A Strange Friendship
By Taiani Mendes
Breve História do Planeta Verde
“No one let go anyone’s hand” became the slogan of resistance against the currently harmful political ruling groups in Brazil and a concept that has long been present in the imaginary (or, with luck, in reality) of the marginalized and persecuted. Tania (Romina Escobar), Pedro (Luis Soda) and Daniela (Paula Grinszpan) are three lonely types who have come together to help each other since childhood in Argentina. Now as adults in the metropolis, when separated they share silence, isolation and lethargy, as they appear for the first time in Santiago Loza’s Breve historia del planeta verde (Brief Story of the Green Planet). Even when they are together, they stand out from the rest, surviving in the bubble against transphobia, homophobia and abandonment in depression.
There is nothing new about returning to the traumatic scenario of the past to pave the way for the future, but Loza tries to do differently by creating a fable about union and belonging. Youngsters considered strangers on a strange mission, told in a deliberately strange film, whose greatest quality is the pursuit of a natural approach to the trans-protagonist’s life, even though she is intimately connected to the most surreal facet of the plot. When weirdness gets mixed up with nonsense, however, there is nothing to be proud of, and such moments are not uncommon, both in the characters and in the film as a whole.
Present since the first shot, Tania's identification and connection with the alien is slowly developed as if it were a big mystery, when it is all a tremendous obviousness. Predictable as the light that goes out in the map revelation, or as the homophobic perpetrator who actually desires the victim.
Just like colorful and excluded Power Rangers walking through unknown regions and guided by magical beings, the main characters preserve characteristics that almost count as special powers: Daniela with melancholy, Peter dedicated to express himself, Tania serene in coldness, frozen pains in the calvary of memories at the same temperature as the water in stones that preserves the different life of the extraterrestrial throughout the return operation. Side by side they are able to raise a Megazord of love without fear to defeat the unity of their opponents, ready to kill them with fire before they reproduce.
The weird movie filter masks a great deal, but the film above all delivers a weird comic discourse that scoffs at humanity, exalted for much of the plot to justify Tania's overpowering connection. She, the sensible one between the inconsequential and the sheltered, the one who stays awake in bed after getting up, and the other one prefers to go back to sleep, can't take it anymore and chooses to leave. As for the straight selfish cis needy to the point of wanting to put another life in this dark world, and the dancer guided only by feeling – it’s them who should stay and fight. Tania's freedom is to trade what was right for the doubtful, hoping to find a less hostile tribe.
