An intimate character study of a real-life Mexican gay porn star and online “sex influencer”, Pornomelancolía is an engaging exercise in lightly fictionalised documentary, a reality-blurring hybrid approach which has proved controversial even with its own star. Fresh from its world premiere in San Sebastian, where it won the best cinematography prize, Argentinean director Manuel Abramovich’s latest feature expands on the style and milieu of his Berlinale prize-winning short Blue Boy (2019). Queer themes, juicy subject matter, and timely insights into niche social-media celebrity should ensure plenty more traction in the festival and art-house world, especially with a hint of scandal to spice the mix. Next on the screening schedule are Zurich and Reykjavik film festivals.
The subject/star of Pornomelancolía is Lalo (Lalo Santos), a young Freddie Mercury lookalike living in the Mexican city of Oaxaca. By day he works in a small engineering company, passing as straight with his more conservative, macho colleagues. But Lalo is also famous online among a huge gay fanbase for his home-made hardcore sex clips, explicit selfies and paid sexual hook-ups. And yet, despite his apparent success and highly active sex life, Lalo appears lonely and depressed, occasionally breaking down in tears in public, and forever leaving plaintive voicemails for an elusive mother who never appears on screen.
Like Ulrich Seidl’s Sparta, Abramovich’s artful docu-drama screened in San Sebastian under a cloud of controversy. The narrative fabric of Pornomelancolía is closer to auto-fiction than pure documentary, with Santos reportedly consenting to turn his life into a hybrid blend of reality and staged scenes. But the star chose not to attend his own world premiere, berating the film-makers on Twitter for “domination disguised as fake empathy”, and for “carrying out a project with a depressed person and pressuring them to recreate painful moments of their lives without having mental health specialists accompanying the project.” In his San Sebastian interviews, the director responded to these allegations with wounded bafflement, insisting Santos spent four years helping to shape the film’s content as a full creative collaborator.
Wherever the truth lies, Pornomelancolía undeniably feels like a sensitive, empathetic portrait of Santos. Shooting sexually explicit material with cool distance, Abramovich includes plenty of hot naked bodies and springy erections here, but the actual sex scenes are always carefully framed, strongly suggestive without becoming real pornography. The film’s viewpoint is unsensational and non-judgmental, with major focus on its star’s downbeat moods, which feel almost like bipolar reactions to playing an insatiable stud on camera. The corrosive effect of social media’s perpetual, voyeuristic, needy gaze is a key background theme here.
Some scenes in Pornomelancolía are more obviously docu-fiction than documentary, notable the location shoot for an absurdly funny period porn fantasy set during the Mexican Revolution, with Santos playing Emliano Zapata as a rampant sex monster with a proudly priapic sombrero. The director of this film-within-a-film is a man of forced good cheer and risible artistic pretensions, citing Bunuel’s That Obscure Object of Desire (1977) as inspiration, then firing Santos at short notice for his pained reaction after being pushed beyond his comfort zone. Sometimes abusive behaviour comes cloaked in fake bonhomie.
Impressionistic and disjointed, Pornomelancolía touches on serious themes such as mental health, HIV and sex-work exploitation without much in-depth journalistic engagement. All the same, Abramovich and Santos have made a glumly compelling, emotionally rich and sporadically hilarious film, whatever their later disagreements.
Visual invention is striking too, with Abramovich doing double duty as his own cinematographer. That San Sebastian prize rewards his innovative multi-format aesthetic, which smoothly blends conventional documentary-style footage with full-screen clips from Twitter and other platforms. During these sections the film situates the audience within Lalo’s viewpoint as he scrolls through social media threads, likes posts, sends text messages and more in what feels like real time. This is a simple but effective touch, a cool-eyed critique of the coldly transactional nature of contemporary online life.
Director, cinematography: Manuel Abramovich
Screenplay: Manuel Abramovich, Fernando Krapp, Pio Longo
Cast: Lalo Santos
Editing: Juan Soto, Ana Remon
Producers: Gema Juarez Allen, Rachel Daisy Ellis, David Hurst, Martha Orozco
Production companies: Gema Films (Argentina), Desvia Films (Brazil), Dublin Films (France), Martfilms (Mexico)
World sales: Luxbox
Venue: San Sebastian International Film Festival (Official Selection)
In Spanish
94 minutes
