Nota de la película: Sex by Moonlight

1 de marzo de 2017 En Notas de la película

¿Soy yo (y mi calentura) o #Moonlight need more cruising? 🤔 I mean, it was breathtaking, but it felt a little shy. pic.twitter.com/gVP4eEy6KZ

? Chucho E. Quintero (@Chucho_Q) 23 de enero de 2017

I’ve made my peace with the disappointing and sexless second-to-last shot in Barry Jenkins’ otherwise satisfying and stirring triptych, Luz de luna, not because of the film’s deserved but ganó extrañamente Best Picture Oscar, nor because I’ve changed my mind about that shot’s coyness or its misguided minimization of gay male desire.

No, I’ve made my peace because I’m comforted to discover I’m not the only one to feel this way, though I’ve yet to read any pro critic making a peep about it. That alone should tell us something about the limitations of Jenkins’ occasional universalist impulses, and those of critics who mention universalism as an automatic virtue. I say, well, it depends.

Tras una conversación con un amigo varón heterosexual que vio la película conmigo, reconozco el valor de poder hablar sobre si alguna de mis afirmaciones es cierta o no, y de contemplar la idea de que echar un buen polvo, o ver uno, o simplemente un beso apasionado, puede ser tan importante, tan afirmador de la vida, como recibir afecto y aceptación platónicos. O que en ciertos contextos uno sin los otros representa, en el mejor de los casos, una capitulación al sentimiento o al decoro heterosexista, o en el peor, una especie de castración.

I think that’s what Andrew Garfield was getting at in the Hollywood Reporter Actors’ Roundtable discussionCuando preguntó, con auténtica decepción pero con buen humor sobre el final de la película, "¿Dónde estaba la acción?", todos los actores masculinos heterosexuales que le rodeaban se rieron y parecieron estar más o menos de acuerdo.

That’s what that second-to-the-last shot in Moonlight showed me. Jenkins, as a self-professed “active ally of the LGBTQ community,” was no doubt acting in good faith by not ending the movie with a hot sex scene between Chiron and Kevin, or “at least a kiss,” as two other of my straight Venezuelan friends said.

I can hear his reasoning: love is about more than sex; Chiron should not be reduced to his dick. Well, I agree, but he has one so don’t cut it off, either. Why imply that there’s a dichotomy? Director Chucho Quintero dijo en Twitter that most of the third act, intertitled “Black,” is basically hot foreplay, and it is, full of slow-burning sexual tension. So where’s the money shot? Did Chiron get in his car after a phone call from Kevin and travel all the way to Miami from Atlanta for a headrub?

Don’t get me wrong; I love Luz de luna. It’s the only recently released film that I can say held me enrapt until the end. I may get around to a detailed shot analysis, since there’s plenty to write about and I haven’t seen much of that in any of the reviews I’ve read. At the moment, though, I’m content to just let the two viewing experiences linger in my head like a luminous memory of somewhere I’d never been before.

I will say that despite the by-now universal acclaim it’s received, much of which has focused on its cultural significance, I suspect that none of us have even begun to account for the richness and depth of Moonlight’s logros como una obra de arte [personal].