A hard and tender Mexican gay romance

Picture Patent crossed with a particularly horrible episode of Narcos:: Mexicothen filled with sufficiently sex and nudity On the road (Along the way).

As hard and uncompromising as this pitch may seem, which is the most surprising about this first of Venice Orizzonti, it is how tender and ultimately moving. The framework of its improbable love story is a long motorway to hell where death, or perhaps worse, is just hidden around the corner. And yet, in the midst of all lust, violence, blood and other body fluids, Pablos has designed a deeply felt romance about two men who are passionately in a very dark place.

Diego Luna (Andor) is one of the producers of this entry of the extreme arthouse, and its name can allow it to find a certain traction outside the festival circuit. The plethora of exposed phallus, as well as a handful of graphic sex scenes, could otherwise hinder its commercial perspectives in certain places, while perhaps helping it in others.

But On the road (The less generic Mexican title, which results in In the truckWorks a little better) is far from being an operating film, even if it is the exploitation of young and old men, whether they lead trucks or sell to drivers at rest arrest. The film is filled with explicit images and moments of macabre violence, but they serve a higher goal, which is to show how human souls can somehow meet even if their body is completely broken.

The story touches the floor on the move, or more like the bump, when we meet the handsome young Drifter Veneno (Victor Prieto), who turns the towers in a gay club by the road which resembles what it belongs to Gaspar Noé Irreversible. Pablos portrays sex as brut and not very romantic: it strikes, not love, which makes sense when we realize that Veneno earns his life sleeping with truck drivers in exchange for money or coke, the latter, which he sells on the side.

After one of his steep customers, Veneno comes up against Muñeco (Osvaldo Sanchez), a trucker in his forties who spends long weeks away from his distant family, drinking and consuming drugs to stay awake at work. He is hardly a model, but Veneno quickly takes a taste for the old Wayfarer, either because he hopes to associate with him or perhaps steal his money, or – and this is where the film becomes interesting – he took feelings.

The two go down the highway, sitting side by side in the 18 wheels of Muñeco. (Phallic symbolism is hardly discreet, especially when Muñeco boasts of the way the truckers are the best in bed because they manage the woman as they manage their vehicles.) Veneno does not hide the fact that he is attracted to the driver, nor that he is gay, while Muñeco claims that he is not homosexual, even if he is not against that and seems curious about it. The possibilities seem as endless as the road extending in front of them.

But this booming love story is also a raced and curtain thriller, which means that the two travelers soon find themselves in difficulty when killers of the Veneno disorder past – seen in violent stylized flashbacks which are explained much later – begin to continue them. In a sordid rest area, it is a cemetery of broken down trucks, between which a team of sex workers maintain its customers, Veneno crosses the paths with the driver who stiffen it and ends up stabbing the guy to death. Now potential amateurs are on the run from the two killers And The cops, leaving them with some viable options.

What is the most impressive is how On the road Takes a Passe -Partout genre scenario – and which does not skimp on a bloodbath at the end – in a film which becomes more and more emotional because things are exponentially emphasizing for its main characters. More Veneno and Muñeco are in danger, the more their bond evolves with hard bromance in a total romance. When things are the most desperate, the two hide in an abandoned warehouse and slow dance with the Colombian ballad “Los Caminos de la Vida” (“The Trucks of Life”) in one of the most moving sequences this year in Venice.

They also do other things together. The new arrivals Preito and Sanchez, both excellent, courageously display their bodies. Pablos and DP XIMENA AMANN capture sex, as well as the many stoppages, the shabby bars and the bathrooms of the service station, in severe images that highlight the extreme conditions that Veneno and Muñeco live – conditions that apply to all the other Mexicans they meet on this extent of Blacktop Blacktop.

However, despite its dark adjustment and its darker outcome, On the road is an unexpected and optimistic film, even if viewers may want to turn away from a brutal final. It is as if Pablos had chosen to take his lovers deeply in one of the lower circles of hell, just so that they can seek and, in Dante’s words Hell“See the beautiful lights of the sky” for a short period. His film is punitive and painful, but filled with promises.