Esteban Caicedo in Dos Entre Muchos ( Julián Hernández/YouTube)
Two art films assess the costs of the lockdowns.
The two new love stories by Julián Hernández and Sally Potter, respectively Dos Entre Muchos and Look at Me, are also tales about painful longing. Hernández’s film is exquisite, Potter’s is exasperating. These are different sensibilities but also opposite responses to a pressing subject: life after Covid.
Hernández gives a romantic account of Esteban (Esteban Caicedo) trying to communicate with Alan (Alan Ramírez) after a pandemic forces them and all of Mexico City into isolation. Using video calls and a slowly eked-out love song to communicate, Esteban feels distant — even though he can see Alan from his rooftop balcony. The Romeo and Juliet metaphor cleverly transforms the state of political tyranny into personal strain. (Hernández evoked Shakespeare in his West Side Story update Asphalt Goddess.)
The artful concept of Dos Entre Muchos — which translates as “Two Amongst Many” — is consistent with the existential perspective that distinguishes Hernández from other contemporary filmmakers. His bright, intense visual style (this time photographed by Chak Pérez Peña) observes the characters’ recognizable, universal emotions. The desire to stay in touch, conveyed through the rhythm of camera movements across distant spaces, makes the longing of Esteban and Alan a miniature update of Antonioni’s and Ophuls’s profound modern couples.
Optimistic and romantic, Hernández deals with the alienation brought on by artificial social conditions that then affect the youths’ dreams. They share emotional space only in memory. That their longing becomes nearly tactile — symbolized by a survivalist caprice — confirms this brief film’s great aesthetic feat.
Chris Rock and Javier Bardem in Look at Me. (Sally Potter/YouTube)
In Look at Me, Sally Potter is fascinated with Covid-era narcissism as displayed by elites; it doesn’t go very deep. She casts Chris Rock as a black gay concert promoter who uses progressive sanctimony in the petty war with his white Spaniard lover, a rock-star percussionist played by Javier Bardem.
Like the boys in Dos Entre Muchos, Rock and Bardem have no names, only the suggestion that the characters are a version of themselves. Potter’s representation of their egotistical interpersonal tension during lockdown is linked to the social-justice sanctimony of showbiz and art-film folk. (Tap dancer Savion Glover plays a third silent figure representing the needy incarcerated masses.)
Potter might think she’s getting at some essential social problem, but she avoids the real-life complication of pop-star complicity with dictatorial Covid measures — as when Rock promoted the daily televised lockdown performances by former New York governor Andrew Cuomo. So soon after those days of high tyranny, Potter seems to have forgotten how performers committed themselves to playing self-serving roles in the government’s Covid regime. When Rock boasts to Bardem, “We raised a lot of money for the unjustly incarcerated tonight,” you can be sure he’s not referring to the January 6 political prisoners still languishing in jail while ignored by media, politicians of both parties, and Potter, too.
Bardem, a proven powerful actor, justifies Potter’s fascination, but Rock can’t match Bardem’s substance. Rock’s whiny voice and supercilious manner are grating, despite the fact that showbiz types take his triviality as a meaningful embodiment of black American complexity.
The two men’s codependency is shown in a slick, neo-noir atmosphere that is Potter’s fashionably pessimistic version of the human condition that Hernández treats ecstatically. When Rock and Bardem trade sarcasm (“I’m free, you’re free. We’re in the land of the free!”), the irony is pure cynicism and self-pity.
Look at Me’s music score is harsh heavy-metal browbeating. The musical score of Dos Entre Muchos is both eclectic and eccentric: Monteverde’s L’incoronazione di Poppea, Vivaldi’s Sonata for violin, violoncello & b.c. in C minor, and the pop tune Esteban warbles comes from Alan Parker’s Fame of all things (“Is it ok if I called you mine? / Just for a time? / If I ask you to hold me tight through a whole dark night / Cuz there’ll be a cloudy day in sight”)!
Caicedo’s thin, halting voice repeats the amateur sincerity of the gay teen in Fame (played by Paul McCrane, who also wrote the song). Dos Entre Muchos also salutes that character’s audition monologue from William Inge’s Dark at the Top of the Stairs. It proves that Hernández has a richer sense of Covid’s spiritual cost than any other contemporary filmmaker.
