Roberto Pérez Toledo | La cuarta cita (The Fourth Date) / 2020

sexual frustration

by Douglas Messerli

 

Roberto Pérez Toledo (screenwriter and director) La cuarta cita (The Fourth Date) / 2020 [6.22 minutes]

 

Pérez Toledo’s 2020 film was obviously shot during the early months of the COVID crisis, and the two males of this film, Rubén Bernal and David Mora, are forced to meet up on line for their “fourth date,” only the first evidently having been in person.

      They joke for a while, comment on one another’s clothing and appearance, and express their frustrations for their situation, one of them even more anguished than the other because he evidently cannot speak loudly, having either roommates or family in the next rooms. He is also particularly dissapointed that they didn’t have sex the first evening when they met. But both are obviously in need of a full sexual encounter.

     They finally decide to engage in sex on line, but feel it’s so outré in this day and age, something someone might do in 2007, but not in 2020. Nonetheless, they show off their packages, try to talk “dirty,” and attempt to determine who goes first. But it all seems so ridiculous and removed that they end up in giggles instead of orgasms.

       Both are so attracted to the other, but the distance makes what they really seek impossible: an exploration of one another’s bodies. The first finally dares to tell the other why he wouldn’t have sex that first night, whispering it before speaking the words for fear that his admission he feels “that it’s stupid to have sex the first night with someone you really like” might mean that the screen will go black. This is, after all, the age of one night stands, of the Grindr world where you call up someone else, meet, have sex, and return home sexually satisfied—not the world of dates and giggles which these two have now been forced to “reexperience” like something from the past.

       But the second one, demanding once again to see his friend full face, does not disappear, but sighs in despair, “Fuck! Why did I have to meet the perfect guy just before having a national quarantine due to a pandemic?"

     The other bashfully responds, leaning forward: “Did you say the perfect guy?”

     “Just don’t get too excited, eh?”

     This is one of the first short films to directly confront the problems of what in some countries amounted to a two-year or more hiatus in most gay and heterosexual contact for the numerous younger unmarried individuals. If AIDS meant entirely new ways of approaching sex, so too did the COVID crisis, meaning that young people of now two generations have had to put a stop to their normal sexual activities, a far more serious problem than the self-censoring media will ever admit it to be.

 

Los Angeles, February 28, 2023

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (February 2023).

Roberto Pérez Toledo | Admirador secreto (Secret Admirer) / 2015

pairing off

by Douglas Messerli

 

Roberto Pérez Toledo (screenwriter and director) Admirador secreto (Secret Admirer) / 2015 [7 minutes]

 

Carla (Sandra Martín) is getting messages from a secret admirer, someone who loves her and apparently knows a great deal about her, but will not provide his name. Her three male roommates (Miguel Ángel Bellido, Yerai León, and Ventura Rodríguez) have varying notions of what to do about it. One suggests it’s gone far enough that it’s reportable; another thinks that it’s certainly not dangerous, given the friendliness and love expressed in the letters. The first friend believes that she’s being stalked and that all secret admirers are ugly.

             From left to right, the negative friend, Carla, the second friend Javi, the silent 3rd roommate

     The second friend wonders whether she recognizes the handwriting as being one of her classmates’. But he writes in capital letters, obviously, to change his handwriting.

      The second thinks that overall, it’s nice: “He knows your name, he could add you on Facebook… He could text you on Whatsapp and be a nuisance. However, this guy is gentleman, he writes nice things.” He likes him.

      But the first friend disagrees, arguing that it makes no sense to write how you feel.

      The second argues that they’ll simply see what happens when it happens, the first, obviously a man of strong negative feelings, adds, “Let’s see when the gentleman threatens to chop your neck off.”

      Carla notices that he has failed to note his apostrophes, contracting a word without putting in the proper punctuation.

       At the fifth letter the secret admirer suggests Carla may not hear from anymore, not because he doesn’t continue to admire her, but it hurts more each time. S(he) signs it “love.” The negative friend again finds him “annoying.” But this time, their female roommate observes, it wrote the letter quite beautifully, without any missing apostrophes. The second friend suggests that perhaps he is the fat neighbor and has been listening into our corrections. The first friend wonders if perhaps the secret admirer is “here, in this room.” The third, who has said very little up this this point, suggests in must be Javi, who’s a mess at spelling. Javi—the one I refer to as the “second friend”—responds, “Well, I know how to write “fuck off.”

      The next day, there are no letters, just a water bill. Facing the three again as they sit upon the couch, she asks them again whether it was one of them who has hassling her. But each one responds, “no.”

      She’s mad at herself, she confesses, for being disappointed that a man she doesn’t even know has stopped writing.

