the second coming
by
Douglas Messerli
Álvaro Delgado-Aparicio and
Héctor Gálvez (screenplay), Álvaro Delgado-Aparicio (director)
Retablo
/
2017
It
says a great deal about the changes in LBGTQ filmmaking when one is suddenly
faced with a film in Quechua—my first. It’s more than fascinating to know that
even in a community in Quechua-speaking Peru a 14-year-old boy might suddenly
be faced with the painful difficulties of finding his way through emotions that
do not fit into the normative values of his society.
Yet in Álvaro Delgado-Aparicio’s 2017
film, Retablo, it is not the boy, Segundo (Junior Bejar) who—at least at
first—is haunted by his sexual urges, but his artisan father, Noe (Amiel Cayo),
whom the boy, riding to the nearest town in the back of the truck in which his
father is seated up-front, discovers, upon briefly parting the canvas barrier, giving
fellatio to the unknown driver.
It is so quick of a glimpse that perhaps
even some of the theater viewers might not immediately recognize its
significance. Yet Segundo, having grown up in this violent and homophobic
society living at the foot of the Andes perceives immediately just what it
means and, despite his love and admiration of the man preparing him for a
career as a “maestro,” the term by which all of the natives address the elder,
recognizes it as something so shameful that he cannot even think of, let alone
speak its name.
The voyage they are making is a fairly regular
one to the nearby village to sell his father’s “tourist” retablos—small wooden
framed structures, a assemblage brightly painted
with traditional motifs that when opened, a bit like the doors of an apartment
building, reveal shelves containing small likenesses of people, sculpted out of
potato dough and, once again, brightly painted to represent their local
costumes. These tourist versions of the grander 4-feet high constructions
bearing the likenesses of real local families who have commissioned them are
the major source of income for Noe’s poor family, who themselves live in a far
less grandiose world in a stone hut with dirt floors. Their major source of
food are the potatoes themselves and, perhaps an occasional lamb which they
also raise as a source of milk and whose fleece provide them with clothing and
blankets.
In
the first scenes of this film we have watched the father and son working in
their nearby studio, wherein Noe is slowly tutoring Segundo on how to create
this nearly sacred peasant altars. Segundo is not only a good and loving
student, but you realize at first sight, just how appreciative this sensitive
boy is to have the opportunity to create something of beauty and meaning as
opposed to the hard labor available to others such as his nearby friend Mardonio
(Mauro Chuchon), the son of a pig farmer who dreams of running off to the
cotton fields where, he insists, women are nightly available, like the cotton
itself, for the plucking.
His bragging machismo along with his and
his friends’ sudden shifts from playing soccer into sometimes brutal brawls, is
the only thing the far gentler Segundo knows of what he supposes is standard
male behavior, except when his father, increasingly until the denouement of Delgado-Aparicio’s
film, comes home drunk, sometimes unable to find even his own bed to which
Segundo’s loving mother eventually guides her husband.
In an earlier trip to the village, the
two encounter natives nearly flaying a man, who simply as a stranger, an
outsider to this also xenophobic world, is suspected of cattle rustling. Later,
in a day of celebration akin to Mardi Gras, the locals, donning horrendous
looking masks, play out in theater productions and in all-male battles involving
leather belts demonstrate their quite obvious internal aggressions.
The only woman who attracts Segundo is
the town grocer, who in admiration of the “maestro” always saves some of her
best produce and sweetly smiles at both father and son. Later, after witnessing
his father’s sexual act, Segundo becomes determined to prove his own sexuality,
breaking into her home while she lays
sleeping, presumably to rape her or, at the very least, to gain entry into her
bed.
Yet, the boy can do little more than
stand beside her bed for a few moments before running off in despair. In his
mind, he has failed the test, while in the observer’s view he has simply proven
himself as someone removed from the brutal enactments of the society in which
he has been raised.
