman’s shoes might make that decision, no matter how devastating it clearly is to his younger lover. The two still manage to get away together for substantial periods of time, to buy an apartment in Moscow, and to enjoy the company of less judgmental friends from the world of theater and other arts.

      The evil KGB members determined to discover every dirty secret and expose it to the restrictive society at large is not truly that different, afterall, from the horrific gossip columnists such as Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons, the numerous political figures determined to out anyone they could find for gay sexual activities and/or suspicious political values, and the determined police forces both in the US and England that were bent on making life hell for anyone visiting a gay bar or homosexual outing? Is an accusation from a supposed friend which leads to many of the covert acts undertaken by Roman so very different from the wives and husbands in dozens of heterosexual films from 1930-the present who hire private eyes to spy on and terrorize their own partners?

       What makes this film directed by Estonian born Peeter Rebane so interesting is that it has become so lovingly cinematically normalized that if you were blind to the fact that it is often two men who are ecstatically engaged in sex, busily introducing each other to the ballet (hence the film’s title), theater, and opera, and writing each other love epistles, you might not even know this was an LGBTQ film. The writer and director have almost completely erased the usual psychological traumas of gay self-acceptance, the lure of mutual gay attractions—although it is quite clear that one of Sergey’s fellow students is more than a little attracted to his peer and peeved in his seeming lack of interest—or exploration of the childhood parental abuse which helped to make their sons “queer.”

     There is a childhood memory of guilt on Sergey’s part for refusing to support his best friend after the boy was punished by his father for being queer, but the trauma it plays in his life is far less significant than a very similar incident is, for example, in Alan Ball’s Uncle Frank (2020).     

     In this film, just as when Gary Grant deeply kisses Deborah Kerr, when the beautiful male leads Oleg Zagorodnii and Tom Prior lock lips we register a sense of joy, our hearts fluttering to watch them engaged in discrete sex, facial gesturing their orgasmic pleasure in one another’s bodies. And until they are written up in an unsigned report slipped to the KGB there is hardly a moment when they when they are not developing photos of one another, studying Shakespeare, watching for the first time—in Sergey’s case—Firebird, that the two can keep their hands (feet, legs, and lips) of one another.

      Even when they are restricted from revealing their physical passions, both are restlessly eyeing one another or, in Sergey’s case selflessly coming to terms with having lost his bed mate by embracing a more spiritual sense of love through sharing Roman with his wife and son.

      The sets by Aadu Larnbot and Peeter Sepp are quite lovely, and the costumes by Mariatta Nissinen and Mare Raidma are nearly perfect for the drab days of the Russian imposition of the cold war. And finally, there are lovely landscapes and views to take in. In short, this romance really does splendidly by its genre.

      I’m sure there are many who will dismiss this film for showing no great sense of camp humor, for ignoring the deep angst that both its central figures obviously feel about having to abnegate their sexual responses for heteronormative values imposed upon them. And certainly, this film displays little in the way of experimental cinematic techniques. It’s wonder is that for being such a lovely tale of gay romance it is otherwise almost completely true to type, which is perhaps precisely where Firebird is most radical.

     Otherwise, a bit like the soap-opera this work threatens to but fortunately never actually becomes, we boo the KGB officer, and detest the military tortures just as we would in any straight film. Perhaps the most unlikeable character, it turns out, is their friend and wife Luisa, who having lost her husband to his service in Afghanistan, turns out to be as homophobic as the society in general when she finally faces off with her husband’s other lover, Sergey. Whereas, he has been able to make sacrifices of his love for her, she is only bitter that her husband has ever shared the same bed as her former friend and is furious for not being told of a relationship that she would surely have done everything in her power to stop. Perhaps the trauma missing in this film may show up in the next generation if she continues to express her bitterness of having to share his father with a fag to her son.

      It is not the ground that this film seeds that makes it interesting, but the same-sex gender of those who tend its predictably pleasant pastures.

      Yet, by telling their story as a standard cinematic romance, we also know that they are creating a fantasy that contradicts the true empty spirited and mindless hatred of the society around them, just as did the heterosexual fantasies of the same period. The reality was always the angry, empty headed harridans who Luisa represents. If the boys-in-love imagined a warm, sunny world of sublimity, a drab gray and brown reality waited for them both at home.

