Tyler Cunningham | I Was Wrong / 2023

a fan

by Douglas Messerli

 

Tyler Cunningham and Bernard Leed (screenplay), Tyler Cunningham (director) I Was Wrong / 2023 [15 minutes]

 

Director Tyler Cunningham summarizes the guilt expressed in his film of 2023: “I spent my youth avoiding eye contact with most of my straight male classmates just to be able to walk down the hallway in peace. It was during those years that I developed a deep, subconscious fear of all straight men – my bullies. I began lumping them all into a box, making sweeping assumptions that all straight men were violent and homophobic. After a decade of keeping them in this box, I was mortified to realize that I had become the bully and was perpetuating the cycle of abuse.”

      Those are the very views that Peter (Nick Lehmann) brings back home to his small town for his brother’s bachelor wedding party. We’ve seen dozens of films, short and feature, that focus on gays and lesbians being forced, for one reason or another, to return home and face the very people who taunted them as youths—or simply to have once again to face up to the narrow attitudes and close-mindedness of those who never left home.

     Peter is one of those individuals, and isn’t at all looking forward to hooking up with his older brother’s bros, who he remembers as being bigoted, boorish, and limited in the topics of their conversation. Even the kiss he is about to plant on the face of his brother Eric (Alex Esola) upon greeting him is met with a pull-back, and he is suddenly forced to remember where he is and to whom he’ll be trying to communicate for the next day or so.

       He immediately runs into one of his brother’s friends, who when being reminded that for 15 years now Pete has been living in Los Angeles, confidentially confides to him: “Just watch out for the dirty ANTIFA fucks. They’re all over the place down there. They don’t respect this country.”

      No sooner has he turned away from that encounter, than he turns back to greet to newest arrival—suddenly standing face to face with one of the most notable on-line gay porn stars. He immediately excuses himself to call up his best female friend, Elle (Zurah Taylor) to share the news and assimilate the fact.

     He returns to the room to meet up with Jack (Michael Graceffa) believing that he can’t actually be gay while simultaneously being a member of what he has described to Elle as his brother’s “Proud Boy ass friend group,” and seeing Jack now as a “gay for pay” exploitive force, he feels the need to call him out.

      Peter asking Jack what he does, gets back a fairly honest answer: “I’m a filmmaker,” but as he proceeds, he gets vaguer answers, Jack suggesting he does experimental stuff, but admitting that his audience likes him best when he is himself in front of the camera. “And who is your audience,” probs Pete. “Pretty diverse, actually.” “Do you see yourself in your audience. Do you feel your work as contributing to the culture in which you feel yourself to be part of?” Eric cuts off any further examinations, telling his brother that he’s being “weird.”

     It soon turns stranger yet. Getting increasingly drunk, Pete gets on the internet to describe the porn star as a “liar and a gay-baiter,” then proceeds to describe what he believes Jack to truly be.

     As the evening wears on, he happens a conversation between two of the other guys, Dan (Brian Muller) and Taylor (Stephen Stocking), commiserating that Taylor’s three-year engagement has just been called off. Peter’s first question is, “What’s the matter? Did you just get dumped?” They look over at the intruder with a kind startled disgust, Dan suggesting, “Dude, we’re not talking middle school.” Pete’s further advice sounds more like grade school, “Well, you just gotta get out there and start worshiping some new puss.” Both turn away from him with incredulity for the words that have just come out his mouth. When he asks if they want to do some drugs, they both emphatically answer, no, and we are forced to realize that Pete is acting like a teenager. When he leaves, they both laugh, Dan lamenting, “I thought gay people were supposed to ‘get it,’ right?’” Presumably, he means he imagined gay people as being sensitive and empathetic. Pete is an obvious exception to the positive stereotype.

      Pete pulls a full jug of gin out of the refrigerator and trolls Jack’s website once again before returning to the others in mid-conversation about Black Lives Matter, the speaker, Dan again, arguing that he believes black lives matter but that he doesn’t condone the looting.

      Finally, Pete shouts out “Enough!”—as one of them mumbles that the town bully is back. “You guys are so confusing. A few seconds ago, Dan was talking about Taylor’s ‘life journey’ and now you’re spouting about ‘Black Lives Matter” stuff.” He turns on Jack blaming him for sitting around and nodding to all the “offensive” comments when a minority community is paying his bills.

