Mexican-Gay-Realist-Mythological-Romance-Film

Florian, bless his soul, was making fried-egg-bagel sandwiches when I got home at 16h00. He’ll make someone a great wife, I tell you.

My original plan had been to just stay awake until this evening’s activities, since falling asleep now would mess up my sleep cycles something bad. So after a sorta breakfast-lunch, I took a shower and then sat down to work on my blogging while Florian went back to his proofreading.

A few minutes later, I was asleep on the couch.

I woke up in time to get ready for our night out at the Berlinale Film Festival, although we still managed to arrive after the film had started (partially because there are two theaters with the same name at Potsdamer Platz).

The film we saw was a Mexican flick called Rabioso Sol, Rabioso Cielo, which was one half black-and-white gritty realist nearly-dialogue-free borderline-porn about men cruising each other in dilapidated porn cinemas and bathrooms, and one half oversaturated-colour Mexicanized Orpheus myth. I’m not going to recite the plot to this 3 hour marathon, but here’s some point-form notes:

• The film involves a scene where one character is fucked back to life. Seriously.
• There’s some odd stuff going on with race in this film, where the two protagonist-lovers include a “pretty boy” character that is of European descent and the more knowledgeable, active, even persistent lover, and a baby-faced “innocent” character that is of mixed black ethnicity and passive, hesitant, and eventually plays the role of Persephone (i.e., dead and waiting to be saved) once the film turns into an Orpheus myth. Also, the bad guy (a jealous lover who turns into Hades during the myth) is of Native Mexican origin and has a much darker skin tone than the other two.
• The camera-work was wonderful, especially in the black-and-white portion, where the silent interactions of the men cruising each other was mostly told through camera movement. Some great shots that trace people’s looks across space.
• The plot was lame, the dialogue was clunky and the acting was sometimes pretty unconvincing. Considering that this film was supposed to be a sort of modernized-but-mythologized lover’s tale, I think it would’ve been better if the dialogue in the myth portion of the film had been super-stylized; it would’ve been less cringe-inducing if it seemed more like opera lyrics or Shakespearean tragedy or something.
• Anyway, this flick managed to win the Best Film award at the Teddies, which is the GLBT section of the Berlinale awards. Meh.