 

Los Angeles, October 18, 2021

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (October 2021).

Anthony Rangel Coll | a BLOOM / 2021

accomplice to a suicide

 by Douglas Messerli

Anthony Rangel Coll (screenwriter and director) a BLOOM / 2021 [24 minutes]

 

Nick (Stefan Erasmus) has just been released from gay conversion therapy, and instead of his father driving him home—the man who has clearly put Nick into therapy—he simply does show up. Away on a business trip, he sends a cab in his place.

    The people at the center are proud of the man Nick’s become, sending him off with a book titled Straight Man.

     Friends from his past show up on his phone, but he quickly deletes their messages. But a phone call from a former friend insists they’re on their way, no “buts” about it, to pick him up and celebrate.

     It clearly is not what Nick wants at the moment; but perhaps it is what he most needs. Yet the friends seem at odds to how to deal with Nick’s three-month absence. While he was gone, Thato (Thabang Mashiane) has come out as a lesbian, and his other friend Aidan (Aidan Scott) simply chatters on without even acknowledging Nick’s stubborn silence.

     But while they take sides, Thato arguing that something terrible has happened to Nick and Aidan trying to ignore it all, Nick gets totally lost in the stare from across the room of a beautiful stranger (Jonah Dollery).

     When the stranger gets up and leaves, Nick also scurries off, unable to deal with the arguments of his friends and his full attraction to the stranger.

    Even more mysterious is the fact that the stranger seems to know Nick, sending him a cryptic message saying “I knew it was you.”

      Aidan follows, ordered by the father not to leave Nick alone while he’s away. But Nick rejects his friendliness and retreats to his bedroom, being sure to take the pills he was given by the nurse at the conversion center. What these pills might consist of—a sex inhibitor, a drug to knock out sexual desire?—is never explained.

      But is also suffering another kind of anxiety, the loss of his former girlfriend (Kelly Meyer) someone he deeply loved but with whom he obviously couldn’t maintain a relationship. He seems to be wearing her sweater and attempts to masturbate to thoughts of her, without success, as he falls asleep. It was clearly her loss that was involved with his agreement to undergo conversion therapy.

   Meanwhile, Nick begins chatting with “The Stranger,” even at swimming practice, as the two locate themselves in relationship to one another. Once again, they plan meet up in “The Raptor Room,” to play the staring contest, as the stranger describes it. But Nick seeing him through the window, rushes off, afraid of what it might lead to.

     More pills, frustration, and conversations with the ghost of his former girlfriend follow, Nick admitting that he likes the stranger, she perceiving the suffering he’s going through. And in a sense, Nick realizing that she is not truly “back,” does not truly represent love, she gives him the permission to seek out the new gay relationship.

     The Stranger determines it is time to meet. And Thato, once more, reminds Aidan and Nick that they are late to their meeting with her. Nick now tells Thato everything, how his attempt to be honest with his ex-girlfriend ended their relationship, and that he feels he is gay, which has resulted in his absence. And finally, he admits how horrible his experiences at the conversion center were: “weird group sessions,” “endless polls,” etc. Thato makes him promise that he won’t go back to the center, telling him what all gays know: there is no “cure” for being queer.

     Suddenly the frame opens up, so to speak, to a split screen as Nick and The Stranger text one another, Nick speaking honestly about his fears and desires.

      He finally meets up with the man, and they have a conversation about love, their own past lives. But Nick is soon talking again with his former girlfriend in his imagination, a conversation about moving in together. She asks to know his darkest secret, arguing that she needs to know if she’s going to move in with him—clearly the conversation that led to Nick’s confession and her leaving him. As if he has overhead the that conversation, The Stranger suggests “It sounds like it was quite intense.” Nick adds, “The more you know about another the harder it gets to let go. By knowing that one thing you become an accomplice. You both share the crime and you have to live with it as if it were your own.”

     Their meeting obviously does not go well, as The Stranger suddenly declares he has to be going, after which Nick once more feels abandoned. His mother was evidently a marine specialist who studied jellyfish, who, she explains on tape, when they feel ill go to settle on the sea-floor, starting life again as they become reborn.

