Argentinian queer filmmaker Marco Berger’s 6th feature, THE BLONDE ONE is a slo-paced, blue-collar romance between two collegial men, Gabriel (Re) and Juan (Barón), Gabriel is the blonde one, a reticent single father, renting a room from his coworker Juan, while his school-age daughter Ornella (Irusta) stays with her grandmother.
A decade after his debut feature PLAN B (2009), Berger has asserted oneself as a supernal intimist in configuring the game of seduction. Juan, a virile, both-ways-swinging satyr, finds Gabriel a low-hanging fruit and proceeds with his tried-and-tested titillation swimmingly, knowingly stoking Gabriel’s thigh on the sly, appearing dishabille in front of him accidentally on purpose, gazing him too long with his lip-smacking gaze. A reactive Gabriel absorbs all the signals in full, it is a matter of time that the two consummate their carnal knowledge, short of 35 minutes into the movie, Gabriel yields to Juan’s provocative suggestion, but it is always the nonplussing and awkward post-coitus moments that eke out the intrigue which is crucial to keep audience hooked in this gradualistic probe into the delicate equilibrium between two men who are sexual bedfellows.
Everything happens in THE BLONDE ONE has a whiff of banality which has been percolating the queer cinema since the millennials, if one doesn’t resort to surrealistic flourishes. Personal coming-out struggle slowly gives way to a more introspective look on the interactive nature of sustaining a relationship, often under an extrinsically jaundiced milieu. And on the regard, Berger’s film cleaves to that realism at heart, being a story preponderately confined in the unprepossessing apartment, its camera sticks to its garden-variety naturalism and withholds any bold gestures. Totally in sympathy with Gabriel’s quiet, observational viewpoint, which means a viewer is better to be psyched up to immerse oneself into the slowly panned-out plot, where emotion weight will soon encroaches the blasé happenstances.
Gabriel’s passive presence (his nickname is Dummy) is the dominant perspective that makes THE BLONDE ONE a gay drama with a difference, and Re makes most of his soulful look to elicit maximal tendresse in our hearts. His Gabriel’s introvert disposition isn’t a bottled-up gimmick, but a truly entrenched personality that doesn’t change through any turbulence. That said, in the pursuit of that elusive thing call love, the blonde one is also the braver, truer one, and Berger’s open-ended coda ingeniously freezes on the smiles of the intimate father-daughter duo, all’s well that end’s well, that illuminating hopefulness is just what the doctor ordered.
referential entries: Berger’s PLAN B (2009, 6.4/10); Andrew Haigh’s WEEKEND (2011, 8.1/10); Lucio Castro’s END OF THE CENTURY (2019, 7.8/10).
