Love grope achievements and setbacks of a film.
Rubens Riol of the Guadalajara Talent Press 2014 reviews Daniel Ribeiro's HOJE EU QUERO VOLTAR SOZINHO.
Daniel Ribeiro's HOJE EU QUERO VOLTAR SOZINHO.
HOJE EU QUERO VOLTAR SOZINHO (I want to go alone 2014) Daniel Ribeiro´s opera prima has been labeled by several international film festivals as a gay affiliation film which seems rushed and reductionist, considering the homo fate of the protagonist is just a fleeting conjecture, the first spteeps of a blind teenager that explores his sexuality, an alternative solution to escape a castrating family atmosphere, beyond a possible vocation. All this seen through the eyes of a young filmmaker who marks his film with strong doses of optimism.
What catches my attention of the film is exactly that sweet and naive tone that escapes the militant approach of an LGBT production that is certainly in fashion. That desire to fight for the rights of a sexual community historically postponed, it seems –sometimes- to wish the supremacy over the hetero prejudice norm. In this sense the film insists on showing discriminatory attitudes from the school environment, since the main character not only embodies the difference as handicap but also as a desiring subject who aspires others of the same sex. On the other hand we have an overprotective mother, who inadvertently excludes the child, seeing only his limitations and also a useless and anachronistic father figure, which does not add much to the story. The film takes us into the life of Leonardo (Ghilherme Lobo) and his glaring for his new classmate, which is at the same time an awakening of the senses, I mean the other way, remember that Leo is blind. This is an item of great interest, because apart from the clichés about what we know of the blind, the director gets –after the adequate investigation- to build a believable world in which there is a lot of situations where only we and other characters see what the main character ignores, which is also coherent, sometimes touching, as for example in the shower scene when Gabriel sees with desire that Leonardo is completely naked and go immediately and hides his erection with a towel showing a real and organic sing of interest, a legitimate attraction from one to the other and not a forced strategy of the screen writer .
To this end, one of the biggest attractions of the film is to have treated the topic of a love triangle in a group of teenagers, almost children, because if it is not an unprecedented case in contemporary cinema, I'm thinking of THE DREAMERS (2003) LOS TRES (The three 2011), FÁBULA (The fable 2011), LES AMOURS IMAGINAIRES (Heartbeats 2011) and EL SEXO Y LOS ANGELES ( Sex with angels 2012), just to mention some, where the characters never flaunted similar age range. However, the conflicts generated by jealousy and emotional usual antics between the two boys and Giovanna, Leo's best friend, we had seen it coming as an inherent feature of this type of group relationships, nicely plotted from the visual point of view, where an analogous raw aesthetic intention to combinations is primary. The only thing that confuses me a bit is the ending, which shows a completely unexpected history of social acceptance by the school friends, comprehendible in Giovanna´s case because of their proximity but not from the other guys. Here I can only see the smiling mistake of a giggly filmmaker thinking about the happiness of others, not stopping on prejudice or complications, all of which is forgivable only because of their age.
By Rubens Riol.