    “Guys,” Pete confides, “people pay to watch Jack get fucked by other guys!”

     Eric suddenly calls an end to his brother’s raves. “Jack his gay,” he states plainly; Jack responding “Guilty as charged. Card-carrying cum-dump here,” the others laughing and chiming in “We love it!”

     Pete is completely nonplussed, demanding to know why his brother never told him that his best friend as a super porn star, Eric responding, “You never asked.”

     “Pete you never come around. You never respond to any of my texts. You’re basically a ‘fucking’ ghost. I never thought you cared what happened in any of our lives.”

     “This is just bullshit. All of you guys used to torture me, and now you’re cool with having a gay friend?”

     Dan answers, “Yeah man, it’s called growing up.”

     Jack admits that it was probably hidden homophobia in his case, the fear of being who he was.

     What is clear is that it is Pete who has never grown up.

     “So Pete,” Taylor slyly interjects, “I take it you’re a fucking subscriber then?” Pete looks down. “It’s all right, your brother is too!”

     “Right, we’re best friends!”

     A moment later Eric discovers that Jack’s account is “blowing up,” and Jack, clicking on, realizes that he’s suddenly lost hundreds of subscribers. Peter has to admit that he might have had something to do with that, finally confessing what he’s done.

     “I can delete all my comments and say I was lying,” Pete insists. But Jack declares the damage is done. Dan suggests the only way for Pete to correct his wrong is for Jack to “hate-fuck his troll on Only Fans.”

     Terrified by the possibility of having sex on line, Pete tries to talk his way out of such a possibility, Jack finally assuring him that “It’s cool, we’ll hire someone and pretend they are a common troll.”

     There’s nothing left for stupid Pete to do but to say “I’m sorry.”

     If this comic skit is basically unbelievable, nonetheless, it clearly points up that gay men and “woke” folk can sometimes themselves be fairly bigoted when it comes to the people they left behind in their hometowns.

     In the past few years, I myself discovered that for all these years when I thought I was the only gay kid in my school, that I was quite mistaken and that more was going on both in the minds of my fellow classmates and in their active lives, while I sat quietly suffering in torture, than I might ever have imagined.

 

Los Angeles, April 4, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (April 2023).

 

Jordan-Paige Sudduth | Aces / 2022

the definition of a word

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jordan-Paige Sudduth (screenwriter and director) Aces / 2022 [9.30 minutes]

 

A far less sophisticated study in Ace sexuality than Gear’s film Ace of 2018, Jordan-Paige Sudduth’s Aces features a girl, Phoebe (AJ Antrim) who meets up with a girl who attends her school, Summer (Emi Curia) when she misses the bus. Summer gives her a ride to school in her car and the two, over a period of dozens of teen-cute images), develop a close friendship.

     In one of the few dialogue encounters, Phoebe, recognizing that Summer seems to have been flirting with her, asks her about it and when she admits she has, confides that she is also lesbian. And their relationships warms up accordingly, with a lot of winks, hugs, and snuggles. But when Summer finally removes her shirt to get serious, Phoebe reacts vehemently, without even thinking, hurling the accusation at Summer that instead of a true relationship she just wants to get her into bed.

     In response, Summer accuses her of being Ace, a word that Phoebe has never even heard before, and which would remind any gay boy or lesbian girl of the epithets hurled at many of us in our childhoods such a “homo,” “queer,” or “lez,” without us quite knowing what the words truly meant for our lives. Here, the girl’s close friendship seems suddenly to be over, and Phoebe feels left out of all human contact, finally calling up the word on “Goggle” to discover it defines actually who she feels herself to be.

     The two meet again soon after, Summer immediately apologizing for her behavior, with Phoebe stopping her to suggest that “Maybe I am what you said, Ace.”

      Summer insists that they can still remain friends, despite Phoebe’s doubts about being unable to give her want she wants. And the two make up, presumably taking hundreds of teen-cute images of their fun times together over the next few years.

