Tod Browning | Dracula / 1931

homage to a dead vampire

by Douglas Messerli

 

Garrett Fort (screenplay, based on the book by Bram Stoker and the play by Hamilton Deane and John L. Balderston), Tod Browning (director) Dracula / 1931

 

Before I even begin discussing this film, I must reassert what has long been presumed and discussed often in academia, but not in the popular media: Vampires are inherently homosexual, and their activities of sucking the blood of living human beings cannot help but be associated with sexual activities, along with other queer forms of behavior which border on cannibalism and purposeful infection.

     Let me just begin by reminding the reader that in order to survive, the vampire, who lives only at night and evidently for eternity unless special actions are taken (a stake in the heart, sunlight pouring in upon a vampire in his coffin, etc.), survives only through the intake of human blood, the gender being of no importance. In both F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922) and in Tod Browning’s Dracula, in fact, it is the male courier Thomas Hutter in Nosferatu and Renfield (Dwight Frye) in the 1931 film to whom the vampire is first attracted, and who, in both cases, become slaves to his desires. In the original Bram Stoker fiction, the author expresses it even more clearly in having his Dracula—as he orders his women vampire cohorts out of John Harker’s room (in the original it is Harker who travels to Transylvania in order to meet with Count Dracula)—exclaim “To-night is mine! To-morrow is yours?” as he moves into the bite.* And later, after Lucy Weston dies, becoming the vampire described as “the woman in white,” she dines almost exclusively on female children, hinting at kind of lesbian pedophile behavior as well. Because of his needs of sleeping in the soil in which he is buried, his limitation to night time activities (the way we point to the gay life of bars and clubs today) and his strange sexual habits, the vampire inherently is forever an outsider, one who cannot safely be brought into heteronormative society.

     Of the numerous essays discussing this phenomenon, I’ll quote a couple of more recent critical studies, the first by Clare Nee from her essay “The Haunt of Injustice: Exploring Homophobia in Vampire Literature”:

 

“The classic texts of Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla and Bram Stoker’s Dracula reinforce the notion that the vampire encapsulates societal anxieties about the “uncontrollable,” one that pertains to sexuality and transforms these narratives into cultural hauntings. While some people may believe that vampire literature are composed of merely silly, “make believe” stories, the truth is that they act as platforms to address serious social issues—such as homophobia—that still haunt our society. Carmilla and Dracula portray the hunts for and violent deaths of homosexual vampires to underscore the normalized marginalization of homosexuals, a cultural haunting that extends into modern society.”

 

     Or, as William A. Tringali puts it in his essay “Not Just Dead, But Gay!”:

 

“The vampire is the queerest of monsters. Its terror does not emerge because it is an ungodly creation of science, or a mindless killing machine. It does not rise from the deep, scaled and covered in algae to steal unwary beachgoers. It is not a mishmash of various corpses, sewn together by a mad scientist. It does not howl at the moon, or remain a mild-mannered Jekyll in its waking hours, only to transform when it lies down to bed.

     No, the horror of the vampire is sexual. Worse, it is sexual in all the wrong ways. It is beautiful, charming, even occasionally funny and likeable, but definitively abnormal. This allows the vampire to become a conduit for cultural anxieties concerning queerness within society. As a creature that straddles the binaries of life and death, drawing attraction and repulsion, the vampire queers both gender and sexuality. Stories about vampires can reflect and dramatize cultural anxieties surrounding queerness across both time periods and mediums.”

     Other than Dracula (Bela Lugosi) himself and Mina Seward (Helen Chandler), the female who he chooses to attack—more as a way to get to her fiancée John Harker, I argue, than his secondary  attempt to diminish the strong intelligent and independent-thinking women of the day who Mina and her friend Lucy Weston (Frances Dade) represent—the central figure of Browning’s version of the myth is actually Renfield, who is left by the vampire in the least pleasant of situations: a still-living man in the thrall of the beast, who, although able to survive in the daylight, is unable to fulfill his nighttime desires, particularly to feast of human blood. He is left only with rats, flies, and an occasional spider. Aware of what is happening to the Seward family, inculpating him the gradual murder of Mina, he is nonetheless unable to prevent what is occurring due to the ignorance of Harker and even Mina’s father, both of whom resist the warnings of Van Helsing (Edward Van Sloan) and Renfield himself.