       The last images we have of Nick is him floating, fully clothed, for a short while on the surface of the pool before he sinks out of sight.

       Apparently, Nick drowned, based on the life and death of a real being, Nicolas Coutts (1991-2019)—obviously a friend of the South African filmmaker Anthony Rangel Coll—in whose memory this film was made.

 

Los Angeles, June 10, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (June 2023).

 

 

 

 

Kass McLaws | Together Forever / 2021

inviting your boyfriend home

by Douglas Messerli

 

Kass McLaws (screenwriter and director) Together Forever / 2021 [16.45 minutes]

 

I have to admit that I am not particularly fond of LGBTQ horror films, a genre that over the past couple of decades has been explored by an increasing number of young directors. Neither is it my favorite genre in straight films, but there is something particularly disturbing to me to see gays and lesbians terrified or tortured, particularly by their own kind, when they have already had to deal with the daily difficulties of being homosexual in a heterosexually dominant world. And if the terror is being visited upon them from a heterosexual being I feel like it’s simply a reassertion of the daily reality LGBTQ individuals have long suffered.

      Kass McLaws’ 2021 film Together Forever, accordingly, is somewhat unappealing to me on several visceral levels. The film begins in the pits of a high school classroom as so many bullying and coming out films do; but in this case the new boy, Ethan (Aiden Koeneman), despite the seeming disinterest of nearly every one of his fellow classmates, is nicely greeted by the cutest boy in the room, Liam (Miles McComas). Indeed, the two not only quickly become best friends, but seem to feel free to openly express their gay love, walking hand-in-hand and kissing one another from time to time on the cheek. They appear almost immediately as the perfect teenage couple without anyone around them interested in intruding upon their romance.

     I suppose that I should have hinted to us that there is something strange about this fantasy. Where are the mutual taunts that they might be force to overcome, bringing them together or pulling them apart? Where are the bullying hall boys ready to put the fear of mockery and possible brutal beatings into their minds and bodies?

     The most difficult issue that appears to come between them is Liam’s daring to finally invite his new friend Ethan over to his house. We wonder, what kind monsters might his parents be to make the decision to invite his friend over for a visit so very difficult?

      When Ethan arrives at the house it is startled by the very size of the modernistic, glass-walled mini-mansion. And clearly, when greeted at the door by his friend, he looks forward to exploring this new world.

     But only a few steps into the suddenly empty house, Ethan is struck from behind with a heavy object, blood running down his face, he waking up after in a walled-in basement-like tomb where he has been hand-cuffed to a shackle inserted into the concrete of the floor.

       Later Liam appears with a bowl of what looks like dog food, but offering at least something for his friend to at least imagine as sympathy. We are startled by his statement that he’s sorry for the situation but knows that Ethan in a few days will realize that it has been necessary before they can return to “normal,” since he is seeking to know that their relationship will last “forever.”

        That is certainly a strange way, one realizes, of asking for a permanent relationship. But when Ethan even dares to question the foundation of his logic, Liam again turns on him throwing away the bowl and kicking his friend as he lies on the floor, insisting that he should be appreciate for taking out time to feed his guest.

     We don’t know what Liam’s psychosis is all about, and we never really learn much more except to glean the fact that he evidently lives alone, his mother having died. How that might happen in a small town without the authorities having insisted upon some familial supervision, or whether or not Liam himself has had something to do with that death is impossible to discern given the dearth of information that McLaws’ script provides. But it certainly suggests that this kid is someone very different from loving being he has formally pretended to be.

      We might imagine that he wants a relationship with the boy while at the same time being so self-hating as a homosexual that he must, as Wilde declared, kill the one he most loves. The word “forever” is always related in some manner with death, the only true “forever” mankind can imagine. We have sure entered, if nothing else, a kind of romantic fantasy where love and death are intertwined.

        Rather inexplicably, Ethan finally discovers somehow to cut out a piece of the metal bowl in which his food was delivered and break through his handcuffs. It appears to involve almost a bloody process of immolation, but the camera doesn’t tell us in detail what we are actually witnessing. In any event, he returns to the main floor of the house on his way to escape when he again is met by Liam.

