Jean Renoir | La Règle du jeu (Rules of the Game) / 1939

playing at love: a world without sex

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jean Renoir and Carl Koch (screenwriters), Jean Renoir (director) La Règle du jeu (Rules of the Game) / 1939

 

Over the years since its first and evidently disastrous showing in France in 1939, Jean Renoir’s Rules of the Game (La Règle du jeu) has received extensive commentary, particularly concerning its masterful mix of genres—farcical comedy, soap opera, drama, love story, political documentation and social satire—which function together not as pastiche as in many postmodern works, but as a shifting, improvisational entity that allows very few moments of viewer disinterest. The farcical elements of this fable—the various affairs between the wealthy La Chesnayes, wife Christine (Nora Gregor) and husband Robert (Marcel Dalio), the former of whom has had a recent dalliance with the heroic aviator André Jurieu (Roland Toutain) and the latter of whom is trying to end his long time affair with Geneviève de Marras (Mila Parély)—serve as ridiculous counterpoint to various other enamored actions of servants and guests at Christine and Robert’s weekend chateau-party for their friends—and enemies. As in the Beaumarchais, Marivaux, Musset and Molière comedies which inspired Renoir’s script, the serving-class characters parallel the bedroom antics of their masters—although in this work no one seems to be able to make love in a bedroom but must find various public rooms, nooks, and corners of the chateau to carry on their affairs.

    That includes at least one obvious gay figure (Géo Forster, described in the cast listing is described as the effeminate guest) who appears to change bedrooms as everyone pretends to settle for the night in the Chesnayes’ country house, Colinière, all the guests not quite ready to sleep as they dart into each other’s quarters, and behave a bit like bad children on a visit to sleep-in with friends. The gay boy hits the bottom of another fellow guest with a pillow as if attempting to encourage some sort of sexual recognition, even if most the men around him are certified sexual predators of the female species.

    But there are also other figures who, even if seemingly heterosexually interested, clearly lean toward same sex identification or, at least, don’t really have the interest in women or men that they pretend.

    Octave, a life-long friend of Christine’s who studied conducting under the mentorship of her famous Austrian father, flirts with all the women, and even imagines himself in love with Christine whom he looks after almost as a replacement father, describes himself openly as “not the marrying kind,” even if late in the plot he imagines eloping with his mentee. The character, performed by the film’s director Jean Renoir, is a clumsy bear of a man—he even appears dressed in a bear suit from which he cannot escape with the help of others in a series of playlets performed at the estate for the guests. He is also a good friend of the male hero of the story, Jurieux—the aviator who has flown across the ocean single-handed in the tradition of the American Charles Lindberg simply to impress his would-be lover Christine—who, despite his own hanger on designation insists that Jurieux be invited to the country party, despite the fact that it might present itself as a scandal, sharing a room with his male friend.

     Like the actor’s real-life role, Octave does flawlessly determine many of the actions and fates of the film’s central figures, but can find no real place for himself in this wealthy, rather moronic society, including any sexual role.

      Christine’s personal maid, Lisette (Paulette Dubost) is married to the estate’s gamekeeper, Edouard Schumacher (Gaston Modot), whose German sounding name, is in fact the true danger in this film set just a few months before the real German onslaught on France in 1939. She also engages in flirtatious dalliances with Octave and, more importantly, with the newly hired poacher, would-be house servant, Marceau (Julien Carette), who arouses the true jealousy of Schumacher who spends a great deal of the later film chasing him around the estate’s magisterial rooms with a loaded gun. Yet she is entirely devoted to her mistress, with an almost lesbian intensity that might make even an old dyke like Mrs. Danvers envious. She has utterly no intention of rejoining her husband in Colinière and environs, far preferring Christine’s Paris mansion. She might like the meaningless attentions of someone like Marceau, but has no time for real sex and, particularly, has no desire to be a traditional wife bearing children.

