Love Under Siege: Julio Hernandez Cordon’s I PROMISE YOU ANARCHY (TE PROMETO ANARQUIA)
by Jaie Laplante, Executive Director & Director of Programming
Ten years ago this very month, Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain debuted at the Venice Film Festival, breaking ground as a “gay Western” that examined a dramatic life-long sexual/romantic embroilment between two men played by A-list Hollywood actors and eventually defied conventional wisdom by grossing close to $100 million. Yet what has turned the film into an enduring classic a decade later is that, especially today, it “feels neither gay nor especially Western: it is a study of love under siege“, as Anthony Lane best put it. This week, at another European festival a few hours inland from the Doge’s home, another groundbreaker has arrived – an alt-rock “gay film noir” from Latin America, a region still with a relative scarcity of cinematic representation of homosexuality. Guatamalan/ Mexican director Julio Hernandez Cordon‘s fourth feature I Promise You Anarchy (Te prometo anarquía) is similar to Brokeback, in that it reads neither particularly gay nor noir; it, too, is a story of love under siege.
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I Promise You Anarchy, directed by Julio Hernandez Cordon.
Hernandez Cordon’s three previous features have all played in competition at Miami International Film Festival (and his second, Marimbas from Hell, won the Knight Competition Grand Prize in 2011). I Promise You Anarchy alights on present-day Mexico D.F., where barely-out-of-his-teens Miguel (Diego Calva) skateboards around the city, plastic vampire teeth hanging from a loose chain around his neck. He lives in his mother’s comfortable middle-class home, and is deeply in love with Johnny (Eduardo Martinez), the glue-sniffing son of his family’s long-time maid. Having largely grown up together, Miguel and Johnny have been friends since childhood; now, they are also frequent sexual partners, even within earshot of Johnny’s anemic girlfriend Adri, with whom he lives in an empty tanker truck on the edge of nowhere.
In the opening scenes, Hernandez Cordon’s extraordinary work establishes the core dynamic of Miguel and Johnny’s world in confident, clear, deft visual strokes. Climbing out of the top of the tanker truck, Johnny harasses the slumbering Miguel with paranoid accusations that Miguel has been telling others about their sex life, which wasn’t their “agreement”. Tellingly, Hernandez Cordon frames this scene so we can only see Miguel’s face – his sensitive worry – tucked away in a corner of the frame. Johnny is just out-of-frame – symbolically, so close to Miguel, yet also out-of-reach. Filling the majority of the screen is the dawn of a new day behind Miguel – as if it is dawning on Miguel, too, that Johnny’s paranoia and frequent cruelty may never change. “How come you gotta treat me this way?” Miguel complains.
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Adri (Shvasti Calderón), Johnny (Eduardo Martinez), and Miguel (Diego Calva) in I Promise You Anarchy.
Johnny pulls Miguel inside the tanker truck, where he reposes in his underwear, enjoying the spooning affections of his sleeping girlfriend Adri, while wrapping his legs around Miguel. When Miguel gets Johnny sufficiently aroused, the two depart for an adjacent room, where we see the first sex between the two young men – and it’s shockingly tender lovemaking, with plenty of kissing and affection. We see in Miguel’s face how at peace he is in this moment, how life makes sense, how everything is in its place in his universe. In a later scene, after Miguel has snuck off for home, Miguel tells Johnny over the phone that he loves him, and Johnny responds sweetly and easily in kind.
It’s the explosive power dynamic between Miguel and Johnny, however, that frequently uproots their comfortable rapport. Johnny can’t forget the economic class gulf that exists between Miguel and himself; sexually, he’ll only allow Miguel to be the passive partner, and in yet another effort to overcome the perceived power imbalance, Johnny frequently twists his affections for Miguel into taunts and jeers, sometimes in direct response to the emotional need that so clearly radiates from Miguel. Such is the push-pull of the Miguel-Johnny relationship. If there’s one thing that Johnny can promise Miguel, it’s constant emotional chaos, or anarchy.
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Miguel (Diego Calva) in I Promise You Anarchy.
Miguel has found a niche in the underground trafficking of blood to corrupt blood bank suppliers, and he frequently pulls Johnny into the burgeoning business, part of a variety of his strategies to tie Johnny closer to him. I Promise You Anarchy makes sophisticated use of recurring blood imagery- blood-letting, references to an older gay couple as “blood brothers”, a nosebleed during a moment of a high-stress plot twist, and the blood-red lighting scheme in the interior of Johnny’s tanker truck home. It all has a glorious internal logic in Hernandez Cordon’s immaculate relationship between his visually arresting compositions and the increasing dread of his theme. Love is the lifeforce that pumps blood through Miguel’s veins. His love for Johnny, deeper than anything he could imagine, is what gives him his reason to live. When Miguel’s regular black market supplier sounds the alarm that a blood bag turned in by Johnny was infected with hepatitis C, it’s another clear sign that the twisted and convoluted emotional connection between the two men is darkening.
Miguel has haunted eyes. His love for Johnny is all that he has known of love – is their love under siege, or is love itself simply a siege? The compulsively erratic Johnny ricochets from playing headgames with Miguel to asking Miguel if he would move in with him at a room at the local jai-alai, if Johnny promises to give up his current scenarios. You see Johnny’s naiveté, his puny hope at upending the class control he suffocates himself under. “You make me feel like shit, man,” Johnny tells Miguel when the latter rejects the grossly half-baked idea of the jai-alai life.
True to the film noir hanger on which Hernandez Cordon has wrapped this brilliant meditation on the perils of passion, there is a homme fatal that keeps the foreground of the story blistering with shock and awesome dread. The headlines of horror that we so often read from Mexico these days invade the storyline in an awful, organic way, and you feel the dry-mouth shock of Miguel’s overwhelmed middle class perception of human decency. Every shot, every breath, every story twist, every nuance of I Promise You Anarchy spirals inevitably toward catastrophes, emotional and otherwise. Hernandez Cordon’s film joins a unique pantheon of transcendent visionary cinema inwhich the fragility of the male ego in a relationship with another so much like itself is foregrounded – films like Van Sant’s Mala Noche or Wong Kar-wai’s Happy Together. And yes, Brokeback Mountain.
— Jaie Laplante
I Promise You Anarchy was co-produced by Mexico’s Interior XIII and Germany’s Rohfilm, and made its world premiere at the Locarno Film Festival on Sunday August 9th. Earlier this year, it was workshopped at Miami International Film Festival’s industry-only Encuentros works-in-progress program, sponsored by Knight Foundation; and additionally workshopped in April at Primera Mirada of Festival Internacional de Cine de Panama. The film is represented for worldwide sales by Madrid’s Latido Films.
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