     Renfield is both made detestable because of his horrific laughter which is interrupted to be part of his madness and pitiable because of his “in-between,” twilight kind of existence. He is neither fully human or one of the “undead.” You might almost describe him as gender indecisive, or even as a closeted queer, a man who dreadfully desires to suck the blood of a human male but is forced to refuse himself the privilege, demanded by outside forces (in this case Dracula) to fulfill his  desires with unhuman flesh, making him also an outsider but with none of the vampire group support system. He can read the language of the wolves, but still cannot run with them. At only one point in the film, when the maid faints, does Renfield dare to move in for human flesh, and that it quickly interrupted.

    If Seward and particularly Harker were not so stubbornly traditional and heterosexual in their presumptions, they might have used Renfield very effectively as a conduit to the vampire world, saving Mina far earlier from the intermixture of blood which will doom her to the life of vampirism. But Harker is insistent in Browning’s version of enacting a kind of rape, of carrying her off to London presumably to protect her, when in fact it will simply remove her from Van Helsing’s useful, if still ineffective protection.

     Instead, Dracula uses her as a tool to get to Harker, forcing her to attempt to bite into and suck her would-be lover’s blood, another evidence of gender shifts in this film, demanding that Mina be the active force of sexual desire while the male Harker sits back in dull contemplation of what he might possibly do to save his woman. And in this sense, the scene when she interrupted mid-bite is a truly comic scene.

     Of course, male privilege and English Victorian order must be restored, the source of sexual deviation—as well as representing an infiltration of foreignness (a symbol of the British fear of being overwhelmed by Jews and the Romani) and the Victorian fears of disease which Nosferatu and Dracula both represent (particularly Syphilis, but also with the specter of rats, Bubonic Plague and other diseases)—must be permanently destroyed before it spreads. The strange mix of scientificism and belief in primitive folklore that Van Helsing represents is finally forced into action as he and Harker visit the Abbey where Dracula resides.

     Dracula, feeling betrayed by Renfield, murders his slave who cries as he is strangled are those a still human being who knows that for him there will be no afterlife, since his blood has not yet been fully intermixed.

     Wandering about calling out Mina’s name instead of being able to bring himself to action, Browning’s Harker is sent to find some object to help Van Helsing pound in the stake, and it is Van Helsing who finally destroys the sexual abnormality that Dracula represents.

     That destruction, oddly, completely restores Mina to complete female lassitude as she explains to Harker her attempt to call out for him but had no power to express. Van Helsing, in a strange moment, sends the now normalized lovers off, explaining he will join them shortly. Why, one must ask, does he remain in the cellar of the Abbey with the dead monster, even momentarily? It is a question that has haunted ever since I first saw this film as a young man, and even more so when I revisited it the other morning.

     You needn’t be academic to simply wonder about this event or even in one’s attempts to possibly to explain it. I think the answer might have something to do with the fact that throughout the narrative, Van Helsing himself as been in a kind of middle-ground of the societal concerns in which he lives. He is, as I suggested earlier, both a believer in the scientific method and in the ancient myths and wives-tales of the Romani, who play a much larger role in Stoker’s original epistolary fiction. It is Van Helsing who first notices that Count Dracula does not appear in the cigarette box mirror, or, in other words, that his image is not properly reflected in the normative vision of the Sewards and Victorian society in general. Realizing that Van Helsing is his true enemy, Dracula attempts to do away with him through hypnotism, drawing him near so that, perhaps, he might suck Van Helsing himself into his world.

