Undertow
Directed by Javier Fuentes Leon
Elcalvo Films; Dynamo
Producciones; La Cinéfacture;
Neue Cameo Film
IN THE END, what is most poignant about Undertow, a new film by Javier Fuentes Leon, is the plight of the ghost. In the small fishing village in Peru where this remarkable film takes place, the boyfriends are able to walk down the street holding hands only after one of them has died—and is therefore invisible to everyone but his lover. Like the guys in Brokeback Mountain, the lovers in Undertow must hide their relationship from the community. In Brokeback they hid in the mountains. In Undertow they hide in the Afterlife. It’s a simple plot, with endless irony; and the shot of the two men walking down the sunny street of the village, hand in hand, because one of them is invisible, is a classic.
Undertow is a ghost story—but one believes in the reality of the ghost, whose final plea to the surviving lover is simply: Let me rest. One can understand why. The ghost, who comes back to life the way Emily does in Our Town, cannot be seen, heard, or touched by the living—except, in this movie, by the closeted lover. It has nothing to do but sit in his lover’s house, or appear when the lover thinks of, or summons, him. He cannot paint, or take photographs, or buy presents, or walk around town the way he did at the beginning of the film. He is in Limbo.
This makes Undertow, for all the loveliness of its cinematography, painful to watch—because it dredges up and encapsulates so well the primal homosexual angst of separation from family and community that being gay, or coming out, almost always entails. Yet the Bolivian actor Cristian Mercado, on screen almost all the time, carries us along, easy on the eyes and totally believable in one emotional scene after another. It doesn’t hurt, either, that, as in Brokeback, it’s all set in a beautiful place, in this case a village on the Pacific 750 miles north of Lima.
Undertow is played as a kind of fairy tale, with the elemental emotions of sweetness and cruelty of this genre. There is a fable-like quality to the way the hero, Manuel, is embedded in the community, waiting for his first child, delivering a eulogy for a cousin, talking to his mother-in-law or to his priest. Some scenes verge on the saccharine. There are two scenes of the hero resting his head on the pregnant wife’s belly; and the movie gets so weepy in places—the lead’s wife seems to be constantly crying—that you think you’re watching one of the telenovelas that Manuel, alone among the men, prefers to soccer. But the shots of the corpses sinking to the bottom of the sea, the ritual with which the village lays its dead to rest, the search for the dead lover’s body, the Greek chorus of a community, give this movie a wonderful weight.
If Undertow makes a satiric point (that gay men can exist only so long as they are invisible), it’s not just about that; it’s about the life cycle from which homosexuality seems estranged; and it’s about Death. It’s astonishing that this was made by a Peruvian director (living in Los Angeles since graduation from film school there) in a language, a culture, that so enshrines machismo. Undertow portrays, painfully, the ways that homosexuality puts one at odds with one’s family, one’s religion, one’s community. Like Brokeback Mountain, it takes on the chasm that lies between homosexuals and the family structure—and manages to elicit sympathy for both sides. “Where can this plot go?” one wonders more than once. Where it goes leaves one sitting in one’s seat till the very last logo has flashed off the screen.
Andrew Holleran’s latest book is Chronicle of a Plague, Revisited (Da Capo Press).