      If nothing else, this film actually offers us an opportunity to see a young girl come to terms with an identity suddenly thrust upon her, and the bigot, in this case with a great deal more knowledge that her friend, recognizing the meanness of her bigotry—although one has to imagine that at a certain point Summer will have to engage with other girls to more fully explore her sexual desires, leaving Phoebe perhaps, once more on the outside of a world that seemingly functions, at times, not according to the meaning of a word but to the body’s hormonal demands.

 

Los Angeles, April 2, 2023

Reprinted in My Queer Cinema blog (April 2023).

 

 

Jordan Gear | Ace / 2018

love without sex

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jordan Gear (screenwriter and director) Ace / 2018 [19 minutes]

 

Z (Lukas Gage) and several of his friends, Russ (Jonathan Lipnicki), Joanie (Ariel D. King), Clara (Gisselle Bonilla), Deek (Ty Chen), and Toddy (Holly Blair) appear to live in a college commune-like situation, some of them sexually connected but with deep ties of friendship that go beyond even their sexual connections. They celebrate in late-night parties, dinners, and weekend grills, etc.

     As the film begins the group is celebrating the fact that Z has just been accepted into one of the best dance schools in the nation. Evidently Deek has invited someone’s cousin to the event, who shows up late in the evening and is introduced to the others as Ace (Lukas Gage). The shy young man who has, so we’re told, just moved there from “up north,” is easily assimilated into the group and evidently remains in their house through the night, because the next morning Russ and Ace are seen knocking at Z’s door to wake him up, the celebrated boy so drunk that he needs Ace to drive him back to the campus.

     In a series of moody, hallmark card-like scenes beginning with their drive to campus, during which Z stops by the ocean to take a naked dive into the waters, and which extends for the next weeks after, director Jordan Gear establishes a growing relationship that develops between the beautiful blond-haired Ace and the handsome Z.

     One night back at the community house, as the boys are seen dancing with each of their girls— in a scene that is highly reminiscent of the prom scene in Get Real (1998) in which the guys, dancing with their gals, only have eyes for each other—culminates with Z and Ace sharing a bed, gently interlocking fingers, and finally kissing. We don’t know if it goes any further, but it certainly looks as if their long attraction to one another is finally consummated.

      Yet the next morning, Ace arrives to breakfast where the rest of the group are already gathered, and maintains a distance, instead of choosing to pull up a chair to the long group table, he perches on a nearby ledge to eat. As the day wears on, he almost adamantly chooses to ignore Z, while spending an inordinately long time playing a guessing game with one of the women.

      Angry with his behavior Z storms off, eventually Ace joining him in an attempt to explain. And for a moment it appears that their love will pull the two back together as Ace moves toward Z and they hug. But a moment later, Ace pulls away, shouting out “I can’t. I can’t.” End of movie.

      Obviously, there are several ways you might explain the reasons why Ace pulls out of what almost appears as an inevitable love at the last moment, and why the movie ends at this very moment, a fact that clearly irritated some amateur commentators.

      Underneath his open acceptance of the group which is clearly bi-racial, Ace could be hiding some secret phobia about blacks. Given his obvious attraction to Z throughout most of the film, however, and his general abilities to relate to the community, I find it very difficult to believe the director is suggesting any racial bias here.

       For most viewers, the obvious reason for his refusal to go through with what he clearly seems to desire is that he hasn’t quite been able accept his own identity as a queer man, which in opening himself up to a full relationship with Z, Ace would have to admit to. We’ve seen this behavior in dozens of films ever since queer cinema has begun openly talking about such issues in the 1960s, and certainly in the 1990s and since. Our only hope, in such a situation, is that sooner rather than later Ace can finally come to terms with is sexuality and still return to Z before it’s too late—the wishful thinking a most queer observers of such scenes in movies.

      In 2018, the acceptance of aromantic, demi-sexual, or grey-sexual individuals—all conditions surrounding the term Ace, which categorizes some of those individuals who basically experience a lack of sexual attraction or desire, who are yet, on occasion, attracted to gay, bi-sexual, lesbian queers—was not generally recognized. These individuals, seemingly lacking the sexual urge, may be attracted to other LGBTQ figures but generally cannot carry through with the sexual act, defining themselves as asexual.

