On the other side of the fence, queer film doesn't treat love any more respectfully. Anything remotely resembling a romantic entanglement is quickly trampled by shirts-off, butts-out, man-on-man action. Alternatively, in the more sombre cases, the headiness of romantic attraction is drowned out by the mechanics of a coming out narrative (or, for the more mature set, some good old fashioned drama, probably covering internalised homophobia or some such).
In short, love, romance or even just basic attraction, is not considered meaty enough for an audience to be satisfied with in and of itself.
I say balls to that. Love is one of cinema's driving engines, And I'll put my big, romantic balls on the line and say that in the hands of a sensitive film maker, it doesn't have to hide under the bonnet.
A few of you are going to want to give my balls a beating, knowing that I'm going to hold up Marco Berger's Hawaii as my case in point. I call it exquisite, many in the sold-out MQFF audience called it a complete, cock-teasing waste of time. I'll cut them some slack on that score. Many of them had been drawn to the screening with the promise of the aforementioned shirts-off, butts-out, man-on-man action. I feel their disappointment but, to be fair, that's not what Berger is about, and it never has been.
In his short career, the Argentine director has proved himself to be an intrepid explorer of the space between desire and consummation. His roundly lauded Plan B and his chamber drama Ausente both drew what forward momentum they had from their characters' unspoken attraction. Berger hangs in that anticipatory middle ground, giving cues enough to signal a mutual attraction but providing enough character and narrative constraint to allow that attraction to teeter between sublimation and fulfilment.
This tension is a recurring preoccupation for Berger (it is almost tempting to call it his trademark), and he has been very deliberately honing his technique in numerous short form experiments. Hawaii is the payoff. But to label this nuanced exploration of the intricacies of attraction as a short film stretched beyond its capacity is to fail to recognise its exceptional cinematic control. With little more than two characters, Berger evokes a conventional two level narrative, only he flips it on its head, placing prominence on the swelling romance and pushing the generally foregrounded drama well into the subtext. The result is a film that feels exhilaratingly ephemeral but harbours tangible dramatic depth. In other words, it captures something of that thing we call love.
To give Berger his due, this is not as easy as it at first seems. Romantic attraction, despite what countless Nicholas Sparks movies have taught us, is not a particularly filmic experience. It is something we feel but don't necessarily show, at least not during those uncertain formative stages. Throw another layer of "straight acting" subterfuge on top of that and you soon realise that Berger's text is almost wholly internalised. With this in mind, the emotive response he manages to evoke here is astounding.
To externalise this narrative, Berger leans heavily on the more cinematic tools at his disposal: his shots carefully frame significant details; his camera dwells pensively on the surrounding nature; and the film's grandiose orchestral score swells and eddies with Wagnerian anticipation. It is as if the quiet suburban setting, turned into a lush wilderness deserving of the film's title, heaves continually, in slow expectation of the protagonists eventual consummation.
Hawaii is so visually and aurally melodramatic that the human element could easily have been drowned out entirely, yet the superb groundedness of the two lead performances from Manuel Vignau (who also featured in Berger's Plan B) and Mateo Chiarino, as the film's possible lovers, Eugenio and Martín, tempers the excess and provides an almost banal counterpoint. They give enough to draw the audience's sympathy (Chiarino and his lost puppy looks especially) but never too much that their backstories overcome the tentative courtship at the film's core.
In the foreground, Berger's camera shoulders a lot of the narrative development. There's a palpable connection when Martín shows up at the gate of Eugenio's family home in search of labouring work but the development of that relationship, at least on a sexual level, is left to a fair number of furtive glances and more than a few lingering crotch shots. I should note that the crescendo of secretive mutual admiration is pulled off with a droll sense of humour, mainly in the teasing knowingness of Berger's set-ups but also in the manner in which the impossibly sustained foreplay begins to impact the characters themselves. Berger perceptively picks up on love's unspoken negotiations, how it is a game played to a set of ever changing rules that nobody can ever vocalise. Watching Martín and Eugenio fumble their way through is both mesmerising and soul warming.
Yet Hawaii is by no means an uncomplicated romantic idyll. Behind the hesitant courtship, Martín and Eugenio's stories, the B-plot if you will, cast their relationship in a slightly menacing light. Class dynamics and social power are subtly brokered into the romantic ecosystem.
Berger very consciously plays with space. Martín's homelessness finds him in the linked uninhibited outdoors, a space Berger readily imbues with an emotional, almost mythic, expansiveness. Eugenio, locked away, both in his many bedroomed home and his own writerly mind, struggles to grasp that freedom, despite his relative social privilege. And it is that privilege separates the two men in more ways than Eugenio would likely admit. Like the "germ" in his unfinished novel, a young girl innocently questioning her father's disproportionate wealth, Martín represents an unspoken affront to Eugenio's paper thin belief in social equality. His generosity towards Martín is always carefully structured so as to maintain their social stratification, which eventually becomes the largest impediment to their union.
Martín isn't so much unaware of Eugenio's actions as he is bemused by them. He quietly carries on, slowly working his way into Eugenio's physical and emotional space. Unlike Eugenio whose background manipulations take on a slightly sinister pall, Martín is insistently innocent, almost child-like.
Martín's subtle romantic appeals grow from the nostalgia of the men's half remembered past. His presence alone is an invitation for Eugenio to return to a more selfless time in his life and to redress the imbalance of their childhood, thereby freeing himself of his social and sexual constraints. Berger plays with this concept, giving it significant weight in the film's denouement. Eugenio's revelation, paired with Irusta's beautifully delayed musical response creates a worthy climax for Hawaii's pent up tension, even if it feels more like the beginning of Martín and Eugenio's story than it's conclusion.
For its controlled craftsmanship, its performances, its rare encapsulation of romantic attraction, and for its sheer trust in the language of cinema, Hawaii is the clear standout of this year's festival and I'll hazard this year as a whole. Monumental in a way that few are attempting in queer cinema at the moment.
Rapturous stuff.
★★★★☆
Trailer:
Hawaii screened as part of the 2014 Melbourne Queer Film Festival.
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