      Van Helsing moves slowly forward, as if on command, but then moves just as slowly backward in his tracks, obviously fighting the force of Dracula’s power. Dracula himself recognizes that his foe has “a very strong will,” realizing that he cannot simply pull the scientist into his orbit even if the man believes somewhat in the supernatural, or, to put it in other terms, perceives that there is in fact a world of sexual difference available to the society.

       Could it be that Van Helsing himself feels the pull of homosexuality, but has been successful throughout his life in resisting it, in disallowing his emotions to overtake his intellect? If so, it would only be natural that the man wants a moment to bow down in homage to the monster he has overcome, a monster even within himself. He perhaps needs a moment of private worship or prayer to the force he has been able to destroy not only in the world but within his own being.

       Given the immense outpouring of Dracula-based films and vampire movies since the appearances of Nosferatu and Dracula, it might have seemed like a wonderful idea to group and compare the dozens of films as I have done for the Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde-influenced works and the films involving Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher. But the Dracula and other vampire films are so numerous and also involved, many representing a gradual transformation of the original myth, that in the end I felt it better to contextualize such films within the periods in which they were released.

    A substantial number of directors, moreover, not fully grasping the sexual implications of same-sex blood sucking, have presented their Draculas to be primarily heterosexual opportunists, like the monsters that the #MeTo movement have come to speak out against, who represent little of direct interest for the LGBTQ community. Particularly given the vast resurgence of interest in the vampire that has occurred in the past ten years, giving rise to dozens and dozens of new films mostly aimed at younger audiences, I will discuss appropriate works within the context of the period in which they were created. If the 1994 Anne Rice-inspired Interview with a Vampire is a direct descendant of Dracula, George A. Romeros 1968 ghouls of Night of the Living Dead issue from the graves of another fictional universe.

 

*Stoker, who was apparently homosexual himself, was worried that the line might make the novel unpublishable in the England of 1897, feeling that, as Nina Auerbach and David J. Skal put it, “the America that produced his Walt Whitman would have been more tolerant of men feeding on men.” Stoker wrote highly homoerotic letters to Whitman and the two became friends. Stoker also began writing Dracula one month after the death of his friend, Oscar Wilde.

 

Los Angeles, January 25, 2023

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema (January 2023).

Lloyd Bacon | Wonder Bar / 1934

sleepwalkers

by Douglas Messerli

 

Earl Baldwin (screenplay, based on the play by Geza Herczeg, Karl Farkas, and Robert Katscher),

Lloyd Bacon (director), Busby Berkeley (musical director) Wonder Bar / 1934

 

Upon her arrival early in the film at the famed Parisian nightclub Wonder Bar, a bourgeois Babbitt from Schenectady, Mrs. Pratt (Louise Fazenda)—wife of the manufacturer of “nuts” (Hugh Herbert), accompanied to the club with his businessman friend, Simpson (Guy Kibbee), the manufacturer of “bolts”—declares to Mrs. Simpson (Ruth Donnelly) “Well, this place doesn’t compare with the lobby of the Bijou Theatre in West Schenectady!” The women, nonetheless, find the interior of the bar, particularly in the vast caverns of endless dances featuring Busby Berkeley’s multiple-mirrored sets, to be quite enticing.

     Their husbands are simply looking for a good time with a couple of belles de nuit who spot them and follow along with the several moves of table Mrs. Pratt insists upon as the girls ogle and wink at their husbands. Don’t worry, when a gigolo gets sight of the heavily bosomed Schenectady “mother” he makes a pass, and the two women determine to put a little sleeping powder into their husband’s nightcaps to permit themselves a night in gay paree, just as their husbands determine to apply the same deceit to free them of their wives. We get the idea immediately: for those who can’t truly appreciate the wonders of Wonder Bar a good night’s sleep is a just punishment.