      I gather that this group of individuals, long having felt invisible and ignored by the queer community, joined the LGBTQ+ coalition sometime around 2010, since that is the year when Ace Week began to be celebrated.

      Certainly, by naming his character Ace, it appears that Gear is attempting to make a direct connection with that phenomenon, and although we don’t get any verbal reaction from Z about his would-be lover’s comments, and therefore cannot truly ascertain whether or not he is actually an Ace bigot, it is quite clear that Z is angered over what seems to be a flirtatious invitation to love that goes nowhere, and leaves him empty after he has himself fallen in love with the boy. And there is no evidence that Z perceives what is the cause of the boy’s behavior. He most certainly might perceive him to be a closet bigot or a still closeted queer without even knowing that there are people out there who, while attracted to other gay men, can’t fully engage in sex itself.

      I must admit that only in the past year I have encountered the condition, and am still uncomfortable with its inclusion in the LGBTQ community. It is not that I do not perceive that there might indeed be people who feel confused by their asexuality, and who feel in our highly sexualized culture that their condition is ignored.

      I have nothing against Ace individuals and would be happy to have any Ace for a friend, since I don’t think of my friends generally in sexual terms. Indeed, except for a few youthful jerks, who among the majority of us defines their friends in terms of their sexual behaviors unless in their sexual activities they are engaging young children or endangering others’ lives? How might it possibly matter to me if one of my friends didn’t feel comfortable having sex? Even as a young man, I did not spend my hours sitting around talking about my sex life—although that has often been a standard cliché of gay behavior.

      For me the LGBTQ coalition, on the other hand, was from its founding very much about sex and gender, and how the heterosexual world, before liberation, generally punished, tortured, and degraded those of us who were sexually queer or didn’t behave according to our birth genders. These were sexual matters because we acted on them and behaved in ways that for centuries heterosexuals had feared and hated.

       Not having sex was simply not part of the quotient. If one didn’t want to or felt they couldn’t be sexually active, what, one might argue, could be the problem; who would possibly choose to ostracize or ignore such individuals? I guess I feel somewhat in sympathy with arguments such as David Allen’s in Spike magazine (August 21, 2022) that the LGBTQIA+ has taken over the original homosexual base of LGBT, adding in what he feels are group of “straights” muscling their way into the gay agenda, or what was originally known as the “gay community.”

      I don’t see the alphabet-soup additions as necessarily being an invasion of “straights” as much as I see it as a embracement of numerous other issues which have little to do with the original group of beings attacked for their sexual behavior, and accordingly distract from the coalition’s focus on important larger issues such as educating youth concerning their sexual fears, job security, the impingement of religious rights, and the original  freedom of expression, increasingly become of importance given the current wave of activist conservatives throughout the world who attempt to roll back queer rights—the most basic principles of what we all fought for, possibly even gay marriage in the US.

      As Gear’s film makes clear, however, it is apparent that Z probably is not going to keep Ace around as one of his best friends. And particularly for younger Ace men and women, in our highly sexualized society they might find it very difficult to keep friends to whom they feel attracted but cannot connect with through sex. I have attempted to think back in time to see if there might have been such individuals who I rejected as a younger man because they didn’t pursue sex. But then, I also have to admit, when I was a very young gay man, before meeting by lifetime husband, nearly all friends, outside a few friends I made in my theater, choral, and church activities, were lovers or other gay men. So perhaps I wasn’t a bigot simply because I completely ignored most of my university colleagues. Friends seem to be something I developed a few years later, when finding someone each night for sex was no longer an issue in my life, and when I began reaching out to others through our careers. I think being Ace or asexual if an issue more important for the young; certainly at 76 one wants to cry out, what the fuck is the problem? But I can now most certainly recognize the problem that an Ace individual has in finding someone to love and share his or her life, if that is what she or he desires.

 

Los Angeles, March 2, 2023

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (March 2023).

David Bobrow | Country People / 2016

we heard things have changed

by Douglas Messerli

 

David Bobrow (screenwriter, adapted from the short story by Richard Hall, and director) Country People / 2016 [22 minutes]

 

Richard (Mike Burnell) has moved from New York with the death of lover to live in a small Southern rural community. Evidently a high school teacher previously in New York, he’s now opened up a consignment antique shop and hired an assistant. Perceiving his boredom, she suggests he teach a night course at the local college, not something he’s that interested in doing. But when she says it will not be like New York, no knives, no drugs, sweet country people, and he’s able to teach gay literature, which he could not do in New York, he agrees.