      And finally, even the master of the house, Robert, Marquis de la Chesnaye, might be described as rather effeminate, a man who despite his “love” of his trophy Austrian wife, and the supposed lover of Geneviève de Marras, is far more interested in his complex musical mechanical toys which he collects, representations of the figures of the world he might wish to embrace. Actually, he can no longer bear his mistress de Marras and meekly attempts to get rid of her, but is not man enough to stand up to her determination to tell Christine about their affair if he leaves her. We cannot imagine the two actually sharing anything but semi-affectionate kisses, and Robert clearly lives apart from his wife, having no sexual involvement with her whatsoever.

    Indeed, almost all the figures are ineffectual heterosexuals and pretend lovers, except the truly passionate Christine and our stock-boy hero Jurieux who is also so structured into the “rules of the game” that he could never run away with the woman he loves without properly explaining the situation to her husband first.

      All is show with the so-called naughty couples of this film, who lie and cheat with their spouses, their so-called sexual partners, and even with themselves.

     Even in their pretend show of being woodland hunters, they have a host of servants to beat the pheasants and rabbits out of the wood and into close range so they can pretend to be game hunters, and the brutally frank documentation of a shooting party’s indiscriminate massacre of every pheasant, rabbit, and quail that can be scared out of the woods by tree-pounding servants into easy killing-range—Renoir reveals through images alone the stupidity and violence at heart of this French society of wealth. Their every action is pretense built on wit and skill they don’t truly possess.

    Part of the great joy of this cinematic masterpiece is the insanity of these figures and others as they rush about the chateau, camera zooming after them, in chase of one another, lover running after lover, husbands in chase of wives and suitors both.

     Renoir, however, has deeper issues up his sleeve, so to speak. Particularly through his presentation of the always ready-to-be-bored party guests and their meaningless activities—from the silly amateur theatrical presentations of brief musical renditions of Tyrolian operettas (including a singing bear, Octave, who later can find no one to help him out of his costume), a macabre skeleton dance.

    The servants, meanwhile, give us glimpses of the antisemitism behind their culture.

    As critic Richard Brody observes in his The New Yorker review:

 

The Rules of the Game doesn’t mention any political figures, but it alludes to the division underlying the Occupation and its depravities: antisemitism.

     Robert is a marquis, inheritor of an ancient title of nobility, who nonetheless has German Jewish ancestry, something that attracts the attention of other characters. His own chauffeur haughtily refers to him as a métèque, a derogatory term for an immigrant, and his chef, noting that the subject of discussion is, specifically, Jews, praises the Marquis’s culinary refinement, says that he’s a gentleman “even though he’s a métèque.” What’s more, Renoir emphasizes Robert’s identity by casting the suave and ebullient Marcel Dalio, born in Paris as Israel Mosche Blauschild. (He was soon to win fame in Hollywood as the croupier in “Casablanca.”) The very antisemitism that Renoir underscores with the dialogue and the casting was partly responsible for the film’s commercial failure: right-wing viewers, aware of Renoir’s left-wing politics, came out to boo when Dalio was onscreen, and rightist critics sniped at the character, too. Meanwhile, the plot-pivoting rage of Schumacher—whose name Christine pronounces as if it were German—suggests a barbed allusion to the militaristic wolf at France’s door.”

 

      As Europe stood at cliff’s edge, Le Règle du jeu demonstrated all too well, evidently, why France would be unable to defeat the German armies. The film was not only badly received, but caused an uproar upon its premiere, one theater patron even lighting a newspaper afire in hopes of burning the movie house to the ground. Other theaters planning to show the film were threatened and, after having been re-cut several times, the movie was ultimately banned on the grounds that it was bad for the morale of the country. It is a near-miracle that most of the lost footage was eventually recovered and the film rediscovered in the Venice Film Festival of 1959. The movie I watched today, again for perhaps the 10th time, was the 1959 version that reinstated nearly all of Renoir’s original enforced cuts.

