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Reviews
Ode to Billy Joe (1976)
This movie made me feel desperate many years ago
POSSIBLE SPOILER
I saw this movie on cable TV in Mexico City at the end of the seventies. I was a teenager and was just going through the turmoil of accepting my sexual identity, and this movie made me feel so scared, so lonely and so desperate. The seventies in Mexico had a lot in common with the social mores of the South depicted in this movie. I am sure teenagers today could not possibly feel what I felt when I saw this movie, as alternative lifestyles are represented everywhere in the media nowadays. The comments of other posters that saw the movie recently make me realize how much the world has changed in 25 years. This movie was at that time poison for a confused teen, but now it just seems like a period piece, a reflection of a long forgotten nightmare.
No se lo digas a nadie (1998)
Gay life in Latin American upper classes
"No se lo digas a nadie" is a film that is showing in several theaters in Mexico City, following a trend of showing gay themed movies outside art clubs. I think it is a good reflection of what coming out is in Latin America for upper class youth, it shows the alienation that can lead to drug abuse, something that is not particular to this part of the world, as Australian movie "Head on" shows; but more tellingly, it shows the absence of a gay subculture, or at least, in such deeply class divided cultures as Peru and Mexico, the preeminence of class identity over sexual identity. It is thus not only possible but even mandatory for people with a homosexual orientation to marry within the appropriate social circle, while at the same time having homosexual encounters. I think this movie is at times excessively caricaturesque in its portrayal of machismo and its counterpart, submissiveness and religiousness in Latin American women, I felt like I was watching one of the soap operas the region is famous the world over, but on the whole I think the movie is on target in its honest portrayal of the subject.
Head On (1998)
Head On as a lucid representation of the need to belong and the need to forge one´s destiny
"Head On" is a movie I saw at a charity for HIV treatment in Mexico City; I guess a year has passed since it was screened in Australia. Living in a different culture, there were things I could relate to quite easily, while others were more remote. The alienation of immigrants, greek immigrants to Australia in this case, was something I was not aware of; on the other hand the effects of that alienation seemed to me universal, they apply to Mexico as much as they aply to Australia. This is certainly a movie I want to see again, the pace was so fast I left the theater exhausted, and the images I saw haunted me in my sleep. On the one hand, Ari, the gay son of a greek immigrant is such a sensual man and the greek culture in which he lives seems to relish so much bodily expression that my entire body felt stimulated by a thunderbolt. In this sense, Head On is easily one of the most erotic movies I have ever seen. On the other hand, Ari is so terribly isolated and marginalized, he is so painfully outside from the time cycle of his milieu that I experienced a deep sadness at his life prospects. This recreation of human quest to belong (in its most physical expression) and at the same time to find its own destiny (with all the alienation it entails) was so lovingly crafted in this movie that it made me recoil into some of the deep recesses of my heart and ponder at that particular dilemma of the gay soul, in which its alienation prompted by ignorance spurs a heightened desire of the flesh, with all its gut wrenching beauty, only to discover that such ravishing gift makes the soul´s quest for wholeness more arduous. It is, in my viewpoint, this conundrum that Head On so masterfully explores.