Temblores<\/em> begins with the family of Pablo (Juan Pablo Olyslager) descending upon a palatial home with the kind of energy one might expect for a funeral. But no one has died \u2014 at least, not literally. Pablo might as well be dead to many of them now because he makes a startling announcement that he will be leaving his wife and two children to live with another man, Francisco (Mauricio Armas Zebad\u00faa). The nebulous diagnoses and pseudo-psychology begin flowing immediately. His ex-wife Isa (Diane Bathen) and her family speculate that his sexuality stems from childhood trauma; meanwhile, Pablo\u2019s parents wildly claim he was not gay before marrying Isa.<\/p>\n\n\n\n What flows from the opening represents the impossibility of Pablo to establish any kind of new normal in his life and relationship with Francisco. The intense homophobia of the Guatemalan evangelical community, of which Pablo was once a part, quickly rears its head. He\u2019s made a pariah in his religious community, told to step away from his job, and barred from seeing his two children. When he gets to court to settle the divorce and custody, Pablo gets accused of pedophilia. The pressure campaign forces him into a false choice between happiness with his family and self-respect as an out gay man.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The righteous indignation and bafflement of Bustamante in Temblores<\/em> lands with a strong impact due in large part to the soulful, tortured performance by Olyslager. Pablo clearly thought coming out would make for the hardest part in his journey of self-discovery and assumed his privilege might insulate him from the fallout of his decision. He\u2019s an honorable, amicable, and even quite virile man \u2014 not that these things matter when determining a person\u2019s basic human rights and dignity! But when it comes to public treatment, Pablo still feels he can lay claim to some of the benefits afforded to men in a patriarchal, heteronormative society.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Lingering doubts about whether he can really justify leaving his entire old life behind for Francisco drive Pablo back into the arms of the church. They\u2019re willing to take him back in, provided he offers sufficient oblation for the sin they believe he has committed. For the church, that means some unique variation on \u201cconversion therapy.\u201d Don\u2019t expect Boy Erased<\/em>, a condemnation of the practice through the eyes of someone who hoped the method could \u201ccure\u201d his homosexuality. Temblores<\/em> finds more fertile psychological ground in exploring what might drive a man there after social pressures make him doubt the truth he\u2019s chosen to live.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There\u2019s something silly about Bustamante\u2019s portrayal about the evangelical deprogramming process. It\u2019s not laugh out loud funny, per se. But the irony of trying to turn gay men straight by making them take long group showers together in the nude as well as wrestle each other in their underwear is not lost on him. Bustamante recognizes the thin line between homophobia and homoeroticism, depicting it not so much to call out hypocrisy. (After all, that arises fairly organically from simply documenting the processes.) Rather, it\u2019s to show how these porous boundaries can throw someone like Pablo into such debilitating uncertainty over what he actually wants.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Contrast this sequence with the most strikingly beautiful shot in Temblores<\/em> \u2013 Pablo and Francisco laid out on their bed, spooning in the nude as magic hour lighting peeks in through the windows. It is beautiful, natural, tender. For a brief time, the camera sees what the Guatemalan society around them cannot. Sadly, it cannot last. But the golden hue lingers in our minds and puts additional urgency in the fight to make that loving embrace more than just a fleeting, flickering moment on a screen. B+<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n In Guatemalan writer\/director Jayro Bustamante\u2019s feature debut, Ixcanul (2016), the filmmaker shone a light on how an indigenous community around […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":522,"featured_media":12893,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[340,1381],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12891","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-movie-reviews","category-movies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12891","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/522"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12891"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12891\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/12893"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12891"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12891"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12891"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/09\/crookedc.png\")
<\/p>\n\n\n\n1 hr. 47 min.; not rated<\/em><\/h5>\n\n\n\n
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