That place is in the eyes and is the creation of the cognitive-affective machinery we all possess. It can even be simulated as if we were there in a fine performance, consciously enacted.
We saw a fine multi-award winning film last night: Since The Last Time We Met, by Matìas de Leis Correa, a brilliant two-handed doomed but blossom-bearing sexual romance starring, as in the picture I’ve chosen as my theme, Patricio Arellano and Esteban Recagno.
But the beautiful places in Spain the film inhabits are nothing to their reflection in the eyes of Arellano in the still above, a prolonged moment of achieved love in the midst of an emotional vacancy in the life of Victor played by Arellano. He meets David, his first love fifteen years later – now married to a woman we never see who takes regular trips away. In these gaps David wants the life, love and sexual togetherness he only has with Victor, though he believes he loves his life. The film calculates the days between each meeting – between fifteen to thirty but rising to the hundred of days when David’s wife becomes pregnant.
Amidst this time and on a particular long trip away for David’s wife, the two meet at a holiday bungalow on waterways, oft seen in all their glory, and catch time where the one neighbour cannot see them (Recagno plays the ‘closeted’ David brilliantly) because she is lost in her afternoon soaps and siesta. Here, on a log overlooking the waterway, the men lose themselves in longing – though David’s longing is conditional on his wife’s business trip duration and his fear of him being seen with Victor and reported back to her.
This meeting, as it is performed, even by the close-up on the body and face of Victor is lived though not in physical time-space but in the eyes, so that it is reflected in them but can only be imagined. It is a place that has duration only in memory – even in prospect of a future memory – but that can be longer than the experience of physical space and time. But it must sustain within and alone if it is to be worthwhile.
Victor gives David up and David falls into supposed despair, but in the final scene of the beautiful fil, Victor sees David again, now with his baby, in the same square in which his first reunion took place, but after a sad look within moves on. He may never relive that place he visited in the enactment of it above, but he will use it to sustain whatever future he has and his choices, should they come, to love again.
With love
Steven xxxxxxxxx
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