      Once more, the former friend begs him to stay, explaining that this is all an expression of love; while at the same moment we see the bat held behind his back.

       When he finally moves toward for the attack, Ethan greets him with the piece of cut metal which somehow gets lodged in Liam’s forehead as the boy falls dead; Ethan is startled, shocked by the result of his self-protection, but quickly escapes the house and the grounds on the bicycle he has left parked at the entry.

      We all know that such horrific behavior often cannot often be explained, but the fact that we are given so very few clues about this abnormality of behavior makes the entire work so highly abstract and completely unrealistic that we have to rethink the work from the beginning. Perhaps this is all a kind of dream conjured up in the new boy’s imagination. Certainly, we could argue the first half of this film has been a bit like a fantasy. But we simply don’t have even enough clues to put a name to what the film is trying express, the illusional world of Ethan’s vision or the reality of Liam’s brutalization and terror. Perhaps Liam has simply been transformed into the missing hallway jock that we were waiting for after Ethan’s first classroom scene. But it is difficult, given the vagueness of McLaws’ logic to even read this film as a metaphor.

 

Los Angeles, May 26, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (May 2022). 

 

Harry Weston | Two Birds in a Cage / 2021

even a hug can make you queer

by Douglas Messerli

 

Harry Weston (screenwriter and director) Two Birds in a Cage / 2021 [14.30 minutes]

 

Clearly like the US, outside of the major urban areas, Australia is filled with small homophobic towns that destroy any youth who even dares to hint at anything but heterosexuality.

     This film, by Australian director Harry Weston, begins with his character Connor (Matthew Homer) in bed with a woman (Rachel Nibbs). The sex is obviously not going well, and he sits up and quickly dresses and leaves.

      His parents Mary (Kerrin J. Brown) and Rob (Daniel Lazdinis) are glad to see him home, his father even more happy to hear that he’s been with a girl. But the homophobic intolerance of Rob is made immediately apparent as he can’t even bear to hear the news of another young gay man attacked for his sexuality, getting up and taking the remote out of his son’s hand in order to turn it off.

    On his way to work, Connor runs into his best friend from childhood, Sean (Braden J. Ligertwood), riding a bike. He gives his friend a car ride, promising to pick him up that night from work. Meanwhile, it appears that Connor works for his father as a car garage mechanic, and even his being late results in taunts from the other mechanics for his having bothered to take time out for “his little buddy,” but having heard that he’s been with a girl, they respond, “So you’re not a poof after all.”

      That night when Connor picks up Sean he attempts to talk with him, but at the last moment backs out. And the next day, as the two meet up on a park bench, Sean is curious to hear what was bothering him last night.

      Finally, Connor finds the words to tell his friend from childhood that he’s gay. Sean immediately calls out “Halftime,” meaning that he’s ready to hug and relieve Connor’s fears. The two hug, but when Connor attempts to touch his leg, he quickly pulls away, explaining that he loves him too, but not that way.

      And even a hug in this hellhole, observed by neighbor, is clearly too much. At dinner, his mother tells him that his father has gone on to a pub. What he and others are actually engaged in is almost too terrible to describe as we see them grab a bicycle, obviously Sean upon it. They take him to a remote area and beat him.

        Evidently, Sean survives enough to call Connor, who rushes out to try find him via locational messaging from the sender’s phone. He discovers him, either near dead or dead—we cannot discern which, but given the time it takes the ambulance to arrive, just after daybreak, we can presume he probably hasn’t survived.

        Being even straight, as Sean apparently was, in this terrifying town doesn’t save you from being murdered as a fag. In short these two birds are locked up within the same cage even though they are not of the same feather.

        This powerful short work, however, could have dealt with some better cinemagraphic techniques: fuller lighting, framing, and camera motion all would helped make this a superior film.

