Two new films illustrate why love stories are rare in modern movies.
Mexico’s Julián Hernández, contemporary cinema’s greatest stylist, reunites with Alejandro Cantú, cinematographer of his previous masterpieces Broken Sky and Raging Sun, Raging Sky, for his new movie, Demons at Dawn. It’s not a horror film but a sensitive love story told through the elegance of visualized passion — a rich, mauve color scheme enrobes two Mexico City youths bedeviled by their inability to understand the complexity of loving another person.
Hernández’s mastery distinguishes him from Hollywood director Daniel Minahan, whose latest is On Swift Horses, another love story about romantic panic but without Hernández’s élan. The difference between these two films signifies today’s confusion about gender roles and social freedom.
In Demons at Dawn, Marco (Axel Shuarma) and Orlando (Luis Vegas) suffer the inner fears roused by the career dissatisfaction and sexual availability that perplex the modern generation. In On Swift Horses, set in mid-1950s Kansas, Muriel (Daisy Edger-Jones) and Julius (Jacob Elordi) recognize a common perplexity — both are stifled by lust, whereas Hernández explores the complications of young men expressing their sexual liberty. In short: Hernández has made a film about the depths of desire while Minahan makes a torturous case for sexual liberation. Hernández is soulful, Minahan is political.
Millennial movies lack romance as a consequence of politicized sexuality that twists and defies natural identity. Hernández instinctively transcends that limited perspective. His films deal with sexuality almost exclusively, giving him unabashed insight into emotional endeavor, not virtue-signaling limited to social groups. Free to explore emotion, he begins Demons at Dawn with a disco-dance sequence to Gloria Gaynor’s “Never Can Say Goodbye” that establishes Orlando’s romantic longing — anticipating his emotional passage that is the film’s narrative.
On Swift Horses falls short of spiritual exploration. Adapting the 2019 novel by Shannon Pufahl, Minahan manufactures fashionable sentiment about closeted emotions. Muriel and Julius are in-laws; both are card-playing, race-track, and gambling aficionados who hide their queerness through deception (she is married to Julius’s brother, played by Will Poulter). Ultimately, everyone’s happiness is denied, which makes for a cautionary critique of the hoary cliché of 1950s repression (the same falsification that was the basis of Todd Haynes’s drab lesbian drama Carol, starring Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara).
Both movies show trysts that become triste. Minahan’s affected melodrama employs lachrymose pop songs (“Mr. Blue”) and a neon-lit visual design that turns Edward Hopper compositions into sexualized alienation. Julius’s secretive couplings with a Latino gambler (Diego Calva) are discreet, never sensual like Hernández’s nude compositions. Hernández’s imagery (such as Marco and Orlando’s rooftop assignation and intimate interiors) succeeds as both amatory ideals and erotic analysis.
Modern filmmaking gets no better than Hernández’s balance of carnal and mundane conduct — Marco and Orlando’s physical yearning matches their career ambitions. Orlando wants to be a dancer, Marco graduates nursing school. But Muriel hoards her betting wins while Julius sinks into sex work and the gambling demimonde.
On Swift Horses (Sony Pictures Classics)
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“You think I don’t know exactly who you are?” Lee asks his very private brother. Elordi, this era’s brooding heartthrob, makes a laughably transparent hero for Minahan’s thesis about the shock of homophobia. Both brothers wear flamboyant pompadours, and Edgar-Jones’s only convincing moment shows Muriel at a mirror toying with a butch haircut. Minahan reduces the period story to cosmetics rather than capturing the down-low essence of the pre-Stonewall era. It’s as if Tennessee Williams and William Inge never happened.
Hernández’s cinema equals the verbal poetry of Williams and Inge, depicting spaces filled with longing in a world of chance encounters. That opening disco scene is about movement in life, introducing characters reaching for each other. “You kiss as if it was the last time,” Orlando tells Marco, going beyond Minahan’s still-thwarted view of romance.
In Demons at Dawn, Hernández awakens audiences to what’s missing from most movies. His swirling, circling Ophüls-like camera movements and magenta-to-mauve tonal shifts create an atmosphere sensitive to morning-after regret. His talent allows emotional separation to dissolve into spatial distance — the reality of loss and loneliness in one beautiful, sweet sequence. Critic John Demetry noted Hernández’s awareness of modern gay insensitivity personified by the “demon twink” social stereotype. Hernández shows what Minahan doesn’t: that what keeps gay men from loving each other is not political or social; it’s inner. Orlando’s and Marco’s young faces (“so full of light”) are subject to both shallow and tragic feelings. But Hernández forgives their generation’s AIDS fears along with pardoning them for being young and stupid. Yet Minahan’s gambling and equine metaphors blame the past, not foolhardy personal desire. That ethical dodge — congratulating modern progress, ignoring this era’s nervous breakdown — is the basic, political, insensitive reason that contemporary Hollywood cannot create love stories.