     A great many critics, in fact, have seemed to suggest that the film’s unstated predictions foretold a kind passivity on the part of the French haute bourgeoisie that ultimately allowed some French citizens to readily accept the Vichy government. Octave’s remark early in the film has been quoted extensively: “You know, in this world there’s one thing that is terrible: that everyone has his reasons.”

     Even earlier in the film, one of Renoir’s figures puts it quite bluntly, asking the audience outright, “What’s natural these days?”

     Once again what was thought to be natural among the wealthy class was homosexual behavior, not all greeted in Renoir’s work with an acceptance of what truly mattered. The elite, it is quite clear, even from Renoir’s generally humanistic perspective, were a neutered, asexual folk.

     Renoir’s work is significant because it brings these issues into focus, and although the director has no easy answers to his questions of moral consequence, the ultimate result of the ridiculous follies of the chateau’s inhabitants—the shooting death of the “hero” aviator André says everything: meaningless violence will ultimately be accepted quite readily by this society.

      Even if I cannot readily agree with these assessments of the film, Renoir’s work is so beautifully textured and complex in its structure that the movie moves in many directions simultaneously. I am interested, however, in another perhaps less political issue—although an ultimately even more troubling issue concerning the “polis”—a concern embedded in Renoir’s title, “the rules of the game.”

     We must recall that the theatrical performances, shooting parties and sexual chases I’ve already recounted are just a few of the “games” these people undertake. These people are, as Robert Altman has suggested in his version of such a “country weekend,” Gosford Park, an absolutely bored folk, a group of individuals with a great deal of money but, who without imagination, are desperate for further entertainments. The film begins, as I have already suggested, with just such a “game,” André has matched the record for long-range flying of Charles Lindbergh, a feat accomplished not because of his love of flying but in order to impress Christine. When she does not show up for his landing, he sulks, refusing to speak to the waiting radio audience; in short, as Octave describes it, he behaves as a spoiled child.

    The minute the guests begin to arrive at the La Chesnaye’s chateau, they begin talking of games: bridge, ping-pong and belote. Robert, the master of the house, is a collector of mechanical toys and other such gadgets, and the highlight of the theatrical productions is his presentation of his newest—and largest—acquisition to date: a room-size musical clock that features various doll-like figures performing instruments. Some of the most ridiculous moments in the movie, moreover, portray the nap and bedtime rituals of this group of supposed adults as they gather in the hallways to promenade back and forth, kissing each other goodnight, the males roughhousing like teenagers armed with pillows and other props. There is something almost painful in Renoir’s insistence upon our witnessing these child-like antics.

     To repeat, the most awful of the “entertainments” enjoyed by this group, however, are far more aggressive. The favorite game at Colinière is obviously gossip, a game that can be won only by the party being gossiped about admitting (or partially admitting) the facts. The camera almost drools over the various guests’ and servants’ salacious comments on the relationship between Madame La Chesnaye and André Jurieu until Christine blithely admits that the two have seen a great deal of each other and he has undertaken his voyage on her account. Later, upon accidentally spying her husband embracing Geneviève (an embrace, ironically, he attempts to deny her), Christine readily purports to have known of the affair, even convincing Geneviève of her knowledge and acceptance with an offer of open friendship. Even though she is an “outsider”—an Austrian and all that might suggest on the eve of World War II—she recognizes that the “rules” of this French game require that she not lose face.

    Yet, unlike most of the other figures in this game-playing universe, she is impetuous, desirous of breaking the “rules” by taking up with almost anyone who will help. The actress playing this part may be, as the late film-critic Gerald Mast described her, “as haunting and bewitching as a plaster giraffe,” but in her very ungainliness she stands apart from the others. After a brief tryst with M. de Saint-Aubin, she admits her love to André, suggesting that he and she simply run off. This “hero,” as I’ve already noted, must play the game properly, first accosting her husband to tell him of their intent to run off, and perhaps engaging him in a duel or at least suffering his outrage. Their “duel” of fisticuffs ends in Robert’s friendly warning that without sufficient money André can never hope to make Christine happy. And afterwards, they unexpectedly bond as two males who cannot quite fulfill Christine’s desires.