     His students all look like throwbacks to another century, two young handsome boys, James and William, (John J. Hansen and Marco Kengott) looking vaguely like Civil War veterans, a woman, Millie Herkimer wearing a long 19th-century style dress. And older man, Isreal (Paul Uhler) claims he used to run the drugstore, replacing the original owner, Solomon.

      Richard is rather startled and rather put-off by their oddities, the fact that they don’t have money, they claim, to buy the books and don’t have easy access to computers. He places his own copies of the books they read—everything from Socrates and James Baldwin to Willa Cather and gay Afghanistan War memoirs—in the office so they can share the books.

      They all demonstrate interest in the books, although some of them find the stories all too sad (imagine had they taken a queer cinema course, how sad they might find their plots). But they begin to open up in strange ways. James and Bill suggest they live in a commune, since James was not able to return to his family home after his wartime experiences. Millie reveals that the Herkimer clinic which used to be a girl’s school was founded by her aunt. She (hinting at Millie herself) got got into difficulty when they found correspondence between her and another teacher. Isreal hints that the classmate he used to work with in the drugstore was someone he so loved that he’d go to work just to be near him, but he could never tell of his attraction.

      James and Williams show him a postcard of them dressed in Civil War costumes which they claim they had taken in Albany.

       But slowly, as the course comes to a close and he begins to travel about the small town, Richard discovers that things just don’t add up. The place where James says they had the picture taken closed, so reports Richard’s clerk, 50 years ago. Solomon was the head of the pharmacy long  before Isreal might have known him. Millie was the founder of the school and clinic, not her aunt. And the commune the boys have pointed him to is a graveyard that reveals the dates of the birth and death of nearly all the figures who the students in the classroom are pretending to be.

      The joke is on him. Pretending to be figures of another age, who may or have may not have been gay and couldn’t reveal it, the contemporary figures seem all rather well-adjusted and accepted in their community. They seem to have been testing him to see if he believes they are still as backward in their community as it was decades ago.

      In fact, Richard’s class is now full for the next two semesters with a waiting list. His subject is obviously a quite popular one for a community that supposedly would not even talk about gay life.

     There may have some small truth to what they claim about the families thereabouts, but it’s clear by film’s end that this rural valley community is far more open-minded than outsiders might have ever imagined. The good country people of this community are not only “sweet,” but rather witty, not only curious, but starving for more information on a subject in which many larger communities throughout the US (New York City included evidently) is not always easily taught what with the outcries and parents and community authorities.

 

Los Angeles, April 1, 2023

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (April 2023).

 

Douglas Messerli | LGBT Bigotry [Introduction]

lgbt bigotry

by Douglas Messerli

 

We would all like to imagine that LGBTQ+ individuals, given the suffering, internal and external we have had to endure throughout history, and our struggles, largely successful, to erase homophobia, transphobia, and other negative cultural attitudes internationally that we are primarily a sympathetic, empathetic, and open-minded folk.

     But we all know, deep inside, that that isn’t necessarily true. In terms of percentages, just as many LGBTQ individuals are conservative fascists and intolerant individuals as heterosexual people. Early in the rise of Hitler, the Nazi’s made a cult of homosexuality, And as Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salò makes clear, Italian fascism often openly supported homosexuality and pederasty. There are rightist US gay men and lesbian women. Gays who are adamantly opposed to transsexuals, lesbians who are intolerant of gay men, and both gays and lesbians who don’t believe even in the concept of bisexuality. There are, astonishingly, gays and lesbians who voted for Trump, who support Putin, who argued for the politics of Bolsonaro’s Brazil and support the iron-fisted “democracies” of people like Hungary’s Viktor Orbán. LGBTQ+ individuals are can be racist and pro-abortion, can be fanatically religious and even hate the LGBTQ+ coalition.

