There are genres that smell of Brummel. To testosterone. The western could be the clearest example, and hence the value of feminist reappropriations such as those carried out by Kelly Reichardt or Jane Campion in First Cow o the power of the dog, respectively. But there are others who, although they have sold themselves as the opposite, have also perpetuated the patriarchal gaze. There is the romantic comedy, which has spread a conservative message about the family and the couple, and toxic in terms of relationships. Let’s remember that praise of the ‘whorehouse’ that was Pretty Womana woman who needed to be saved by the man who paid to have sex with her.
This is how the LGTBI collective appears in Spanish fiction: they are 6.2% of the characters, gay men predominate and only four are trans
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In romantic comedies, moreover, minorities, especially sexual ones, did not exist. At most the gay friend appeared, exaggerated and comic relief, but they were never in the center. Is it that the LGTB collective did not fall in love, did not want to laugh with their stories and sexual and sentimental entanglements? It has cost, but in the last years those stories begin to arrive. Some made from the classic model like Bros; and others, like my friend’s frienda “dying comedy of entanglements” as those responsible define it and made from the margins and with the intention of being a demolition ball to all the stereotypes that exist.
A Spanish film made with a low budget but a lot of charm and intelligence by Zaida Carmona, who has written the script with Marc Ferrer, another representative of queer cinema made outside the industry with films like cut. The director is also the protagonist in a character that is nothing more than a trompe l’oeil of herself, who laughs at the stereotypes about lesbians (“they are all vegetarians”), as well as those of the social class they represent, young people from artistic and cultural unions in a cosmopolitan Barcelona. People who live between cycles of Rohmer (whom she pays homage to in style and from the title) and have dinner with good wine while bumping their heads over their bad luck in life.
A film that was previously a podcast that the director made with Cristina Pastrana and where “different dykes we admired were interviewed.” They showed “reachable references that with their way of being the world make activism.” Talk about these issues with “humor and closeness”. During the confinement, the idea of turning the podcast into a film arose, and with a campaign of crowdfunding and the help of many friends has been achieved.
my friend’s friend it is queer activism without speeches or underlining, from normalization and grace. “It is the way in which I feel most comfortable doing activism”, confesses her director. “I am a superfan of romantic comedies, but it is a genre to which queer people, and I don’t even tell you about dykes, it seemed that we could not belong. Dykes can hardly belong to comedy. It seems that we can’t be funny, that we can’t work with humor, that we have to be there angry and sad. At the cinematographic level, it was necessary to conquer certain spaces or certain genres from which we have been thrown out or to which we have not belonged. The lesbian thing here is not the conflict of the character, we simply put ourselves in the front line of the scene and celebrate our identity, and that is a form of vindication”.
I am a super fan of romantic comedies, but it is a genre to which queer people, and I don’t even tell you about dykes, it seemed that we could not belong
Zaida Carmona
— Film director
Just as there has been a reappropriation of the language that was used to hurt and is now part of the language of the collective itself, now it is time to do the same with genres such as romantic comedy “which is super patriarchal and where love is represented in a super toxic way ”. In my friend’s friend love is also toxic: “It’s not that we do it better, but there is a reflection on how toxic it is, even if we continue to have these types of relationships later. It is that there is also this thing that it seems that when you make a queer or feminist fiction the characters have to do things well and relate well, be exemplary. And it is something that both as a spectator and as a creator, is difficult for me and makes me a little tired. We can talk about toxicity falling into the toxic, because surely it is more similar to our way of relating and rethinking about it”.
The film also poses a dilemma, should queer cinema always be on the fringes, should it be punk and anti-establishment or can it be within the industry, produced by a big film company? A debate that Zaida Carmona herself is not clear about and that she has with her screenwriter Marc Ferrer. “We were talking about it the other day, he is clear that the essence of queer cinema is to attack the system. I agree, but I feel that in the end we have made the film completely outside the industry and that is unsustainable. You can make a movie like that, but you can’t make many more. It is true that the industry then appropriates it if it is interested and sets higher budgets, but that is not happening. The truth is that I don’t have an answer, because I do believe that there is something in the essence of this cinema that has to be punk, but I think it would be nice if it would transcend more if it reached the mainstream, because in the end it is how our stories would be in line with other stories. I have my doubts and I have no conclusion, but I do believe that there must continue to be films on the margins, because if the margins falter, the mainstream it also begins to move ”, he says.
my friend’s friend it works as a tribute to Rohmer, but also as a review of a very heterosexual cinema, “like all the references we have, which are extremely heteropatriarchal”. A review that serves to see “how we could use those structures, that learning and that aesthetic to tell our stories from our present.”
Self-criticism is another of the key elements of the film, because its author does not understand autofiction from another place, and more “in an absolutely egocentric and narcissistic present.” “Laughing at ourselves can save us, and we have talked about reappropriation, and I think it also goes through there, about how to use this cliché to be able to disassemble it, burst it and laugh at it. In the end I think about my character, that she is falling in love and falling out of love and feeling like a super victim of the world and thinking that nobody loves her and she is really a brat. You have to tell him, honey, you are 35 years old, wake up. Get to work. We are complaining or talking about activism while I am having a wine in a super posh bar in Barcelona”, says Carmona with the same grace with which she laughs at herself in a film that is an important point in the representation of queerness in cinema. .