Queering the Mexican Coming-of-Age Film: Quemar las naves (2007) by Francisco Franco Alba

Abstract

Queering the Mexican Coming-of-Age Film:Quemar las naves (2007) by Francisco Franco Alba Juli A. Kroll Set against the backdrop of the Mexican state of Zacatecas' stark beauty, the award-winning Quemar las naves (2007) by director Francisco Franco Alba contributes to a growing body of twenty-first-century Mexican coming-of-age movies featuring gay characters and subtexts and/or LGBTQ themes (Y tu mamá también, 2001; De la calle, 2001; Sin destino, 2002; Temporada de patos, 2004; El cielo dividido, 2006; Niñas mal, 2007; La otra familia, 2008; Todo el mundo tiene a alguien menos yo, 2012; Peyote, 2013; Cuatro lunas, 2014; Memorias de lo que no fue, 2017). With adolescent protagonists driving the plot and focalizing pressing social issues, the coming-of-age movie is a potent vehicle for cultural criticism.1 In this vein, Quemar las naves–which won the Mexican film industry's Ariel award for Best Actress (Irene Azuela) and Best Music (Alejandro Giacomán)–takes its place as a key early twenty-first-century queer and anti-homophobic film that bridges gay and straight audiences. The film is staged as a traditional coming-of-age tale dealing with orphanhood and gender and sexual identity within the confines of normative gender roles. By employing recognizable images of female gender performativity, Quemar establishes communication with mainstream audiences in its first minutes while subtly coding its male protagonist, Sebastián (Ángel Onésimo Nevares), as queer. Relatively progressive in the history of Latin American and Mexican cinema, however, Quemar resists stereotypical portrayals of gay youths in film even as its characters resonate with three ways of representing gay men on screen: the maricón, the entendido, and the macho. Most significantly, sixteen-year-old Sebastián's coming out is staged not stereotypically as pathology or voyeuristic spectacle, but rather as a source of healing and metaphoric fledging from the familial nest. The film de-politicizes homosexuality by positioning the historically and geographically meaningful Zacatecan landscape as background for Sebastián's and his lover Juan's (Bernardo Benítez) budding relationship. This abets a positive mainstream Mexican audience reading of the pair's sexual identity and allows mainstream audience response to move from a dominant reading of hegemonic gender identity to what media theorist Stuart Hall might call a "negotiated response" ("Encoding and Decoding in the Television Discourse"). The result is a response that more closely aligns with the film's positive view of gay identity and coming out. [End Page 137] Quemar las naves depicts two teens struggling with the transition to adulthood, grappling with orphanhood and grief, negotiating gender roles, and dealing with homophobia. Siblings nineteen-year-old Helena (Irene Azuela) and sixteen-year-old Sebastián share a desperate fraternal love on the verge of being lost, and they express a tremendous urgency to strengthen familial ties via intimate acts and mimicking inherited gender performances. In the film, the siblings struggle with the death of their mother (Claudette Maillé), a well-known singer for whom Helena has been caring. Helena simultaneously shelters the vulnerable Sebastián, a shy and artistic youth whom Helena still bathes while she also positions him as an audience for her hetero-normative gender performances. These performances include lip-synching to recordings of her mother's songs and performing a campy femininity replete with a feather boa. When the mother dies in her bed at home about one third of the way through the film, Sebastián is away experiencing one of his first romantic encounters in the Zacatecas countryside on an overnight camping date with his hyper-masculine lover, Juan. Helena discovers Sebastián's emerging sexual identity and attacks him verbally in a shocking display of homophobic cruelty, which leads to a brutal physical confrontation between the two. Witnesses to the conflict are Aurora (Jessica Segura)–a young woman who is renting a room in Helena and Sebastián's spacious family home–and another important character, the wealthy Ismael (Ramón Valdés), a family friend of Helena and Sebastián who secretly harbors romantic urges toward Sebastián. The film ends with Sebastián's lover, Juan, getting into a...