Undertow (15)

any man or woman,it doesnt matter the genre, who see this and doent cry isnt human at all. despite its well-known metaphor of gay invisibility, its cliches or steriotypes--gay is the only artist, women are gossipy and bitchy and mothers--and its oh-so-clear message about truth. the fact that it is set in Peru, doesnt matter much. it could be any small town anywhere for that matter. it is like dona flor with a gay twist when it is funny but it is also cruel when it is sad. love the acting and the music and the cinematography.

Most gay-themed films are just trashy and are based on getting lots of sex and not really having any emotion or community. This film is different. It has much more depth and shows the involvement of community and family.

I saw this movie in a small festival in Bologna (Italy) last Saturday, never heard about it before so it happened to be a magnificent surprise. The movie is set in a seafront village in Peru, where a fisherman, Miguel (aka Mico) living with his pregnant wife, but in love with a city born painter-photographer, Santiago (Tiago). Santiago kills himself drowning in the ocean, and returns as a ghost whom only Miguel can see. The film's better invention is the realisation that, for Miguel, having an invisible lover is a comfortable situation. He can finally living his relationship with Tiago without hiding himself, despite living in a small deeply catholic community where homosexuality is condemned as sin. But unfortunately this situation doesn't last very long, and Miguel will face the hostility of his village revealing his relationship with Santiago and giving him a proper funeral ceremony. The lead actors performances are astonishing and the small Peruvian village set is something you wouldn't easily forget. Highly recommended.

Phil Ince, as you're clearly articulate and literate, may I ask you to offer your thoughts re: your own comment "it doesn’t seem to advance gay cinema as a whole"? How exactly do you define "gay cinema"? Is this a genre? And what exactly does the verb "to advance" mean in this - in your- context? And if a film fails in this as-yet-undefined enterprise, does that mean it's necessarily a less-than-engaging movie?

I’m not too concerned about my minority status, cinematador, and I may not be quite the beneficiary of metropolitan privilege you suppose. I’m puzzled that you seem to suggest that the nationality of the film is irrelevant. I think culture is fundamentally geographical in origin and I’d expect Peruvian culture to have distinct qualities and the distinct qualities to be visible in the film. I hadn’t any distinct sense of the place either physically/visually nor culturally and I have the impression because the environment couldn’t be shown that this was because there was no locale. I’m wrong about many things and so I may well be wrong about this. For all the rurality of setting that I infer from watching Undertow, perversely it seems to me very metropolitan. When you say that it asks, “What does it take to be a man?�, I’d be puzzled because I don’t understand the question. The best I could do to try to understand would be to return the answer/question, “Where?� This you seem to say has no meaningful answer because ‘what it takes’ to be a man doesn’t differ from one place to another. If it does differ, place matters and therefore its Peruvian origins matter. Then I come back to your dismissal of the films origins as irrelevant and I don’t know how you can do that. I can see on reflection that a film I went into blind may focus on its characters responses to sexuality but that may mean it is a film about perceptions of gender. Pointed out to me, if I’ve taken the point correctly, I see this to a degree but does it do that in any wider sense than the sexual? I do not pretend to have grasped it but if you can clarify the ways in which you identify Undertow ‘repeatedly’ and ‘superbly’ asked whatever its questions were, I’d be interested to know more exactly what you mean.

Hi Phil, I think you are bogged down in semantics of both a) the privileged metropolitan freedom you emerged from/are surrounded with and b) missing some key texture embedded in the story. This is not a gay or political film, it simply asks the question 'what does it take to be a man?', many times over and answers this superbly. Furthermore, the film doesn't cast any judgement on any 'super' values such as community, christianity, etc and in fact subversively integrates these into the narrative in a way most gay fillms cannot. You are in a minority on this one despite the lead character obviously dealing with his crisis of conscience and in danger of patronising the wife who fails to impale herself on preconceived notions of what women need from men. As regards Peru, what would you have us know, other than this story emerges from there?

Hi David, to me Undertow seemed ordinary. The failing may well have been mine but as an Englishman living in London, I can’t imagine what purpose this film serves here. On the one hand, it doesn’t seem to advance gay cinema as a whole and because neither the community nor the relationship between the 2 men had any real background to it, I didn’t feel that it told me much of interest about Peru either. When I tie that to the depiction of the women which seemed questionable and negative cliches to me, I was left with a film I didn’t ‘get’. But then the conclusion has a queasy ‘stand up and be counted’ feel to it which verges on the didactic. If it’s presuming to pass comment on the community’s stance on homosexuality, it didn’t convince me that it had a moral position on the adultery and, to me, the adultery was the heart of the film, not the vague, gay, summer romance. It has a clear position on denial but not betrayal. I just didn’t know what the film’s intentions were but I felt it was delivering a reproach and in turn to some degree deserves one for what came across to me as a negligent self-righteousness.

It reminded me so much of my previous life, and how it would've ended up like, had I not put the foot on the brake. Painfully close to home...

Phil it might be a little morally muddled because that's what life is generally like not the Lassie come home moral black and white stuff that Disney and the pope would have us believe.

I hope we can get the soundtrack, both Selma Mutal''s work and the song "Aunque no sea conmigo". Loved this film the audience was so excited.