      The real denizens of this club which features the dance duo, Inez (Dolores del Rio) and Harry (Ricardo Cortez), are much more sophisticated in their attempts to get the love they want. Liane (Kay Francis) is determined to run away from her famous banker husband Renaud (Henry Kolker) if necessary to maintain her affair with Harry; and Inez, who loves Harry, as we later discover, is willing to go even further in her attempts to keep him in her bed.

      Meanwhile, nearly every male in the joint, particularly Wonder Bar’s owner and emcee Al (Al Jolson) and the club’s band leader and off-stage composer, Tommy (Dick Powell), is in love with Inez, Al having nightly dreams of her floating above his bed and Tommy staying up all night to create songs about his amorous pursuit.

      And then there is the Wonder Bar regular Captain Hugo Von Ferring (Robert Barrat) who, having just lost everything he had left in the stock market is planning to spend the few francs he has left to celebrate a grand send off with the chorus girls and others before driving over a cliff on his way back to his house.

      Love, it seems, might put nearly everyone in this film to sleep before the night’s out. If the American nuts and bolts quartet are destined to a long night’s snooze, so is the sleazy double-crossing Harry provided an early dispatch into eternal rest by a knife his jealous partner puts in his chest as they whip up, quite literally, a gaucho dance (the South American version, evidently, of the French Danse apache). To save the woman he loves from any embarrassment, Al manages to stow Harry’s body in the Captain’s car, having been told by that gentleman about his midnight plans. That’s 6 down...and 3 to go. But wait, Inez, almost immediately recovering from her passionate mistake, finally comes to realize that she truly does love Harry, who given the singing composer’s bland and always smiling presence will surely soon bore her to death.

      Meanwhile, the movie’s audience might wish to have a little cat-nap to escape the loudly recorded stand-up jokes which Jolson cracks whenever director Lloyd Bacon gives him an opportunity, which is far too often. There’s the one about the nudist colony from which Al has just returned, “tired from seeing the same faces all the time.” Did you know that in America a boudoir is a place to sleep, while in France it’s a playground? A chaise lounge is a Murphy bed back in the good old USA. A moment later there’s the long embarrassing skit in which Jolson pretends he’s Russian, striking up a conversation with his White Russian émigré friend Count “Ofenlong” in which he describes the former great “wiolinist,” having lost everything, is now a street peddler selling “or-ang-és wid and wid-out cids.” The skit goes on...but I have to presume that your interest has already “vaned.”

       If those worse-than-vaudeville jokes don’t put you into a dreamy heaven of slumber Jolson’s overtly racist blackface number “Goin’ to Heaven on a Mule” will surely send you into a stupor of astonishment.

      Writing in Sense of Cinema, David Boxwell describes the event:    

       

"This now notoriously extravagant 'tribute' to African-American culture serves as a key illustration of the laxity of official overseeing and governance of content in Hollywood films before the middle of 1934. No doubt entirely defensible to its creators, this long musical number climaxing the film is only different in degree to the many ways in which mainstream American popular culture appropriated black culture and distorted it through a racist lens which was ostensibly “affectionate.” As Eric Lott argues, “blackface minstrelsy has seemed a form in which transgression and containment coexisted, in which improbably threatening or startlingly sympathetic racial meanings were simultaneously produced and dissolved.” Thanks to his performance in The Jazz Singer (1927), Al Jolson was associated with blackface performance traditions originating as far back as the 1830s. This number was a kind of apotheosis of Jolson’s blackface star persona, but Berkeley also intended the number to be a fashionable reflection of the Harlem Renaissance’s verve, as well as a utopian vision of material plenitude for deprived Depression audiences, regardless of their racial-ethnic identity. While we find the grotesque elaboration of racial stereotyping in the number appalling today, Wallis and Lord also must have known, deep down, that the unfettered breach of taste inherent in the number wouldn’t fly past the SRC, hence their unwillingness to screen it for the Committee."

