an unattainable desire
by
Douglas Messerli
Yohanan
Doron and Ariandé
King (screenplay), Yohanan Doron (director) Allende / 2021 [10 minutes]
Fransisco
(Uriel Mendoza) is a young handsome Mexican man married to a quite beautiful
woman, Maria (Caraly Sánchez), with one young son and another child on the way.
Obviously, he has married young and, as a day laborer, forced to find a way to
support his growing family.
But what quickly becomes apparent is that
there are far worse problems facing the couple, Fransisco is quite obviously
attracted by the male sex, and now spends much of his days, when he isn’t out
shopping with his wife and child, brooding and longing for a male companion.
It is a story that anyone who has followed
my work through the years will immediately recognize as a truly common one,
retold again and again in so very many films, short and feature, that it is
clear it is now a LBTQ+ genre so popular that it almost matches, so it seems,
the “coming out” story. In fact, it is another version or sub-genre of that
story, about men who are so trapped and caught up in the heterosexuality of
their society and family that they were unable to successfully come out as 16
or 17-year old boys and believed they might resolve their sexual desires by
marrying and proving themselves as successful heterosexual husbands.
For them and their wives and children, it
is almost always a disaster, their youthful cowardice or simply denial of their
feelings, slowly being revealed as a frustrating and terrifying unhappy world
into which they have now locked themselves seeming forever. The story appears
even in so-called gay classics such as Brokeback Mountain.
I should add, this dilemma not always, but
most often has a great deal to do with class. Most of the young high boys who successfully
or even disastrously come out to their parents are middle or upper class
children, having grown up in basically loving and heterosexual families. For
the poor and undereducated young boys, such possibilities seem almost
impossible. Although we are not shown anything about Fransisco’s family life,
it is evident that he was born into poverty himself, church and family life replacing
any other possibilities for the young boy growing up.
But now, he is distraught, as is Maria and his child who cries for his father to pick him up, but is ignored as the brooding would-be cowboy sits in a corner smoking, thinking, frightened, and horrified by the life into which he feels entrapped.
One day, picked up as part of a work gang
to repair fences in the Mexican desert, he meets Miguel (Américo del Río), with
whom he makes eye contact, the two laying working side by side on the fences,
moving ever closer together and, in Doron’s excellently filmed movie, finally
falling into kisses and finally passionate love-making. However, as often
happens in such situations, Fransisco, even then, is suddenly seized by the realization
that what he is engaged in is sinful and wrong in his societal upbringing,
begins to beat the handsome Miguel before finally giving into the passion, the
ending the scene laid out together after clearly having culminated their
actions with sex. Doron intercuts their sexual activities with an equally brooding,
angry, and worried wife at home, who eventually takes a shower and accidentally
or, maybe, purposely aborts her own child, evidence in the bloody towels hung
out in their back yard which Francisco discovers when he returns home.
This
film offers no solutions. Often, there are none for such beings as Fransisco
and Maria. Their relationship will perhaps just grow more and more distant and
isolating as Fransisco begins time and again to see outside sex with male
companions.
Some of the promotional descriptions
define some scenes as surrealist, but I find them all too real and
representative of reality. There is no surrealist palette in this film. All the
individuals are tapped until one of them comes to the realization that they
have to leave and change their lives, given their financial conditions and
responsibilities, a near impossibility.
It is too late and far to difficult for such
men to “come out,” and besides, to whom would they come out except to their
still own-conflicted selves? And even worse, we know within most societies today,
there are still thousands of others who remain in this closeted position. You
cannot come out in a world that will deny your very existence and the choices
have made if you were to do so, particularly that may even mean your own
destruction if the “truth” ever got out.
In Spanish the world “allende” means
something “beyond,” beyond the horizons, beyond the seas, unattainable at best.
Los
Angeles, October 17, 2026
Reprinted
from My Queer Cinema blog (October 2026).
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