Raging sun, raging sky

A-

The B&W photography is outstanding, the aspirations of the writer-director have to be admired, but the length he went to express them is unjustified.

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If it won the Teddy Award at the Berlin International Film Festival, a movie includes an LGBT issue and will probably be worth watching. The inaugural winner, in 1987, was Almodovar for Law of Desire, and the list of annual awardees (a page in Wikipedia) for Best feature, Jury and Special films includes many good movies (the 2010 winner was The Kids Are All Right). LGBT Awards are also presented annually for Best Documentary and Best Short Film.

Raging Sun, Raging Sky won the feature award in 2009 and is an ambitious work of classy soft gay porn from Mexico's Julian Hernandez. The writer-director was already a multi-award-winner for A Thousand Clouds of Peace (his debut feature, which also won him the feature film Teddy in 2003 ) and Broken Sky (2006), and has been making gay shorts and documentary films since 1992.

"Sky", "clouds", "sky" : his fans could guess Hernandez would look to the heavens for more inspiration. In his third feature, its two lead roles are passionate lovers, portrayed handsomely by young actors each working only for the third credited time in a movie, (and for the first time as leads in a feature). When Ryo (Guillermo Villegas) is kidnapped by a jealous boxer (also a first feature role, for Javier Olivan), Kieri (Jorge Becerra) can only save him with the guidance of a divine female spirit (Giovanna Zacarias).

Simple storyline, extraordinary rendition.

When it was shown in Berlin, the movie ran for an awesome 191 minutes. Back home in Mexico, its screened version had lost 50 minutes. The DVD issued by TLA is the uncut epic version, and has to be seen for it to be believed that anyone would dare, or be able to, create an experimental gay epic in which lots of handsome non-camp young Mexican males are beautifully filmed while constantly cruising and connecting, mostly in the toilet of a rundown urban cinema specialising in screening hard gay porn.

Lustrous black-and-white cinematography uses lavishly teased available light to weave silky shadows and sensuous close-ups of skin spots, dead-pan expressions and frantic fornication. When two men reach a bedroom, they silently strip to their briefs to pace slowly, gaze outwards and skywards, and then grasp each other with full frontal embraces, wet kisses galore and full dorsal pseudo-action.

The film's first focal point is Ryo, who has the elfin charm of a Mexican-Indian Sabu. Before that the film tracks a woman wandering city streets for 15 minutes, seeking her desired human contact: Ryo's sparkling boyish smile enchants her and leads them to dance in the rain and eventually copulate tenderly. You will meet the strong man you need, the voluptuous woman intones to the back of the apparently heterosexual youth when they part silently in the morning.

No one in the screenplay ever communicates directly in words. Touch, strokes, glances, stares and sex are all that the characters need, and the only conversations belong to the world of make-believe heard off-camera in TV soaps. Such symbolism feels apt until the scenario takes its lead characters into a world of ancient ruins, sandy caverns with burning torches, genitalia and nude clambering.

Much was unclear amid the faded green weeds of the wasteland; I think a couple or more of the dreamy chapters repeated themselves. I was surprised to see the boxer again, in a snappy toga, because I thought he had already been slain during or after anal sex by an aggrieved sex partner who he'd previously beaten up after giving him a blow job. What else would a sudden splurge of red on the screen mean?

But the boxer (a psychotic swarthy Zorro type with a slimline beard) reappeared like a demon angel to steal sweet sleeping Ryo, who had found true love with his fated lover, Kieri (a Latino Keanu Reeves, with eyes that can act). The boxer laid the lad's supposedly dead (but visibly breathing) naked body down inside a cave, after flying them both into it down an invisible cable. Meanwhile, the desperate lover emerges from sleep, and being buried in sand, to slay the boxer, as his female guardian angel told him to, after which he resurrects Ryo to smiling life by fucking him under the wise gaze of the kneeling spirit woman, but that gift of his life force appears to sap all the naked lover's strength, or maybe life. Nude Ryo then hoists his love over his shoulder, to bear him out of the cave and across the wasteland ... to a final scene where they are happily alive in bed together and the boxer stands at their bedroom window beside the spirit. It all looked more graceful and lovelier to behold than the clumsy preceding summary is.

The film's black-and-white photography is outstanding, the over-reaching aspirations of the writer-director have to be admired, but the length he went to express them is ludicrous and unjustified. Mexico's truncated version may not have expurgated fake sex and full nudity; it may merely have eliminated repetitions and longeurs.

I wouldn't watch the long version again, but am glad I saw it once. In future, a dominant producer with determined scissors could help this director make fine art.