      The next day Javi is laying alone on the couch when Carla comes in announcing that there has been another letter. Javi is curious: another from her secret admirer? But the letter, this time, is addressed to him. It begins, as he reads to the whole group, with the writer feeling that when the letter is put into the slot that all is “irreversible.” The writer goes to say that he has heard that when you feel something for someone, it is better to say it than to hide it—words appropriated from the very first letter we have heard read out.  

       As he continues reading, the camera pans to the young man I have been describing as the negative friend, who mouths the words as they come out of Javi’s mouth, including the last line: “I’m in love with you, Javi.”

     Now you also have a secret admirer, Carla adds, as Javi contemplates the letter he has just read aloud. “What the fuck is this?” he asks, looking up into the faces of his friends, as the third, more silent of their members, declares “I always get confused with apostrophes.”

       As the camera pulls back, we see that for the first time the four are now paired off, face to face with their secret admirers, lovers they did not know they had and perhaps do not even desire. What they’re going to do about it is left to our imaginations.

 

Los Angeles, February 25, 2023

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (February 2023).

Roberto Pérez Toledo | Sí a todo (Yes to Everything) / 2016

i can’t say no

by Douglas Messerli

 

Roberto Pérez Toledo (screenwriter and director) Sí a todo (Yes to Everything) / 2016 [3 minutes]

 

Enrique Cervantes Carlos as the busy talker in this 3-minute episode, has already fallen for the guy he’s standing next to (Carlos Soroa) before he speaks his first words. In a record shop, a taller good-looking boy is busy leafing through the record selections as the slightly more stout but equally attractive boy next to him speaks about his fascination with the way he looks.

      Finally, the taller stranger looks his way and, observing “Enrique’s” smile, engages him with a smile of his own, signing—establishing from the onset that he is deaf—something apparently about the record selection, and then moving on to signal another message, the lover responding “I don’t have a clue what you are talking about, but it’s ok, I say yes to you to everything. Soon they are wandering about the store, strangers who seem to have immediately become good friends.

      Enrique’s character is sure that his friend can read his lips or, if not, he can write his message out on paper. When he finally is face to face together with his new friend, he asks if he can read his lips; it evident from the other’s response that he cannot. He attempts to explain: “I…like…you,” but the deaf boy seems not to comprehend the message. Enrique asks “Do you like boys?” to which the deaf boy appears to demonstrate his frustration for their lack of communication.

      In the following scene they are riding the escalator down, face to face, which should make it clear to nearly anyone that something is a bit strange in this friendship to say the least. When the shorter boy moves his hand slowly to touch other boy’s hand, however, there is no flinching. He seems to like it, given his self-reflective smile.

     Seemingly worn out, the two boys are sitting together in the next frame. Finally, the chatty friend asks for a cellphone so that he might get his new friend’s number. But it’s not until he himself pulls out his own cellphone that the other understands his request. He takes up the phone and texts: “I don’t know you very well or what you’re up to, but you’re lucky, I also say yes you, to everything.”

     Now standing, the formerly deaf boy, signals the other on.

     If I were in the constantly talking boy’s shoes, I might resist that “come one,” given that the other apparently has been deceiving him the whole time, not a way to begin any new relationship, even one as impulsive as the speaker has been. I’m not sure that Pérez Toledo, however, wants us to make a judgment about either of the two boys who have just made such a remarkable leap into love.

 

Los Angeles, February 19, 2023

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (February 2023).

Roberto Pérez Toledo | La peli que vamos a ver (The Movie We Are Going to See) / 2017

i don’t want to hear about aids

by Douglas Messerli

 

Roberto Pérez Toledo (screenwriter and director) La peli que vamos a ver (The Movie We Are Going to See) / 2017 [5 minutes]

 

In the final stages of wonderful lovemaking, one young man (Fran Antón) suggests to his bedmate

(Javier Santiago) that, having had great sex, they might now do something “useful” such as seeing a movie.

     The second wonders if their sexual after-play isn’t useful. But the first not only would like to go to the cinema but has a particular movie in mind, French director Robin Campillo’s 120 battements par minute (in English BPM [Beats Per Minute]), a film about AIDS and the ACT UP group in the 1990s. The film buff’s friend is not really interested in the cinema, and certainly not up to seeing a film about AIDS. He’s more interested in superheroes like the Marvel figures.

      His friend wonders about his intellect, since the two still getting to know one another, and challenges him also about how he might feel if he suddenly were to tell him that he’s HIV-positive.

      Suddenly the second man is made quite obviously uncomfortable, querying the friend to make sure it’s just a bluff. But the friend proceeds in the enquiry, suggesting that his answer truly matters.

