Raging Sun, Raging Sky (Hernandez, 2009): ICA Cinema, 2pm
This film is part of the Collective Visions of Pleasure season at the ICA Cinema and this screening will be introduced by the season curator Nico Hughes.
Reverse Shot review:
Raging Sun, Raging Sky is split into three distinct verses,
consisting of a prologue and two separate epic visual love songs, the
first contemporary the second mythic and ancient, featuring the same
principal characters, but for the first time in color. All stanzas are
largely dialogue-free, with images moving in musical ebbs and flows—it’s
unlikely that anyone has made or ever will again make a men’s room
seduction scene as lengthy and sinuous and erotic as the one that opens
the film’s second act. After a brief shot of a projectionist, firmly
situating us both in a movie dream world and literally in a movie
theater frequented by horny young gay men, Hernández orchestrates an
intense roundelay of flirtations, intercourse, masturbation, and
voyeurism between multiple mute characters, from urinal to stall and
back again—graceful camera dexterity transforms this potentially putrid
lavatory space into an erotic labyrinth and unites these hungry young
men in a luscious continuum of desire. The cruising continues in the
shadowy entrance to the theater itself, an overhead chiaroscuro of Kieri
avoiding Tari’s attempted seduction on the steps—as stunningly
patterned with light as anything from early Sternberg. The lingering air of sensuality in this film, as in Broken Sky,
is so strong that it’s almost as though all the characters have
ESP—that they can sense each other’s presence, their skin and bodies,
yes, but also their melancholy and loneliness, their intense passions.
Hernández here almost seems to view this young community of gay men
(more than twenty years his junior) as spiritually connected. In their
isolation one could read a rather old-fashioned take on the homosexual
doomed to loneliness, but there is no discernible sociopolitical angle
to his point of view—this is the stuff of classic romantic legend, of
poetry, of lovesickness and pursuit. When Hernández shows us an overhead
shot of man in bed curled up, the sheet creases fanning out around his
body like rays of light, it’s not a visual aside, it’s an entire stanza
from the love song itself. Yet Hernández is seeking something more sensuous; these men are not
shirking their skins but inhabiting them even more fully, and their
desire is depicted as a primal, ancient force, one that, in this case,
even has power to affect the present. Indeed, the richness of
Hernández’s filmmaking isn’t quite comparable to that of any other of
the formalist darlings of the contemporary art-house scene, from Tsai
Ming-liang to Lisandro Alonso or even to Portuguese director João Pedro
Rodrigues, who may also trade in vivid homoeroticism but whose approach
is less extravagant and more given to tragic grotesquerie. The
romanticism and desperation in Hernández’s films are an aesthetic unto
themselves—Mexican cinema has somehow given birth to the bastard child
of Cocteau and Ophuls. Now the world needs to take notice.
Michael Koresky
Here (and above) is the trailer.