Indeed, much of the middle panel of this,
a bit too obviously segmented cinematic triptych, consists of Segundo “acting
out,” the way any young teenager might, his angst over his father’s behavior
and his fears for what it might mean about himself. For this boy the time has
come, as it must for most children, in which he must negotiate the differences
between the voices of his peers and those of his parents. At the celebration,
Segundo runs off after witnessing the male-on-male battles to an old stone
building, either a former center of government or religion, removing his
sandals and painfully cutting his feet against the outcropped stones, an act
which might be said to resemble the knifed arm and hand carvings suffered by
disturbed young men and women in more urban communities.
After that last trip into town, Segundo
refuses to return to work with his father in the studio and often goes missing
for long periods of time, at one point insisting to his mother that he intends
to join Mardonio as a cotton picker. The confounded woman kindly insists that
if he does so he will be undoing everything his father has attempted to provide
him, the life of an artisan instead of a peasant.
It is only when Noe arrives home so terribly
beaten that he is near death that Segundo begins to come with terms with his
and father’s relationship, in which he can only fear may force him more in the
direction of his father’s behavior than those of the general community.
When his mother demands that he
immediately run to the neighbors for help, Segundo does so only to be shunned,
Mardonio and his father both reporting that Noe had been caught having anal
intercourse with a man, whose relatives beat his father with the intention of
killing him.
Returning home and to the studio where he
suddenly perceives the sometimes open and howling mouths of many of his father’s
hidden retablo, that perhaps for all these years Noe has recognized the horror
of his neighbors’ close-minded values.
When his mother demands to know why the
neighbors haven’t arrived, Segundo can only mumble that they were not at home,
in response to which, she herself, with her crutch in hand, makes the trip to fetch
help.
Her return is far more violent than Segundo’s
simple horror, as she enters her husband’s studio like the mad Lytta (related
to the the Maniae, the spirits of madness and insanity) of Greek mythology.
With furious swipes of her arms and hands she wipes away nearly all of her
husband’s creations, allowing the retablo and their figures to fall broken to
the floor.
Soon after, her mother arrives and they
begin to cook and pack up for their journey to another region, far away from
where they will now ever after be shunned.
Segundo cannot assimilate that possibility.
As he nurses his ailing father, he insists that they still have enough potatoes
left for the dough for new figures and that they are still owed for the last
retablos they have placed on commission in the village. Carefully, he attempts
to retrieve any of the figures and wooden structures which have survived her revenge.
Pulling away from them as they pack up,
Segundo sits on a nearby hill, refusing to respond to their calls for him to
join them as night approaches on their long journey away from a world in which
they can no longer exist.
Still caring for his father, the boy
packs up a retablo with the intention of selling it, but, met along the way by
Mardonio and his soccer-playing bullies, he is mocked by his former friend who
beats him, bloodying his nose and destroying the large retablo. For the first
time, Segundo himself releases his fury, tripping Mardonio as he turns to leave,
and slapping him over and over again in his face. We can only take some small
pleasure in Segundo’s final coming to terms with the world around him; yet, at
the same time, we are horrified that he too might have now become a member of
the society which he, Noe, and his have previously shunned.
Segundo returns home knowing now that
there is no possibility of ever again finding some version of normality.
Arriving in his hut, he sees that his father has disappeared and hearing the
far-away bleating of their lambs, realizes that Noe has left the yard. He finds
his father’s body hanging in the nearby well.
Once again entering the studio, Segundo
creates his own small retablo, showing his father as a teacher while the son
sits below him, creating still unpainted and unformed villagers below, a gift
which he places gently into his father’s pine coffin before buying it.
The director could not have provided a clearer
statement of what lies ahead. This boy’s future in society is still something
unformed, like the pristine white clay which he and his father worked into
shape before painting eyes, hair, mouths, and the multi-colored clothing upon
the small icons.
Packing up the paintbrushes and the few
pieces of wood and figurines undestroyed in this symbolic devastation of his
world, Segundo moves on and away in a direction opposite the route his mother
took. He too will need to move into another still unknown world where the sins
of the father—if in fact they are sins—will no longer hinder the development of
the son. But in taking on his father’s avocation, with both its sacred and
profane elements, Segundo, has become, like the second “one” whose name he
bears, a kind of Christ hopefully redeeming the new world he encounters.
Los
Angeles, August 23, 2020
Reprinted
from World Cinema Review (August 2020).
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