      The friend attempts to steer around the subject, obviously uncomfortable with discussing any aspect about AIDS, and possibly anything to do with death in general. But the question remains open; would he suddenly get up and leave if his friend truly was infected?

       Once more, his lover tries to find a way out of answering the dilemma by saying it certainly would be something that he wouldn’t wish for his friend, and that he would certainly have to think about it. But we can also see that he is still attempting to discern whether or not his friend is speaking hypothetically or attempting a roundabout confession.

       But even that waffling disturbs this short film’s moviegoer. What is his new lover afraid of. Might he be there if he did get sick? What are his values? Is he truly so limited in his tastes that he cannot even see a serious film?

       When his friend pleads with him to tell him whether or not the scenario he has tossed out is real, his friend admits that he not infected, and the other immediately agrees to join him at the movie.

        But in this transaction, we have learned a great deal about both men, and are certainly doubtful after this very brief conversation that the two can become life-time partners—that is, unless the lesson the second has just been taught about facing up to reality and the passion of the movie he is about to see might encourage him to think more deeply about life.

       Obviously, Spanish director Roberto Pérez Toledo had been highly moved by the film, which came out in the same year in which this film was made. And in some respects, one might think of this short as almost being a plug for Campillo’s excellent work. But these are the kinds of questions, nonetheless, that need to be asked and dealt with nowadays with any new gay relationship. Certainly, I have no time with of those many young gay men who don’t want to hear another word or see another film about AIDS, statements that have appeared in a couple of recent movies (notably in Jordan Firstman’s Call Your Father from 2016 and Etyan Fox’s Sublet from 2021).  It is a little bit like saying don’t tell me ever talk to me again about the Holocaust. There are just some horrific events that need to be always with us in our collective consciousness, particularly when the possibilities of such horrible and illogical death and hate still remain in the human brain.

 

Los Angeles, November 15, 2022

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (November 2022).

Roberto Pérez Toledo | Zombie Kiss / 2016

makeup

by Douglas Messerli

 

Roberto Pérez Toledo (screenwriter and director) Zombie Kiss / 2016 [4 minutes]

 

Pérez Toledo’s 2016 Zombie Kiss begins with two handsome young men making love and then eating large bowls of spaghetti as if to build up their energy for the night ahead. For it is the Spanish day for the celebration of what we in the US call Halloween.

     Using coloring dye, makeup, and cream lotions, they costume themselves as bloody zombies, both having evidently just been chewed upon. But the heart of the film lies in their decorating one another’s bodies, a haphazard but still almost ritualized affair, as they begin with red hearts and white dots that slowly become transformed into large festering sores. In their process of making-up one another there is clearly a sense, also, of ancient natives painting themselves up for war.

     They complete their costuming with a deep kiss before joining their women friends on a walk down the city street. The Spanish celebration of Halloween, based on the notion that on this day the dead come back to life as ghosts or zombies who roam the streets. That is why masks are not included in this celebration, so that the zombies can recognize human beings as one of them. Masks in Spain, says the narrative voice, are “just not a Halloween thing.” But here the film slightly shifts, as the men go down the street each hand-in-hand with a woman. “But, someday we won’t need to disguise ourselves anymore,” so the narrative intones, suggesting that even in 2016, these boys feel the need to pretend they something other than who they truly are: real human beings in love with one another.

      I find this work, despite its welcome message, the thinnest of the films of the talented director I am reviewing in this collation.

 

Los Angeles, February 22, 2023

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (February 2023).

Roberto Pérez Toledo | Hola, mamá, hola, papá (Hey Mom, Hey Dad) / 2016

nothing will ever be the same

by Douglas Messerli

 

Roberto Pérez Toledo (screenwriter and director) Hola, mamá, hola, papá (Hey Mom, Hey Dad) / 2016 [5 minutes]

 

Jaime (Daniel de Llano) certainly chooses one of the most original ways to declare he’s gay to his parents, speaking from a cellphone from a hotel bed in Madrid lying next to his boyfriend Mario (Miguel Ángel Bellido). One might suggest that it is a cowardly way to “come out,” except that the two boys, who have obviously long discussed Jaime’s coming out, are so charming in their celebratory announcement, that it’s hard to be angry at them for long.

    He begins with a brief series of shots of the modest hotel room itself, as if showing his obviously provincial folks, the glamor of the city life before he then sits down, announcing that “I wanna tell you this little thing.”

     If Mario hasn’t come to Madrid to see the musical “Holy Camp”—although he will probably see it anyway—he has come to the capitol city to observe, as he explains to his parents, Gay Pride Day. And, so he declares, “I am here to celebrate too.” And it is at this point that he begins to hint at his own difficulties, as he describes the people “here” as being brave, that they don’t fear and just want to live and be themselves. He, so he reveals the real reason of this visual phone message, he wants to be like them, the city queers of Madrid.

