Known for his sexually frank, gently subversive explorations of queer desire, Argentinean writer-director Marco Berger’s films typically feature beautiful young men, often naked or scantily dressed, outwardly straight but wrestling with latent homoerotic urges that they can barely articulate. Berger’s latest darkly comic ensemble drama continues this tradition, although Horseplay is a little more caustic than usual, a pitiless dissection of hetero-sexist masculinity and the damage it causes. World premiering in the Proxima competition strand in Karlovy Vary, this biting ensemble piece should have clear appeal to festivals with LGBTQ-themed programs, but also to fans of more politically and socially critical currents in contemporary Latin American cinema.
At a luxurious villa nestled among lakes and woodland, 10 twenty-something male friends have gathered to celebrate the Christmas and New Year holiday. The group spend their days partying, sunbathing, swimming, boozing and pranking each other with physical stunts that often shade into bullying. With their toned bodies, model-pretty looks and extremely close physical intimacy, including sharing beds and showers together, the men appear to be very obviously gay. But in a witty satirical twist, Berger makes it clear that almost all these sleeping beauties are emphatically and loudly heterosexual, or at least “performing” the straightness expected of them by conservative social norms.
The overblown culture of competitive locker-room horseplay between the house-guests entails routinely insulting each other with homophobic slurs, despite their unrelenting obsession with male bodies and gay sex. They also take suspicious relish in posing for “homo photos” of simulated sexual acts with each other to be shared on social media as a mocking, shocking joke. Methinks the lady doth protest too much. Ironically, the two characters who do not participate in this queasy queer-baiting turn out to be the closeted gay Poli (Franco de la Puente) and his secret on-off lover Andy (Augustin Machta). But even Andy is in denial about his inclinations, arguing he is simply so horny that he will occasionally cross over from women to men. “I’m not even bisexual,” he insists.
Horseplay has an episodic, repetitive plot that becomes a little rudderless in places. But the arrival of wives, sisters and female party guests to this all-male milieu late in the drama marks a sharpening of focus, allowing Berger to voice some fairly didactic points about patriarchal power and sexist double standards, not least in pornography. The women make the men behave a little better in some ways, but a whole lot worse in others. In his bleak finale, Berger shows the party spilling over into sexual assault and potentially lethal violence, strongly hinting that repressed homoerotic urges are to blame. Such armchair psychology is debatable, but the film’s cumulative dramatic power does not depend on these acts of casual cruelty, which feel almost incidental to the overall narrative. The main violence in Horseplay is verbal and emotional, mostly lurking below the surface, and compellingly horrible to witness.
In visual terms, typically for Berger, Horseplay is an elegant exercise in highbrow erotica, full of eye-pleasing composition and sensually rich still-life shots, mostly of sun-bronzed male bodies. The ensemble performances are generally strong while the script, peppered with boorish profanity and salty language, mostly hits the target as an abrasively funny critique of heteronormative machismo. Spending 100 minutes in this toxic testosterone swamp is more fun than it may sound, even if you leave feeling you need a long shower afterwards.
Venue: Karlovy Vary Film Festival (Proxima competition)
Cast: Bruno Giganti, Agustin Machta, Franco De la Puente, Facundo Mas, Iván Díaz Benítez, Carlos Carneglia, Iván Masliah, Melissa Falter
Director, screenwriter, editor, art director: Marco Berger
Cinematographer: Nahuel Berger
Music: Pedro Irusta
Producers: Murray Dibbs, Marco Berger
Production company: Matchbox Films (UK)
Sales: Wildstar Sales (UK)
In Spanish
102 minutes