      It is a sign of how much we have been able to openly express ourselves that in the past couple of decades we have finally seen movies that reveal and discuss such prejudices, bigotries, and close-minded attitudes, admitting to ourselves and others that we are not a unified force of thinkers and believers, that we truly represent the entire spectrum of human experience.

      The “bigots” of the four films from 2013-2023 that I have included here, are not terrible sinners, but commit minor and perhaps correctable attitudes for their failures by simply saying, as does the character in the most recent film, “I’m sorry, I was wrong.” But they, nonetheless, do represent biases and flawed ways of thinking that are worth noting.

      I’m sure that there are many others, short films and features, of which I am not yet aware, but this is my first foray into this important subject. The film’s I’ve included here, interestingly enough, are all US productions, which suggest that in the US we most definitely feel free enough to publicize our own failures, surely an impossible thing to imagine in the many fascist and dictatorial governments which remain throughout the world, a few even within Europe.

     In the first of these films, the gay man moved from the city to the country simply commits the crime of underestimating his fellow rural folk, who hilariously outwit him concerning his very subject, gay sexuality. In the last discussed film, the gay figure makes the mistake, once more, of discounting the open-mindedness of rural America as well as all heterosexuals, a mistake that shows him not only to be a rube but an outright bigot. The other two films concern a far more subtle and, one might argue, an in-house kind of prejudice—which I myself admit sharing—against one of the flags of the LGBTQ+ coalition itself, the Aces, those individuals who are non-sexual. David Bobrow’s Country People, 2016, Jordan Gear’s Ace of 2018 and Jordan-Paige Sudduth’s Aces from 2022, and Tyler Cunningham’s I Was Wrong of 2023 all reveal that the LGBTQ+ coalition is not a perfect “nation,” whose diverse members all tolerate each other.

 

Los Angeles, March 2, 2023

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (March 2023).

 

 

Cristian Riquelme Ripoll | Hermanos (Brothers) / 2016-2017

destroying the evidence

by Douglas Messerli

 

Cristian Riquelme Ripoll (screenwriter and director) Hermanos (Brothers) / 2016-2017 [series with 4 episodes]

 

As Vito Russo might have put it, another couple of gay boys bite the dust in Cristian Riquelme Ripoll’s 4-part TV and web series from Chile, Hermoso (Brothers), these boys being products of and unknowing participants in incest, which in Chile is legal while still being cursed by the of the powerful Catholic Church and conservative forces.

      In the first of the series, we’re introduced to the twink, Daniel (Mario Álvarez), fresh in from Canada, who is seeking information about his biological birth mother, evidently having discovered that he was sent off from his Chilean homeland at an early age. Somehow, without sufficient explanation, he’s been an online partner of the boy who meets him at the airport, Joaquín (Alejandro León), who unbeknownst to Daniel but particularly after their initial sexual bedroom encounter, has claimed the newcomer as his boyfriend.

      Meanwhile, in the same small town, the handsome youth Ricardo Camus (Gonzalo Bustos) is entrapped in a relationship with a woman who he’s made pregnant, Ariela (Pilar Muñoz), to whom Ricardo is totally committed to marry in a few weeks along with his mother Magdalena’s (María Olga Matte) blessing and careful overseeing. Yet, is not at all sure of the changes it will make in his life. Ricardo, we soon discover, has not yet fully explored his sexuality, which an accidental meet-up with Daniel, Joaquín, and the latter’s overbearing sister Luna (Deborah Carrasco) among others at a local swimming spot, triggers. While Luna, Joaquín and friends dive in for a pleasant skinny dip, Daniel and Ricardo introduce themselves to one another and before Ricardo can even plead “help,” Daniel has pulled him off into the distance where the two suddenly engage in passionate sex—an event that eventually draws the notice of a jealous Joaquín and his sister, and which leads to total confusion in Ricardo’s life.

      In his absence, Ariela has attempted to call her fiancée all day, and his mother, the conservative local political leader Magdalena, are equally furious by his unexplained absence, Ariela in the meantime having lost their baby.

    To deny the impulses to which he’s just indulged, Ricardo not even believing in the possibility of bisexuality, he further commits to an early marriage. But when Ariela, rather understandably denies him sex, he gets up and seeks out another woman, a former sexual partner, Pamela. When he can’t get aroused even by her, Ricardo visits the local men’s sauna, having sex with the first man who pays him attention.