      Finally come the words which they might have suspected would someday be spoken: “I’m gay. I like boys.” But if that isn’t enough of a shock, in the very next moment he introduces them to Mario, admitting yet another lie, that the last time he was in Madrid it was not to see a concert of Ruth Lorenzo, but to see the boy he met on Instagram. “He’s a very nice guy,” he’s studying architecture (as was Cupid’s potential boyfriend), and “I love him a lot.” As Mario waves at his suddenly new in-laws, there is something terribly funny and almost giddy in the moment.

     The message is complete. All that is left is for him to send it, and as he does so, he comments: “Nothing will ever be the same,” Mario responding, “It will be better.”

      It reminds me so very much of the several trips I made from a small city in Iowa to Chicago as a 15- and 16-year-old (although these young men are obviously older) to see Broadway touring companies perform musicals and plays in that Midwestern metropolis. The only enormous difference, sadly, is that I really traveled by bus (just as Jaime has) to see the plays, with no one there with whom I might share a bed—although I now realize in hindsight that I wished something like that might happen. I would have never been able to tell my parents back then in person that I was gay; and we had no cellphones. My father had already told me that if he found out I was gay, he would disown me. But since nothing happened, I could convince myself a few years more that perhaps I wasn’t gay, so there was nothing to tell.

     Now that Jaime has finally opened himself up totally to the truth of his future life he only must wait for his mother and father’s response. The phone rings at the end of this comic short film by Pérez Toledo, and after a few gulps and further rings he finally picks up the call. “Mom?” are the last words we hear, never learning of her response.

 

Los Angeles, February 20, 2023

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (February 2023).

Roberto Pérez Toledo | Cupido in Love / 2015

the confused cupid

by Douglas Messerli

 

Roberto Pérez Toledo (screenwriter and director) Cupido in Love / 2015 [4 minutes]

 

When I first encountered this short film on a Facebook connection, I thought for the first minute or two that it was an ad (which, in a larger sense it is, given that it is part of a series of short films concerning love, El amor mola, funded by Spain’s El Corte Inglés department store). But I was intrigued by the beautiful boy playing cupid (Pelayo Rocal), got up in a slightly ridiculous if cute white diaper-like costume, sporting a blonde wig and a basket of arrows all in the service of attempting to sell one of the store’s newest perfumes, LovAmor.

     But of a sudden our cupid, Jesús spots a friend Marcos (Angel Velasco), a boy we soon discover he very much likes, coming his way, and attempts to hide—without success. They greet as he pulls off his wig, almost blushing in embarrassment. When asked what he’s doing, he answers “Shooting arrows” as he sprays some LovAmor in his friend’s face.

     “What is this?” Marcos continues, Jesús interrupting to answer “a job.” Acting jobs, he suggests are rare these days. Marcos has just finished his architectural studies. He’s designing, of all things, a funeral parlor.

     But suddenly Marcos changes the subject, suggesting that they never exchanged numbers. Of course, Jesús has no pen or paper, so that his friend has to write in on his arm (which seems to have become of tradition of the way eager young lovers exchange numbers in gay films).

      As Marcos holds Jesús’s hand for a moment to write his number down upon his arm, you can see the boys find one another quite attractive. And a moment later, Marcos says he’s curious about something: “What if Cupid falls in love with someone?” “No, no,” Jesús emphatically replies, “Cupid cannot fall in love.” “Why?” He stutters around for a bit before concluding, “Because it’d create an amorous-sentimental paradox with terrible universal consequences.”   

     His friend laughs and is prepared to leave, wishing that he will shoot lots of arrows today. But he stops in his tracks and asks Jesús to “shoot him.” He takes out an arrow from his quiver and puts it into his bow, lobbing it clumsily towards his would-be lover, almost asking to fall in love with cupid himself. Marcos picks up the arrow, puts it to his own heart, and signals that Jesús should call him, as the cupid smiles in delight, spraying a little of the perfume on himself as his friend walks off.

      Without beings assured of their meeting up, we are convinced they both intend to give it a serious try. This is a film that you can only describe as being dead-on “cute,” a word generally not in my regular vocabulary, having grown up a world where nearly everything pleasant is described in that manner.

      Interestingly, in retrospect, Wrik Mead in his 1998 short film Cupid answered the very question about what would happen to the saint of love if he himself were to fall for someone else; in Mead’s answer his penis becomes so engorged and endlessly projected that it curls itself around his body, rendering him unconscious and immobilized by his own narcissistic love. Fortunately, Jesús is not a real cupid, any more than he is a real son of “god.”

 

Los Angeles, February 19, 2023

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (February 2023).