     Admitting her disappointment with her earthbound “hero,” Christine confides in her childhood friend, Octave, who also has secretly loved her all these years. After a long discussion, he agrees to take her away, but Lisette convinces him that, with no source of money whatsoever, he also would not be a good match. He hands over his coat to André who rushes to his waiting heroine and to his destiny, death at the hands the jealous gamekeeper, Schumacher, convinced that the woman waiting in the greenhouse is his wife Lisette. Meanwhile, even the testosterone-driven Schumacher has also bonded with another disappointed heterosexual of his class, Marceau.

     If we have some difficulty caring about the demise of the blandly dutiful André, we still recognize that his death signifies there is no escape from the confines of the highly-structured game-playing society. For in such a context, no other reality is possible. Robert covers up the murder with a simple lie, which Le Général salutes as evidence of his “class.” As Octave tells Christine: “Everyone lies: pharmaceutical fliers, the government, the radios, the movies, newspapers.”

    As the commentator who writes under the moniker Dragonknight on Letterboxd observes: “The Rules of the Game looks incredibly fresh as if it was made yesterday and about the world we’re living in and not the doomed Europe of 30s. There are some shocking and hair-raising similarities between what Renoir portrays in his film and what is happening in our time. We’re not on the verge of another madness, are we?”

    All their games, indeed, are based on falsehoods. In such a world, no one dares to ask the obvious questions: Are hunters to whom their prey is forced into gunsight really hunters? Are these hideously amateur performances really worthy of such delirious applause? Are any of these individuals really attractive enough to warrant such amorous attentions? Is a weekend in the country truly an enjoyable event? Most importantly we realize that in a world so caught up with meaningless affairs of the heart, there is utterly no time for actual sex.

     The parallel structures of master and servant, accordingly, make it quite clear that the class differences are not at the heart of this woeful tale of pre-World War II France. Indeed, the puppet-like “masters” must submit to the “realities” they have created every bit as much as the man downstairs shining their shoes.

 

Los Angeles, May 27, 2006; revised May 28, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (May 2026).

 

 

Sridhar Rangayan | Evening Shadows / 2018, USA 2019

when worlds collide

by Douglas Messerli

 

Sridhar Rangayan and Saagar Gupta (screenplay), Sridhar Rangayan (director) Evening Shadows / 2018, USA 2019

 

Although Hindi cinema has had several gay films, including works by director Sridhar Rangayan, this director’s most recent film, Evening Shadows, now available on Netflix, is perhaps one of the most nuanced and relevant of LGBT Indian films—particularly given the fact that it speaks contemporaneously of Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, which criminalizes homosexual acts.

      More importantly, this film, through its focus on a rather well-to-do conservative Hindu family in southern India, reveals the effects of patriarchal privilege and misogynistic behavior that underlines much of the culture. 

     Our point of view is through the eyes of a young gay man, Karthik (Devansh Doshi), a photographer living with his gay companion, Aman, in Mumbai; Karthik has returned home for a visit for a holy puja ceremony, which involves songs, rituals, prayers, and invocations to the god, often involving fire and special objects. It is clear Karthik does not often visit his birth home, and his mother Vasudha (Mona Ambegaonkar), particularly, is excited about her beloved son’s return.

      Karthik’s father Damodar (Anant Mahadevan) is also impatient for his son’s return—but for reasons very different from those of his maltreated wife, a woman expected to do all the cooking, care for the selfish live-in aunt, and attend to all the details of the puja; he has planned the occasion to announce the arranged marriage to a local girl, Neela (Disha Thakur), with whom Karthik has grown up. It is time to come home, he announces, and find a real job in business—photography in his mind obviously not being a true “business.”