 

Los Angeles, July 26, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (July 2023).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Madiano Marcheti | Madalena / 2021

city of ghosts

by Douglas Messerli

 

Tiago Coelho, Thiago Gallego, Madiano Marcheti, Thiago Ortman, and Helena Vieira (screenplay), Madiano Marcheti (director) Madalena / 2021

 

Filmed in the Mato Grosso state of Brazil, the highland plateaus that contain some of the most luscious cropland of the country, the miles of miles of green soybean fields, the worker’s houses, the nearby urban area and the activities of those who live there are the real subjects of Madiano Marcheti’s dirge for all things sexual. Like large portions of the American Midwest and Southern states, the hard work, isolation, and rural values of the communities in Mato Grosso do not easily embrace the sexual world of Brazil’s vast urban centers such as Saõ Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. Gay men, lesbians, and particularly transgender individuals are not welcome here, as the newspaper and radio reports daily chronicle the rash of bodies discovered of transgender women. 

    In fact, this film centers around just such a death, not reported for the most of the film and held secret by the first two of the film’s figures who realize she has disappeared and, in one case, know where her body lies. In this one-hour and 25-minute film, we catch only a brief early glimpse of the body, dressed in white, lying in a back field of soybeans so remote that it is visited mostly by drones and Rhea, the latter a wild bird similar to ostriches and emus which inhabit the South America. Indeed, the soybean fields and Rhea, at times, appear to be the central images of Marcheti’s stunningly beautiful film.

      As we encounter the individuals who live in this region, they are presented only with enigmatic and brief images, and there are few we even get know, the most notable, other than the missing corpse, being Luziane (Natália Mazarim), Cristiano (Rafael de Bona), and Bianca (Pâmella Yulle); and the director represents these characters almost as ghosts haunting this world of specters. I argue, in fact, that with regard to human beings, the entire film signifies a kind of haunting, the film presenting an agricultural world of Mato Grosso as beings in absence. It’s interesting that several characters express the desire to leave the area as soon as they can, while those who plan to remain seem ghostly, are nearly hollow individuals who, to use a William Faulkner trope, endure without necessarily prevailing.

      Perhaps the healthiest of these is Luziane, who has a good relationship with her grandfather and at least communicates with her mother, collecting money owed to the home-bound seamstress.

Luziane works as a club hostess, which puts her in touch with a wide range of the younger people of the nearby town, including Cristiano, although she does not personally know him.

      It is her attempt to collect from Madalena which clues her and the audience in on the fact that the titular figure of this film has gone missing. On her first visit she calls to her several times, but receives no response, and leaves without entering the house. On the second visit, when she receives no answer, she enters, finds the woman’s purse and removes the owed money; but she also recognizes in the fact that the purse is still in the house, that Madalena’s cat has been left unattended, and the place is in a state of disarray, all of which suggests that Madalena did not plan on a trip, that something is amiss.

      Luziane is a woman who can take charge, as we see her also doing at a voting spot, keeping out individuals who block the fire lanes, and nicely registering and organizing the voting lines. She does the same at the nightclub in which she works, taking tickets and checking those listed for attendance. The club itself seems to be a place of mixed sexuality, a space where young heterosexual dancers, gay and lesbian individuals (although we are not introduced to any of these), and transgender women all congregate. At work the second night Luziane suddenly sees a vision of what appears to be Madalena, all in white, drunk or drugged out of her mind. And she perceives it as a kind of spiritual vision, sharing her feelings about it with one of Madalena’s closest friends, who we will meet later.

      Although Cristiano attends the club, he is a kind of outsider since he is the son of the landowner whose employs most of the individuals of the community. He lives in a wealthy gated community; but his father has obviously insisted that he begin as a field worker, and Cristiano daily visits the fields talking and working with the ordinary laborers. What is most important to the story is that his father is temporarily out of town, and his mother is running for regional senator. Accordingly, he has been put in charge, his father insisting that he begin harvesting the crop the second day of this film, the very same day when, having been walking the fields in search of an intrusive weed that might endanger the crop, he comes across the body. We do not see the body, only the look upon his face and his immediate retreat.

      One might think that we would quickly report the discovery, but he does nothing of the kind. He only attempts to convince his father via cell-phone to wait a couple of more days for the beans to mature; but his father insists the harvesting must begin that very evening. And Cristiano is at wit’s end.