      Well, you might say to yourself, there are all those Busby Berkeley numbers to simply sit back and enjoy. But here too, I find the repeated images of hundreds upon hundreds of women, hands swaying through the air while their gentlemen dancer friends move in and out of pillars to be a real snooze. There are, as usual, the impossible-to-believe overhead kaleidoscopic visions of human bodies shifting, like wilted flowers, into patterns that are momentarily worth watching just for pure wonderment. I am sure, however, that when Siegfried Kracauer saw this film he must have gone bananas (that’s crazy in German), with which, by the way, Berkeley had much more fun (that’s bananas not Kracauer).

      And speaking of fun: any gay viewer on the lookout for the film’s rumored “panze” humor should not blink twice. There is the early scene when a man asks if he may “cut in” to a seemingly heterosexual dancing couple, only to dance away with the man, to which Al, hand on hip, limp wrist in air, snipes: “Boys will be boys.” And even in heaven there is a blackfaced fairy, hankie in hand, who hands Al his silver foil wings. Well, at least black gays don’t necessarily go to hell.

      Whoever suggested that all pre-code movies were a lot more fun ought to be forced to sit down to watch Wonder Bar back to back twice, no snoring permitted. But then by the year this film was released it was no longer a “pre-code” movie. Things had changed, and those two men dancing off across the crowded dancefloor were also dancing out of our lives.

     It almost makes one want to cry when recalling that this film was 1934s big hit. I think Mrs. Pratt was probably right, I bet the West Schenectady Bijou did have better features.

 

Los Angeles, October 30, 2020

Reprinted from World Cinema Review and My Queen Cinema blog (October 2020).

Edmund Goulding | Grand Hotel / 1932

room to room

 

William A. Drake and Edmund Golding (screenplay, based on Drake’s play, adapted from the novel by Vicki Baum), Edmund Goulding (director) Grand Hotel / 1932

 

Although directed by the stolid Hollywood craftsman, Edmund Goulding, who from 1925 to 1958 worked with many of the most notable actresses and actors of the time (Greta Garbo, Bette Davis, Tyrone Power, and even the Marx Brothers in A Night at the Opera), the portmanteau drama, Grand Hotel, was truly the work of Irving Thalberg, who not only brought up the rights but whose MGM backed the play on stage before determining to film it. Shot on a budget of $700,000, the film was one of the most successful works of the period and his been beloved for generations after, despite the fact that the puzzle box of often conflicting stories reveals it to be actually little more than a thread on which to hang a series of star-leaden monologues.

     But then this film did have stars, and used them to great advantage. As a jewel-thief, Baron Felix von Geigern (John Barrymore) gets the opportunity to actually have conversation with most of the films’ characters; and stenographer, Flaemmchen (Joan Crawford) also meets at least three of them. The dying accountant, Otto Krigelein (Lionel Barrymore), who plans to use up his entire savings just to stay in the luxury of Berlin’s Grand Hotel, has worked most of his life for self-centered General Director Preysing (Wallace Beery), and becomes friends with both the Baron and Flaemmchen, with whom this meek man walks away to new life in Paris. Poor, suffering Grusinskaya (Greta Garbo) an aging ballerina who famously wants to be alone (“I want to be alone”) gets that opportunity by encountering only one of the major players, her would-be lover/and might-have-been robber, the Baron. 

     In between is a cast of hundreds who, as Dr. Otternschlag (Lewis Stone) notes “come and go” without anything happening.

       Of course, between these others a great deal does happen. Preysing fails to make a deal that might save his failing company, attempts to buy a relationship with Flaemmchen, and, finally, kills off the work’s “hero,” if a hotel thief—even as nicely mannered and basically principled as the baron is—might be described as a hero. 

       While apparently in the past the Baron has been very successful in his hotel heists, this time he is thwarted—by love—in stealing Grusinskaya’s pearls and is not allowed to pocket—by friendship and conscience—Kringelein’s fully stuffed billfold. Without money, he cannot pay off the thugs for whom he works and, accordingly, cannot run away to a better life with the Russian dancer. It short he is doomed everywhere he tries to turn, so it is not surprising that the writers killed him off.