    Daniel has been given a name by someone back in his Canadian homeland, which turns out to be Magdalena, whom he seeks out. Earlier in the film, as they were cleaning out boxes in the attic, Ricardo’s sister Valentina notices an old photo of Ricardo with another small boy whom none of them can identify. Accordingly, we easily guess that Daniel might be that young boy in the photo, although Magdalena strongly denies any such possibility and calls in one of her brute assistants to take care of the matter, while pretending to care for the boy by sending him off to the local hostel run by Ricardo. Before Daniel can get there, and the second episode’s credits have even begun to run, the beautiful gay boy Daniel has been hit from behind by a blunt object and dies, disappearing from sight even before we or Ricardo have had a chance to truly get to know the likeable kid.

      Episode 3 is mostly devoted to the police investigation in which almost the players are invited in for questioning. Obviously Joaquín, became of his jealousy, and Ricardo because of his sexual indiscretion are the most obvious suspects, and as the police hold them for questioning they gradually strike up a friendship, without being totally open with each other about what they know.  Joaquín, for example, says nothing about having seen Ricardo and Daniel engaging in sex and dare not openly declare the jealousy he felt. But then, in the interim, his younger sister has connected him up with Tinder, which seems to have calmed him down somewhat. Moreover, it’s clear that he’s developed an interest in Ricardo, who his two sisters also have continually declared as being “cute,” the younger one having even become Facebook friends.

      What Ricardo does reveal to Joaquín is that his sister Valentina has told him that she observed his mother talking to the now dead boy on the day of his death. He is surprised, moreover, that Daniel was found with a card in his pocket for the hostel which Richardo runs.

      In short, everyone in this episode is busy keeping secrets from the others, and when Magdalena discovers not only that Daniel is dead but that her son is one of the suspects, she is furious. She did not mean in taking care of the matter that her minion should kill him, she insists. But he swears that he has not killed the boy and did not have time to even encounter him before Daniel was killed.

      While Ricardo’s mother races off to the police station, we are more fully introduced to a new suspect, her elder son Alberto (Johan Baez) who calls someone else suggesting that he needs obtain something even earlier they’d previous discussed. What it is that he needs and for what purpose bring up questions of Alberto’s involvement in the murder and hint at the major issues of the 4th episode.

      But something strange evidently happened in the writing and direction of the first 3 enticing works of the series and the last, which seems to basically have forgotten the real villains of the piece, the story about family incest, and Daniel’s death. Although the episode begins with Magdalena retrieving the photographs we now believe to be of her son Daniel as a child, and later burning them, the story quickly changes course.  Instead of focusing on the logical development in the plot, the three younger figures of this work, Ricardo, Joaquín, and his sister Luna take off for a day in the country. The boys get to know each other better and the three of them end up at the ocean for a hug fest. In a sense, this new twist in the plot seems to be attempting to introduce something like “normality” into the lives of these characters who have already experienced a world far beyond the heteronormative or even bisexual normality that the movie seems now about to impose upon us.

     Later the group visit a nearby gathering of amusement rides and food stands, Joaquín bowing out of the rides, while Ricardo and Luna enjoy several of them.  Joaquín meets up through his new Tinder app with a young boy and they have sex.

     When the three of the reconnoiter it is finally time for Joaquín to explain what he knows about the connection of Daniel to the Camus family, and whatever bits and pieces missing, Ricardo has now been able to figure out.

     He returns home to take a rope and hang himself, a scene which we’ve already encountered in the very first episode of the series.

      Why writer/director Cristian Riquelme Ripoll felt he needed to kill off the two young men involved with incest is rather inexplicable, and why the film doesn’t end with a round-up of the two real villains, Magdalena and Alberto—who have hidden the knowledge from nearly everyone—is equally unexplained. We can only hope that Valentina, who has since heard the interchange between her mother and Alberto and Joaquín will go to the police with the truth. But given the odd direction this series has taken it is doubtful that they will even be brought to justice. As Russo long ago might have complained, it’s far easier to kill of the gay boys for anything that has gone wrong in the family.

 

Los Angeles, September 5, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (September 2023).