      What isn’t said, but is crucial in order to understand his behavior, is that if he were to report it, police would have to block off the entire field as they searched for evidence; moreover, the body of a dead transgender woman found on their land would certainly destroy his mother’s political career. It is up to him to find a way to get rid of the body.

      He first, he attempts to employ the help of a friend from whom he earlier obtained a steroid injection to build up his muscles. But the strange way that Cristiano describes what he wants the friend to help him accomplish confuses and frightens him, and sends the friend on the run. Eventually after a few drinks in the club, Cristiano finds another acquaintance, perhaps a trusted employee, to take the trip with him to Field No. 4, where the body lies.

     But this time, the now drunk Cristiano’s invitation to show his friend something deeper in the field, is perceived by the older man as a sexual come-on. He seems willing to possibly provide his Cristiano with gratification, even gently stroking his hand for a moment as he takes the beer bottle passed to him. But the idea of going out into the dark beanfields for gay sex is something he is not willing to do. And when Cristiano leaves the car by himself, he attempts to call him back to the auto—willing perhaps to give him a blow job, but not willing to follow him into the dark.

      All of these bits of information which make meaning of Marcheti’s oblique tale, are left unsaid, as if the director expects his audience to either make meaning of the strange world in which he has suddenly placed them, or simply treat it as a mysterious land without logic into which they have entered, the way a visitor to Mato Gross would have to deal with the place and its inhabitants.

      Even what finally happens to the body is left open to question, as the drunken Cristiano discovers a kind of nightmarish world facing him, the large harvesters coming toward him along with the futuristic drones. We leave him stumbling along the large leafy soybeans confused and seemingly unable to right the situation.

      The only way we know he has fixed it up is that a few days later four friends of Madalena visit her house and pack away her belongings, each of them taking one or more of her possessions in memory of the woman whose death has now, evidently, been publicly confirmed. There is a sense of the inevitable in all of this. As the film announces almost as a coda, just before the credits: “Brazil has the highest number of transsexual murders in the world.”

       The friends, one of them who self-identifies as a butch dyke, another who seems to be gay male, and other two who may be either transgender or heterosexual women, Bianca and Francine, the latter the one who Luziane hinted to about seeing the ghost of their mutual friend Madalena, gather, in a different configuration, a couple of days later to take a short voyage to what now appears to have been the place where the police or others found Madalena’s body, a nearby river.

       Recalling brief stories about their life with Madalena, mostly about her utter drunkenness, they gather at the river, swim, laugh, speak of their own dreams and failures, and remember their friend the best they can. Bianca, who has taken a necklace from Madalena’s house, sends it on its way down stream in the flow as a personal sacred gesture. And in the last frames of this film all one hears is the plash of the water and its endless underflow.

       We learn no more of these women, not even their sexual identities, than we knew of Luziane and Cristiano, both of who have dropped out of sight for the third and final act. And we know these people of the city crowded against the endless green fields of soy with its rows after rows of small two room tract houses that have been built for the agricultural employees and their families This is not our world, or evidently, since most of the citizens work as virtual farm slaves, theirs either.

     In its paternal heteronormative order in which little concern is given to the private feelings, actions, racial heritage, or the sexualities of the masses; deviation of any kind has become suspect, and the order of the day is that of the traditional land owners such as Cristiano’s father. The crop is all that matters, and just as the female workers in the local canning company, everyone is expected to show up at work or lose their jobs. The only outlet that the young men and women have is the club, and a few places like it. This is not a world welcome to obvious deviators such as Madalena or other LGBTQ+ individuals, in general. Given its social structures, regions like Mato Grasso are, in fact, hostile to such beings and makes little space for them in its society. Closed social orders, as we learn time and again, are often the source of deep violence.

       Killing off the many forms of individuation as it has, this is truly a world of absences, of ghosts. No one here dares to openly reveal themselves, not even the landowner’s son. Why we wonder, after the fact, was Cristiano attempting to develop something like the overdeveloped muscles of his friend? Certainly, given his wealth, any woman would be attracted to him. Just perhaps he is seeking to appeal to his own gender, but is unable to express the fact to anyone, not even himself.

 

Los Angeles, July 1, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (July 2023).