     The poverty-stricken Flaemmchen falls in love with the Baron, takes up Presysing’s offer for a more temporarily "intimate" relationship, and runs away with Krigelein.

     The dying Krigelein, meanwhile, comes to life, learning how to dance, gamble, drink, and love for the first time in his existence.

    Even the hotel porter, Senf (Jean Hersholt) finally becomes a father to a new-born son, his wife in labor throughout all the events recounted above.

     Only to the disfigured doctor does “nothing” happen, an irony that surely delighted, as it still does, the film’s admirers.

     Looking back at this grand war horse now, it’s hard not to be an admirer of the truly remarkable set, particularly when the cameras flit across the bustling hotel lobby, or when they peer down upon the cascade of circular staircases that take us down into that lobby once again. The rooms, shot almost as if the film were a noir, are not elegant places but rather cramped spaces with dark-goings on: drunken sleep, shady and ecstatic sex, robbery, intended suicide, and murder. Outside, the grand hotel is precisely that,  “quite grand.” but inside it is a pretty dreary place for those “who want to be alone.” And the movie, despite its veneer of glamour, is, given the hours it spends inside each of these different character’s trajectories, often simply depresses one. In the end, we perceive Grand Hotel not so much as a coherent movie, than as a series of extended vignettes, each tuned to the various actors’ talents, none of them quite cohering.

     We’d see this style of filmmaking soon after in Dinner at Eight and in the dozens of star-leaden but mediocre hotel, airport, and disaster films of the 1960s and 1970s (Airport, The Towering Inferno, etc.), as well as the satires of the same genre such as Airplane!

      But then Grand Hotel was one of the first and finest. It won as Oscar for the Best Film of 1932 (without garnering a single other nomination), and has been enshrined in The National Registry. So why complain? 

    As the TV broadcaster of Billy Wilder’s The Apartment puts it, “sit back and relax as we now present Grand Hotel.” The only trouble, Jack Lemmon finds, is that the movie, given all the ads surrounding it, will not be broadcast during the meal he hopes to eat while watching it. Somewhere, there’s a kind of metaphor in that fact: the grand banquet the movie seems to offer up doesn’t quite ever get delivered, and we’re left—despite our expectations—still a bit hungry.

      Given the fact that several queer theorists and LGBTQ critics had mentioned this film as having a number of gay figures, I too was disappointed to discover them only in the figure of Grusinskaya’s assistant Pimenov (Ferdinand Gottschalk)—a neurotic, slightly "flitty" man who calls her "Glu," who Richard Barrios describes as "one of cinema's first evidently gay courtiers to a showbiz diva" who later that year played a somewhat similar role in Cecille B. DeMille's far more openly gay The Sign of the Cross—and in a hurried glimpse of two rather tweedy women obviously enjoying one another's copy as they hang out in the great hotel's Yellow Room bar; but they are certainly not dancing together cheek to cheek as Barrios suggests—unless somehow while watching the entire film four times I happened to miss it, which certainly might be possible given the fact that I wrote this review in 2017, having missed any of the so-called "gay" action I recount in these last eight paragraphs. Indeed, the bar scene is hardly worth mentioning and one might wonder, accordingly, why it even matters except for the fact that Goulding put it in the movie and saw to it that it stayed there despite a thousand other cuts.

 

     Evidently during the early 1930s "pansy craze" it simply was unthinkable that gay or lesbian figures would not somehow be represented. As Pare Lorenz wrote in Vanity Fair in June 1933, as quoted in Barrios' Screened Out:

 

"An educated foreigner, strange to the land, might well conclude from the general moral precepts of ordinary movies that the country at large was engaging in a final orgiastic, razzle-dazzle dash to the devil. He might convince himself if he looked over the record and discovered that only five years ago hundreds of legal and official censors, under the watchful eye of chief wowser, Will Hays, made it almost impossible for a director to handle a manuscript dealing with any of the everyday faces of life.