      This film, in short, is a mini-version of “When Worlds Collide,” as Karthik is forced, quite gracefully, to bow out of the proposed marriage with his beautiful young neighbor, calm his anxious lover back in Mumbai (who apparently is highly involved with the politics of the Section 377 decision) and pay the attention to his loving mother that she deserves. On top of that, he has a married uncle, in the closet about his sexual identity, hotly pursuing him. He calms his ineffectual aunt by taking photographs of her which she might post on a dating web-site. This might have been pure farce, but Rangayan calmly puts the pieces together so that we can easily differentiate the loving and generous life Karthik leads in Mumbai away from the conservative, over-heated, often hostile world—particularly for the women—of Karnataka.

       We perceive that world, the society in which Karthik grew up, in small, carefully edited flashbacks and poignant memories. There are many lovely scenes in which the young Karthik works in the kitchen with his mother—while the father mocks their closeness—when the young boy, visiting in the “evening shadows” a local cruising place, where he encounters, unexpectedly his uncle, realizing that the man is also gay, and when he recovers a “treasure” he has buried as a young adolescent—a container with pictures of handsome young men and male movie stars. Through these artfully directed throwbacks, we come to comprehend that Karthik’s sexuality has not been a sudden awakening in the big city, but a gradual realization of who he was in a cultural backwater.

      It’s odd how much Karnataka and my upbringing in Marion, Iowa have similar parallels. I had no gay uncle, and my father was never intentionally misogynistic. Yet Damodar’s utter hatred for gays and lesbians reminded me so much of my own father. Even an innocent question, as I mention elsewhere in my numerous writing, about homosexuality before I had imagined myself as gay, brought down a torrent of wrath that I could not even assimilate. The culture that supported both had a conservative religious bond from which, like Karthik, I too had to escape in order to survive. After I met my companion, visits home also grew fewer and fewer. Although eventually loved by my parents and my grandmother, Howard seldom opted for a visit. I don’t have a cellphone, but my intense calls to Howard during my stays must have seemed like a kind of male hysteria.

      Karthik handles it all with much calmer and helps Vasudha, through a trip with her alone to Indian archeological sites at Talkad, to perceive the abuse she has had to endure. But when he finally admits to her that he is gay, she goes into temporary shock, crying, moving into silence, and shunning the boy she so intensely loves.

     But like many such mothers, she finally comes into a kind of acceptance, and in so doing recognizes the narrow patriarchal world in which she too has had to allow in order to love the unloving husband. When Karthik’s uncle tries to rape him, his wife enters, observing his own version of male rites. Surely their relationship, despite their children, cannot now survive.

     In the empty house where Damodar rules, he accidently uncovers pictures from his son’s computer that make it clear about Karthik’s sexuality.

      Fortunately, the director does not follow that discovery. It is Karthik’s mother who will now steer the family into the acceptance of her son’s difference.

      I should add that this film, at moments, with its many beautiful songs, seems almost like a Bollywood version of a tense gay drama. So much the better. We should sing of the joys of motherhood, of sexuality, of living as we all naturally should.

      The shadows may remain, but evenings are filled with joy and, now perhaps, a new kind of understanding—or at least comprehension. The whispers and secret troves can now be spoken and opened for all to see. Damodar no longer rules.

       With good reason, this film won several awards at queer movie festivals throughout the world.

 

Los Angeles, March 17, 2019

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (March 2019).

 

Lou Cheruy Zidi | Boy Oh Boy / 2018 [music video]

into the woods

by Douglas Messerli (scenario and director) Boy Oh Boy / 2018 [5 minutes] [music video]

 

In this French music video featuring Sufjan Stevens’s “Visions of Gideon,” a group of male and female lovelies in their 20s (Joss Berlioux, Alexandre Bouyer, Clara Cisse, Louis Cristiani, Sara Etienne, Lucia Passaniti, and Samba Peul) meet up at a camping overnight trip in woods near a lake, as in most such picture-postcard portrayals leaping into the water, giggling, and making out with each other beside a crackling bonfire. The girls shake their hair with absolute pleasure as the boys caress their shoulders.

