Undertow

A-

Simple macho maturity from Peru; as gay movies go, it's one of the better on the festival circuit.

***********************************************************

A scenario that's credible, emotional and dramatic is a rarity in the gay genre (in which even Brokeback Mountain somewhat failed the first criterion). Undertow (Contracorriente) may therefore have been over-rated by the critics, who've been very kind to the debut feature by Peruvian writer-director and co-editor Javier Fuentes-Leon. He also earned the Audience Award at the Miami and Sundance film festivals in 2010, and his Colombian and Franco-German producers deserve big kudos for backing his breakthrough movie (12 years after he directed the first of his two short movies).

The storyline, screenplay and directorial style are observant and restrained. A happily married bearded fisherman in a Peruvian coastal village has also been the secret lover of a well-off bearded painter who stays in the village every year. Villagers have suspicions about the painter but not their dutiful Catholic fishing colleague, who's first seen leading the rites for a dead man's burial at sea after listening to the foetus of his pregnant wife's first child.

When the painter drowns at sea after an offshore tryst and tiff, his ghost returns to the village, visible only to the lover who wouldn't/couldn't acknowledge his existence in life. They chat and embrace, and the former non-believer pleads for the ritual burial and consequent eternal peace, not wishing to be an invisible lover with no contact with reality other than the fisherman. To achieve his lover's wish, the fisherman must come out as a bisexual, accepting his wife's desertion, villagers' hostility and the painter's family pressures.

There are just enough artfully composed scenes of water, sand, fishing boats, male posteriors and village panoramas (cinematographer Mauricio Vidal) to give the movie art-house appeal, while the dialogue and ensemble acting are natural enough to avoid the customary Latin American label of "magical realism". Characters and situations are neatly designed to jerk sympathetic tears but manage to avoid eye-rolling cliches. There's no cop-out "happy" ending; the movie has a simple macho maturity. As gay movies go, it's one of the better on the festival circuit.