Review by Amos Lassen
By: Amos Lassen
"TU ME MANQUES"
Transformation Through Connection
Amos Lassen
Jorge (Oscar Martinez) is a father desperate to find the reason for the suicide of his son, Gabriel (Jose Duran), who lived abroad. The fragility of a father who loses a chi...
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"TU ME MANQUES"
Transformation Through Connection
Amos Lassen
Jorge (Oscar Martinez) is a father desperate to find the reason for the suicide of his son, Gabriel (Jose Duran), who lived abroad. The fragility of a father who loses a child is an indescribable emotion yet through the direction of Rodrigo Bellott and the interpretation of Martínez, we see the closest raw emotion possible to see on a movie screen. It is honest, raw and crude showing the mentality that many conservative parents in Latin America still have a question about LGBTQ themes. The emotional and cultural journey we see here begins for Jorge and his mission to meet the son he never could in life.
"Tu Me Manques" is "an introversion of what it means to love and be loved. The romantic scenes between Gabriel and his boyfriend, are natural and subtle. We realize that any one of us could Gabriel. Director Bellott uses diverse and extravagant characters like the extraordinary Rossy de Palma as the voice of reason and a bridge between rational and emotional. This is a film where the protagonist is not a single character, but the human being itself, and as the end for some, is the beginning for others. Here, the death of a son was the beginning of a different life from a father.
Jorge cries that "In my family there are no people' like this '" as he denies the sexuality of his son. Boliviano, Rodrigo Bellott, writes and directs, this film with common gay themes that are told from a perspective that few filmmakers have tried- from the concerns of a homophobic father who is desperate to know a truth that he is afraid to find. The focus is on human transformation and how the human being has the potential to change through the power of human connection.
This is probably the saddest coming-out story that we have ever viewed. Twenty-something-year-old Gabriel settled in NY because he felt he could never be the son that his ultra-religious family in Bolivia expected him to be.
The story begins when his father, Jorge comes to NY after Gabriel had suddenly taken his own life. He is completely unaware of his son's sexuality and his grief quickly turns into anger once he starts to learn the truth. Most of this anger is aimed at Sebastian (Fernando Barbosa) with whom Gabriel had recently broken.
Sebastian did not know of Gabriel's death and even though he has his own grief to deal he with, he somehow manages to defuse Jorge's bitterness because he was mistakenly yearning for his idea of a son that Gabriel was not. By introducing Jorge to many of the gay men who were an important part of Gabriel's life, he hoped to be able to show his son's true self to Jorge.
While alive, Gabriel had been petrified of discovering the truth of his sexuality; he had denied it even to himself until he had met Sebastian. His deeply religious mother had suspected it and hinted that her recently diagnosed cancer was God's way of punishing her because of Gabriel. Bellott tells the story in a layered manner that mixes the telling of Gabriel's life with a drama that Sebastian has written about the reality of Jorge's New York search.
We see the harm created, whether intended or not, when parents enforce their own ideals on their children without any regard to their nature or their own feelings. What is so sad is that this all-too-familiar tale will resound loudly with so many LGBTQ people who have suffered similar pressure growing up. It still ends with young gay men and women taking their own lives
Bellott doesn't just take the easy way out by making the parents appear purely as the demons here and we see this in the compelling performances of Jorge and Sebastian as they eventually unite in grief.
It is quite ironic that shared experience of parental rejection is one of those things that keeps the LGBTQ community together. It's not that it happens to everyone but it's common enough to have an effect on social interactions. When something is wrong, we assume that friends have a duty to step in because there may not be anyone else. This has been explored in cinema time and again, yet there have been relatively few films looking at what it means to a parent to lose a child in this way. Most parents that reject their children feel compelled to and it leaves a void which no such community is able to try and fill. "Tu Me Manques" tackles this head on. Jorge is hostile to Sebastian at first, blaming him for Gabriel's death yet his longing to know more about his son's life gradually overwhelms this feeling and inspires him to reach out. As Sebastian introduces him to a world full of people he has always disdained, Jorge finds himself drawn into the play about Gabriel's struggle that Sebastian is working on and undergoes a transformation that both brings him closer to his son and changes his whole outlook on life.
Bellott uses multiple layers of fiction to explore themes around loss, rejection, redemption and that deep human longing to understand what's going on inside the minds of those we love. At the end, we question much of what has gone before but also to look inside ourselves as we search for the truth of others' experiences.
The serious themes are balanced with comedy that satirize parts of the gay scene. Emotionally intense scenes remind us of what's at stake. Naked bodies lose their individual meaning, moving like robots. Sebastian laments the emptiness to be found in spaces that focus too much on the sexual, though he understands the relief from stress that they provide. What matters to him is something more personal. Bellott finds this in his eyes.