     But these days, you know, things aren’t always what they seem to be. Two of the women began a deep kissing event in the middle of their surrounding male friends. At one moment a heavily tatted dude (Bouyer) suddenly stands and challenges the handsome Joss Berlioux as if he has been flirting with his girl. But in the midst of their violent encounter, poised over the prone body, he kisses his victim, and they can soon be seen from a distance having sex in a car before they return to the group.

      The rest of the group, having decided to go skinny dipping in the lake, don’t even miss them. And in the morning Berlioux’s girlfriend comes up behind him, tickling his neck and a slightly brooding Bouyer staring out over the lake, turns back to quickly give his friend a quick look—whether of joyful remembrance or disdain cannot be determined.

   Whether or not anything might change in the sexual dynamics of this group, or whether it will simply be chalked up to a few too many beers is undetermined. Certainly, no one at this gathering gives much deep thought to anything but their beauty and momentary urges.

       This work is interesting to queer film audiences only in how deeply entrenched LGBTQ life as become even in the musical video world, the culmination of which we can observe in the works of Lil Nas X.

 

Los Angeles, September 23, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (September 2022).

 

Rufus Shaljean | Not Another Coming Out Story / 2025

an emptied world

by Douglas Messerli

 

Rufus Shaljean (screenwriter and director) Not Another Coming Out Story / 2025 [26 minutes]

 

Two gay south London teens are deep friends, perhaps on the verge of a relationship, but not admitting it or maybe even quite wanting it, yet feeling a closeness that comes from a sense of isolation from those who surround them. Mostly they smoke, drink, and, later, take drugs, discussing who they might like for sex partners.

   Tommy (Rufus Shaljean), the less experienced of the two even imagines that after they finish school they might just travel together some place else, and wonders if his friend Star (James Ryan Nunn) might really contemplate doing that with him.

     They meet up with a drug dealer (Alexander Summers) who offers them a panoply of drugs, explaining to them the drug “G” (Gamma-Hydroxybutyric acid, also known as the date rape drug). “Imagine someone dancing with you,” he suggests, but is not truly interested in you. “G is the cheat code to make them horny.” Actually, it doesn’t make the date horny at all, it simply incapacitates them, and ingested in a drink puts them asleep in about 15 minutes, allowing the provider to have sex with them without their permission. “Those taking it will have lower inhibitions and feel a sense of euphoria. You just have to make sure not to overdose.”

     “Why?” asks Star.

     “You will lose motor functions, have respiratory difficulties, and you will fall under or die.”

     It can, however, be counteracted by taking some stimulants. The dealer demands they pay him and leave.

     We know already that for these kids, danger lies ahead.

     They are about to test the drug, Tommy losing his virginity in the process. But just before taking any drugs, Star and Tommy and an intimate moment and begin to kiss, revealing their love for each other. But it is Jake (Cameron Wright) whom he has expected to make to love to him, not his best friend with whom he jerks off.

     Jake shows up and Tommy and he begin to make out, while Star makes a Grindr meet-up with “John.” As Jake and Tommy kiss, both for the first time, Star is served some G by John (Marlon Kemeka), evidently a requirement in John’s sexual encounters. The dosage is too strong, and it apparent, that despite the pleas for John to stop, Star dies, while Tommy enters sexual nirvana.

      Tommy may be now with Jake, but he no longer is truly happy, filled with the feelings that he shared with Star.

     Tommy forgets to pick his younger sister, Maddie (Maddy Hunter), from school. He is now regularly on drugs. Everything, including the film, is in now in black and white. His sister wants to things to return to normal, but how can that be possible for Tommy who has lost his best friend? He even offers Maddie one of his regular pills, what he realizes in hindsight, was not very responsible action. But faced with the disappearance of his best friend, the drugs create what he describes as “a silence in his head.”

     It’s not actually “silent,” he admits, but he feels like the whole world is empty and he is the only one left behind. And once again, he has forgotten about Maddie, who apparently has been left in Jake’s hands, he also attempting to offer her drugs. Maddie finally reacts to Tommy’s complete irresponsibility, querying him about giving drugs to a 14-year old. Jake, Tommy discovers through her, has no love for Tommy, but simply feels sorry for him.

