Broken Sky
Directed by Julián Hernández
Most movie romances prettify the exteriors of couples in love, just to show how wonderful they are (and how pretty you dream you can be). In Mexican filmmaker Julian Hernández’s Broken Sky, the lovers’ shimmering bodies—introduced in erotic intimacy—seem to burn from within. Is it the Indian-brown skin? The complexions roused to resemble fire? It’s that and more.
Broken Sky is the most concentrated look at young adult ardor since André Téchiné’s 1995 Wild Reeds, but this could be its more spiritual sequel. College freshmen Gerardo (Miguel Angel Hoppe, a nobly handsome Aztec with large lips and eyes) and Jonas (Fernando Arroyo, who has the curly haired cuteness of Sal Mineo) learn about love through their bodies. The immensity of what they come to feel—physically, existentially—is overwhelming.
The lighting in that opening scene makes for one of the great overtures in movie history. Hernández credits Broken Sky as a collaboration with his cinematographer Alejandro Cantu and through the film’s extraordinarily probing, mobile camerawork, Hernández demonstrates a gift for being simultaneously inside and outside his characters. The sensitivity of that opening sex act initiates Gerardo and Jonas’ aware of life and of what Hernández poetically refers to as “the oblivion of love.”
That’s a powerful subject. Color and space draw us into the depth of sexual experience and the fear of love beyond control. Hernández’s visual audacity recalls ’80s prodigy Leos Carax but Hernández’s talent is more intimidating. This was apparent from his 2004 debut, A Thousand Clouds of Peace, a meditation on a young gay man’s yearning, in which Hernández followed ’60s high modernism, especially Antonioni’s most ennui-obsessed, artfully stylized movies. But Hernández is committed to depicting gay experience with the same credibility and seriousness that heterosexual filmmakers have assumed as their privilege. And unlike most contemporary gay filmmakers, Hernández stands apart from current filmmaking trends: He shoots on film, not video; he creates cinema personally and classically.
Yet, from the way characters dress, to their immersion in pop media, Broken Sky is excitingly up-to-date. (Each guy’s different T-shirts make a veritable fashion show of expressive logo-attitudes.) Addressing the generation for whom fellatio is as casual as a handshake, Hernández shows that the ease of sexual activity has not erased deeper emotional needs. This love-lost story reveals how contemporary licentiousness has only increased the bewilderment and spiritual foundering of guiltless young sexual experimenters. Jonas and Gerardo are not libertines—in fact, their libidos get sidetracked by the most unexpected thing: desire.
Desire is what sexual conquest and erotic athletics cannot assuage. Desire persists; it’s the key to valuing love. This story of First Love seems teen-movie perfect when the youths sneak into Gerardo’s bedroom to make love while his mother sleeps. They discover an idea of wholeness that will haunt them forever. Hernández puts this idealized coupling to the test. After years of promiscuity justified as revolution, Hernández contemplates gay men’s amorous fixation. This is more than radical; it’s transfixing.
Broken Sky explores spiritual innocence in an intense, vividly emotional high-art style. Hernández chooses a Marguerite Duras quote to preface that first image of incendiary, commingled bodies filmed so close-up that skin color and texture suffuses our consciousness. This visual poetry references the 1960 Duras/Alain Resnais collaboration Hiroshima, Mon Amour (and that landmark vision of lust, regret and history is not dishonored by the evocation). Hernández’s body shots carry a similar political weight: the tryst between two young men crosses cinematic and social barriers. Hernández is right to claim the modernist heritage and use it to say/see something new. This is sex with meaning. Each young man is inspirited, thus validated. Hernández’s own inspiration shows in the film’s lush, wide-eyed, searching perspective.
Broken Sky is amazing to look at; cinematographer Cantu makes eroticism immediate yet sensitive. His camera swerves about the actors, tracking the phenomenon of existence. (One breathtaking image of Gerardo and Jonas at a stadium symbolizes their isolation from both each other and the entire world.) Cantu distends the passing of lonely time with a hypnotic motif in which the camera moves while a character (Gerardo waiting on the street for a rendezvous, Jonas cruising a dance floor for his fate) reappears in different areas of the same space. The excitement of such style-gestures comes largely from witnessing a poet—Hernández—as he finds a successful new trope. Color and movement cause Hernández’s way of seeing the world to feel more real. Anyone interested in the remaining possibilities of cinematography cannot miss this film.
Working from inside the thrall of romantic idealism, Hernández confronts life’s hard facts. Gerardo and Jonas’ idyll changes when Jonas spots a boy at a disco and when an intense young laborer, Sergio (Alejandro Rojo), cruises Gerardo at the university library. One gets caught up in these developments—both the failure and promise of fidelity—as right-now experience, not just “plot.” And even when Hernández’s narrative becomes a bit enervating, his focus on haunted, desperate, love-struck faces rejuvenates interest in these young men’s quests.
Gerardo’s boldest venture takes place in a sex club, scored to Dvorak’s opera Rusalka. It’s so powerfully emotive that even Wong Kar Wai might envy its grandeur and irony. It contrasts the scene of Jonas attempting to lose himself inside a disco’s blaring electronica—a beat that divorces sensuality from thought. Still, Hernández the moralist keeps you aware of what goes on in his young seekers’ minds.
Broken Sky’s courtship and break-up story is elevated by Hernández’s confrontation with the phenomenon of sensuality—the world of longing and mutual nakedness that Gerardo, Jonas and Sergio all share. Hernández fuses passion and physicality arriving at what I think is an unparalleled equation of sex and emotion. It’s the essence of cinema. Broken Sky’s exalted tone comes from being a virtually silent movie yet always visually heartbreaking.
