Day One of the Loft Film Festival - Temblores (2019) and I Was At Home, But... (2019)

The story of Pablo, a middle-aged Guatemalan man who returns to his wealthy family after being outed as gay, Temblores is a story all-too familiar to millions the world over.  His family as a whole cuts him off and casts him out, his wife takes the kids and uses her money and influence to screw with him legally out of anger, his children have little comprehension of what's happened to their father beyond a general sense he's "bad" now, his lover tries to encourage him to leave it all behind and live with their newfound happiness, despite how much life Pablo left behind.  He is introduced as a man robbed of all agency, hiding beneath a blanket and fleeing the camera's eye for significant stretches of the introductory sequence, and when he finally does take action to ensure his wife and children are OK in the wake of a minor earthquake, his perfectly routine, loving actions are construed as sinister.  There's adherence to all the standard forced gay outing stories here, flavored by the particulars of its Central American setting and Pablo's several decades and greater life experience over most protagonists of his stripe.  Were I to simply describe its events, you might think it unremarkable.

The structure and framing, however, make it so.  Director Jayro Bustamante takes a broad look at Pablo's family and social circle, showing us how every member has their own concerns about some idea of Pablo they've built in their head since learning of his sexuality, and taking us through the intensification of their misguided worldviews as we see Pablo making little to no progress at all.  He is frustrated at every turn by someone deciding his fate for him, people he loves and expects to love him back unconditionally, people who instead get him fired and place restraining orders on his head and speak to him like a monster wearing the skin of their son.  That ineffectuality from the start wanes as he tries to assert himself over the world, yet it never leaves as each new effort is met by higher and higher barriers.  The really damning thing is in how spending so much time with his family in segmented little chunks throughout the film, and contrasting it against Pablo's inability to make is voice heard, is seeing how his consistent inability to meet any of their standards of the demon they see leads to strife into family.  Individuals begin drawing factions consisting of them and them alone, and turning on the other family members for being the REAL reason Pablo turned into this monster.  YOU didn't raise him right.  YOU weren't adequate in bed.  YOU didn't keep a close enough watch.  And all this over a man who loves another man.

It is not a happy piece in the slightest.  I feel compelled to warn anyone checking it for themselves in the future, Pablo succumbs.  Quite contrary to the bright spots throughout where it seems he may finally raise his voice loud enough to make a difference in his own life, the collective battering from those he loves eventually breaks him to the point where he acquiesses to the local church's care, and goes through conversion therapy.  Some of the images early on in this late sequence feel a little detached from Temblores' otherwise somber tone, hitting at "They're trying to make them not gay, but it's actually SUPER gay" visual jokes straight from the But I'm A Cheerleader playbook, but the breakneck descent into destroying their self-identity, physically exhausting, and even sterilizing the men like mere animals really underscores how the behaviors exhibited by Pablo's family are encouraged and reinforced and brought to logical conclusion by a powerful religious entity in the community.  Images of the family as a cohesive unit recur at the end, but we've seen far too much to think it natural.  This is unity by way of harassment, denial, and hatred masquerading as love.  The final look Juan Pablo Olyslager gives the camera, and what he finds behind that last cut, is a real gutpunch of broken eyes locking your own, and simply questioning, "Why?"

Regardless of how familiar Temblores feels at times, it is full of long, withering moments like this, and as a whole they serve as excellent reminder of how even works lesser than this, works that embrace every tired, worn-out cliche of tragic queer narratives, are worth telling as a reminder of this all-too-common story.  The real damage done the world over is too great  to stop regaling just because so many others have done so.

4.5/5

***

You go by the press copies for Angela Schanelec's new release I Was At Home, But..., you get the impression that the reappearance of Astrid's son Phillip after a week-long absence is an event of grand importance.  The framing of the film's opening flatters such an impression: he is preceded by an opening of a fox hunting a rabbit while an indifferent donkey watches, his arrival establishes the film's tendency towards exceptionally long, lingering shots, and Maren Eggert acts the moment of reunion with expected shock and motherly tears of relief.  The full text of the film, however, does not quite support the notion.  Aside from an early sequence of Astrid trying to dryclean his jacket, her son's vanishing does not play into proceedings again.  Astrid's main stressors come from a new bicycle she isn't fully satisfied with, an unnamed worry over how her children are treated at school/the hospital, the comings and goings of a suitor to replace her absent husband, and how goddamned annoying her kids can be on top of it all.  The thought that this week-long period in which her son was missing was more slightly out of routine but still expected, rather than remarkable starts to worm its way into your head.

After all, Astrid's actions and perspective reflect perfectly onto the film's style: hollow and listless, and unwilling to remain with a single topic long even as she has to spend ages at a time with any one subject.  She's over-eager to ditch her new bike after badly modifying it and potentially introducing an error herself, even if the old man with a synthetic voice box who sold it to her is more than happy to make the necessary repairs for no extra cost.  She wanders through the routine of her daily life, speaking in little circles and accomplishing nothing before retiring for the night to lay in the local graveyard.  When she gets a free ear from a director friend, she spends a solid ten minutes rambling and ranting about her thoughts on the inherent dishonesty of the sick meeting the artist and how his whole film was a colossal failure in her eyes, because someone with so clear a view of reality meeting a liar to the bone is cruel beyond belief.  By the time we understand all this about her and see how she really treats her children when they're alone with her, screaming bloody murder over tiny accidents and leaving them by themselves so she can enjoy some Astrid time, it's not much of a shock.  Something obviously wounded her very, VERY deeply before the film's beginning, and hit has left her alternately aimless and lifeless, and full of cynical disdain for any and all inconveniences, of which her definition comprises everything.

Looking at the film's open, it's more the indifferent donkey staring out a barn window than the rabbit killed off-camera or the lively hunting dog that reflects the core character of I Was At Home, But...  Persons standing amidst a world full of possibility, and looking on it with a rotting mindset, thinking it all so terribly staid.  The film itself loses interest in Astrid towards the ending, shifting its focus near entirely to the group of schoolchildren who've been flatly reading snatches of Hamlet during in-between scenes as they act out Ophelia's death and the final battle without interruption.  Though I'm not sure this gels with the film's overall feel as well as it resonates with the themes on display, it makes, on retrospect, a powerful illustration of what Astrid's worldview does when left unchallenged, leaving words and lives of great passion and import reduced to mere robotic script for the children under her, because how else can they know the world?  The final shot of human characters underscores this, with her children in a vibrant wooded setting for once, with Phillip, crippled by the incident at the start, trudges through a stream with his sister on his back at an agonizingly slow pace.  One never does quite learn what happened or why Astrid is the way she is (though there are hints towards an absent father and denied opportunities due to the challenges of raising a family), but it doesn't quite matter.  Once such a perspective develops and grows to this extent, its origins cease to function as a motivator on its continued development, and you grow resigned and cold and bitter for its own sake.

I Was Home, But... makes a compelling depiction of depression and its resultant ennui onscreen, though I must admit the strong possibility I only think this way because I am inclined to think of any slow-moving, emotionally dead piece of media I like a reflection of depression.  There's likely something I'm missing from the growing focus on Shakespeare, and the animals at the start are vague enough that a dozen perspectives beyond my own could hold water.  I AM fairly confident on reading the bicycle scenes as a stand-in for Astrid trying to express frustration with her children that she cannot so plainly verbalize otherwise through a stand-in, though, and think they alongside the extended walk-and-talk with the film director worth the price of entry.

4/5