      Finally, moving through the pictures on his cellphone, Tommy discovers and almost expired photo of John, and he immediately hooks up with him.

      John immediately offers him a drink of water, demanding he drink it all up. And we wonder, why, knowing vaguely what happened to Star, would he even accept the drink surely filled with G?

     He passes out, but apparently recovers after spiritually recommunicating his friend Star. The last scene show him, now in full color, apologizing to his sister, explaining that he feels responsible for Star’s death. But finally, he has been able to move on.

      I have to say this was not an appealing film to me, a man who has never much been intrigued by drugs outside of alcohol. The film won several awards when it first appeared, but the approval makes no sense when one of the two central figures dies from their careless use of drugs, and the other also becomes a near-victim.

      The pair might have made a lovely couple if only they would have survived. But as it is, it is a warning without a clear message, and the apologia comes far too late to mean anything for either of them, let alone his neglected sister. And where are their parents in this dystopian world?

 

Los Angeles, May 27, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (May 2026).

     

Papu Curotto | Esteros / 2016

back to the beginning

by Douglas Messerli

 

Andi Nachon (screenwriter), Papu Curotto (director) Esteros / 2016

 

Based on a script by Nachon with direction by Curotto from 2015, a short film titled Matias and Jeronimo, this movie of the following year can’t match the beauty and exquisite-horror of the early short film. The two boys in that film, Rodrigo Coutinho Da Silva and Gabriel Rost, are far more lovely and innocent than the slightly older child actors, Joaquín Parada as the young Matías and Blas Finardi Niz as the child version of Jerónimo in Esteros.

     Yet, the movie as a whole is quite moving and fulfilling, even if one wishes that it might have included the terrifying scene when a lovely gay dancer in the local Carnival Madi Gras is beaten and left for dead at the black the bleachers where the boys sit, an incident which they observe and explains why perhaps the older Matías of the film, Ignacio Rogers, is slightly homophobic and imagines that he is a straight man, now in a relationship with a woman named Rochi (Renata Calmon), whom he has brought back to the Esteros or Tidelands from Brazil, his new homeland. She also seems to know her way around the small Tidelands town.

    His visit, it quickly becomes apparent, is not only because of his love of region, but his particular obsession with the estuaries near the farm where Jerónimo (Esteban Masturini) lived with his family, particularly his wonderful accepting mother Marilú (María Merlino) who endlessly took snapshots of the boys as if she recognized that their simple boyish affection and later adolescent sexual experimentation was far more than just early male bonding.

    We discern quite quickly in this film when we realize that Matías has told Rochi a great deal about his love of the farm near the estuaries without explaining to her that the home was where Jero lived with his parents, not the home of his own family.

     Jerónimo, in the meantime, who has remained in the backland instead moving on to the cities, has abandoned his possible career as a film director and his now happily involved in creating small action figures and creating small scenes of them for actions films. He still occasionally works as a make-up artist, which is how Rochi knows him, and with knowledge of his intimate childhood friendship with her boyfriend, having asked him to help make over Matías as a zombie for a costume party she and he are attending.

     Jeró is now openly gay, and seeing him again after all these years obviously enlivens Matías’ interest, although he strongly resists the pull of the old relationship, now equally impatient with his girlfriend. Immediately we perceive that something’s got to give, particularly when even Rochi, surprised that he has an old friend in the village, encourages him to meet up.

     Matías does so, as the two basically evaluate each other lives, realizing that neither of them have fully lived their potentials. But Matías is also fascinated by the fact that Jeró has remained in his beloved tidelands as an openly gay man, while Matías has chosen a straight life in which he is clearly unhappy. While he once dreamed of becoming a wildlife biologist, he is now employed in researching a new strain of soybeans.