     Currently, our foreigner would find...pictures especially created for ladies who admittedly prefer pants to petticoats and he would find in almost every movie comedy some allusion to homosexuality.

     Oddly enough, he would also find that even though the censors allow such things, the public cares so little about these antics it consistently stays away from the theatres."

 

      Yet movie-going audiences, it appears, were very interested in these phantom sightings. As Barrios reports, at the opening of Grand Hotel at Grauman's Chinese Theater on April 29, 1932 the police department honed in—among the audience of noted celebrities that included the likes of Jean Harlow and Clark Gable—on "a strikingly gowned woman and her tuxedoed escort," detaining them as they left the theater and arresting them soon after. That beauty in a gown, apparently, was no woman, and it was illegal to appear in drag in public if not connected with an onstage performance. Perhaps the movies were not so much “losing” customers as simply drawing in a more diverse audience than Lorenz might have imagined.

     

Los Angeles, May 5, 2017

Los Angeles, April 9, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (April 2022).

 

Andrés Gómez Tovar | Andrés Gómez Tovar

self-hate, fear, and vengeance

by Douglas Messerli

 

Andrés Gómez Tovar and Boris Abaunza (screenplay) Andrés Gómez Tovar (director) Una Semana (By the End of the Week) / 2019 [12 minutes] End of the Week

 

This is a truly horrifying short film in which the central figure Fernando (Juan Manuel Orestegui) meets up secretly in a garage with an assassin, Juan Manuel Orestegui (simply titled the passenger) explaining that his wife has found new love with a younger man and that wants the man in a pink sweater (Carlos Carvajal) killed, explaining that they meet in a hotel almost every Tuesday night, and that the job should be done by the end of the week.

     The would-be assassin, although he needs the money, still tries to talk with Fernando about changing his mind, particularly after recognizing in the photograph a man who he describes as a fag; I mean would you or I wear a pink sweater, he asks Fernnado. She must have met him the gym teaching some sissy exercise maneuver, he argues. Is Fernando sure that he wants the man killed: mightn’t he just rough him up a little with a warning or even just drive him out town?

     And there is the matter of having to forgive his wife. The hitman argues that he must first learn how to forgive her. He explains is own situation where he had begun playing less and less attending, boozing and whoring around, to the woman he truly loved. And the real problem was he couldn’t forgive her, that the idea that she had been with another man begin to eat into him with such an intensity that he ended up killing both he man and his lover.

      Fernando pays him half the promised money, and sends him on his way, nonetheless, before he drives off.

      Soon after we see him in the hotel room with the man in the pink sweater, and quickly realize that it is Fernando, not his wife who is having the affair. His gay lover is attempting to convince him that he needs to tell his wife, but Fernando clearly does not know have the courage nor can find the way to do that, although he lies about having seen his lawyer and will try to take care of the situation by the end of the week. Of course. what he plans is to destroy evidence of his own transgressions and remove the source of his own temptation, as if that might make his own desires disappear. The one he cannot forgive is himself and his own unresolved sexual desires.

  This all appears in the context of a news report early in the film about general war and vengeance throughout the world, suggesting that it is only when countries truly want peace and sit down with the other to give up some of their power and embrace the other side that they can truly prosper and survive as a successful country.

     But war-like behavior starts small, with the inability to except oneself, and festers until it discovers, as promised, that it must destroy everyone else around it. Mightn’t Fernando also now want to destroy the far too chatty hitman and then perhaps his wife when he discovers a new attraction to a gay man? There is no end to self-hate, fear, and vengeance as this Columbian parable by Gómez Tovar reveals.

    Dates of this production vary wildly, IMDb suggesting it was released in 2017, while Letterboxd insists it appeared in 2020. It was first shown in an international festival in Odense in 2019, the date of I have chosen, although it may have played in Columbia earlier, but since the film’s copyright reads 2018, it probably wasn’t before that date.

 

Los Angeles, August 14, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (August 2026).