     Jerónimo, on the other hand, has not become the director that dreamed of being, but is somewhat happy just making small movie action figures which are often used as figures in movie scenes. Both realize, without saying so, that there is something missing—and although they cannot yet admit it, they subliminally register that missing element is one another.

     Jerónimo, in particular, does not attempt a full expression of his feelings, going about his daily acts almost as gesture of his separation from his former childhood friend, Matías misunderstanding several of his friend’s hugs and friendly relationships with other males as representing relationships, which finally Jeró makes clear are only friendships; he has not found a companion with whom he wants a relationship.

     If Matías appears to have found the love of his life, we realize, particularly in Rochi’s need to constantly remind him of their love for one another, that something is not quite right, Matías passively accepting her hugs and kisses while yet remaining somehow aloof.

     When Jerónimo tells him that his mother and father still live on the farm in the estuaries where Matías spent so many of his summers, he is totally complicit that two should out a day to revisit it. They arrive to find Jeró’s parents away, due back perhaps that night, but actually the next day.

     Jerónimo suggest they revisit their old playing grounds, the nearby swamps wherein as children they imagined to be infested with alligators and snakes, but nonetheless, stripped off they clothes, jumped into swim, wrestle, and fling mud at one another, later to be forced to shower together in childhood eroticism resulting later in adolescent in masturbatory sessions with one another.

    Not trusting Jeró’s ancient truck, Matías borrows Rochi’s car to travel to the place. This time they boat to their old destination, as somewhat distant adults. For the first time, they along with us as voyeurs, actually take in the full beauty of the estuaries, the natural habitat of so many birds and other wild life. And there, suddenly Matías pulls off his shirt and dives in dressed in his blue jeans, Jeró following where they swim, wrestle, and repeat their childhood pleasures.

   By the time they return home it is raining heavily, and Matías pretends concern for Rochi’s car, both realizing that they cannot drive back to the town in such a tropical downpour.

    Jerónimo pours out scotches, and Matías turns on the music, the two of them briefly dancing together which they also freely did as children, although always with a slight sense of dis-ease.

     He attempts to telephone Rochi, but can’t seen to reach—or perhaps merely pretends to.

    Matías is determined to get some ice for their drinks in the kitchen, delighted to see the very same small fridge from old days. But the door is coming loose, and although he attempts to screw back in the bolts, he fails, Jeró joining him to quickly fix the situation.

    It is as if in Jeró’s easy accomplishment of the task that Matías suddenly realizes his complete ineptness at attempting to live as a straight macho male who might “take care” of his female lover. He realizes that he is indeed inept, passive, perhaps not even interested in heterosexual sex. The shock of realization terrifies him, and he suddenly charges out back into the rain to sit out a long period in the car, while the startled Jerónimo awaits he return.

   When he finally does come back into the house, something earthshattering has happened. For now when he enters, he suddenly kisses his old friend and two begin to engage is glorious sex, even when they hear Jeró’s parents have returned home, simply relocating to Jeró’s bedroom where they continue to fuck.

   In the morning they appear without shame to Jerónimo’s mother, who seems to accept the fact that they slept together now as full adults. She even offers a photograph on her cadenza she has taken of two boys laying together as children. But Matías does not take it. He now knows that he must face a future that he is not at all reader to accept. He returns to town, cautiously returning to their apartment. Roschi, smart woman that she is, has perceived what has occurred, and refuses, as they later sit of the staircase to hash it out, for him to even touch her. She demands that he listen to her, always the dominant one in their relationship. Her statement is not one of devastation or even disappointment. She simply insists that Matías return to his true love.

    Unlike so many thousands of unhappy movies where the male is still unable to overcome his learned homophobia, or to release himself from his myth of his heterosexuality, Matías immediately seeks out Jerónimo in the small shop where he sells many of his models of action heroes. The two kiss, and it is clear they have found themselves to their utter delight in love with the person they had always hoped to become their lovers. As in a fairytale, we know these two will continue to live happily together until the end of their lives.

 

Los Angeles, May 26, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (May 2026).