BEAR CUB
DIRECTED BY LUIS MIGUEL ALBALADEJO
THE TENDER MOMENT that anchors the new Spanish film Bear Cub risks being controversial: A gay man is in bed with his nine-year-old nephew, cradling, shielding, almost overpowering him. The little boy's thin arm stretches halfway across the uncle's broad back like a swimmer clinging to a life buoy. It's startling because you don't see many images of intimacy in movies these days, and this one has elements that are clearly out of the ordinary. Your head spins twice, the second time because you realize the miraculous sensitivity that director-writer Luis Miguel Albaladejo has achieved.
Bear Cub is emphatically not controversial, and this is a sign of artistic liberation. Albaladejo grasps the prerogative to depict a gay character's humanity without emphasizing (yet not ignoring) the usual angst and social pressure. He's not in denial of the fears people harbor about unorthodox behavior; rather, the way Pedro (José Luis García-Pérez) freely conducts his sexual life and balances his work as a dentist in Madrid with family obligations to his free-spirit sister Violeta (Elvira Lindo) and her young son Bernardo (David Castillo) is a story that Albaladejo tells in sweet defiance of gay-movie convention.
One of those conventions is brazening past the obstacle of homophobia (film culture's primarily heterosexual hegemony), dismissing the notion that gay filmmakers must outrage the status quo. Pedro Almodóvar has demonstrated just how much power, effrontery and acclaim can come of this approach; his world-class films, which developed out of Madrid's subversive, campy underground, cleared the space for the next generation of Spanish filmmakers like Albaladejo. With a protagonist conspicuously named Pedro, Bear Cub builds on Almodóvar's humanist foundation, but it also salutes Spain's other major gay director, the darkly sinister Eloy De Iglesias, whose Bulgarian Lovers played here earlier this year.
Albaladejo sees double: looking out of Almodóvar's kind eye and De Iglesias' cynical eye, juggling a sense of forgiveness with a sense of suspicion. Bear Cub maintains an emotional equilibrium that suits the depiction of Pedro's romantic and skeptical personality. In the opening scene, Pedro wakes up in the middle of a threesome when Violeta knocks at his door. She's off on a hashish journey to Asia and wants her brother to care for her son whom she suspects is gay anyway. It's an Almodóvarian premise, but Albaladejo doesn't turn Bear Cub into Auntie Mame. Pedro understands that his sister is wacky, an unreformed hippie, and though empathy is part of their affection, he stays grounded, behaving with unneurotic calm, and never hiding his life from his nephew.
Pedro doesn't object when his sister denies little Bernardo any contact with his staunchly bourgeois paternal grandmother. While Violeta is away, Pedro leaves the choice to extend family relations to Bernardo, who knows no better than to follow his mother's influence—besides, he only wants to stay with the uncle he adores. This lapse places too much responsibility on a child's judgment. It goes against Pedro's sense of propriety (seen when he counsels a patient's sexual excesses or chides a friend's drug habit), and jeopardizes the family strength and stability Bernardo will need. Yet, it's a very uncle-like indulgence.
In his professional demeanor, Pedro evokes Peter Finch's performance in the John Schlesinger film Sunday, Bloody Sunday portraying an ultra-civilized gay doctor managing his private life and the responsibilities that include tolerating the annoyance of family ties. Finch enacted the rarely seen dilemma of being sexually discreet when independence vies with duty. But the distance traveled since that groundbreaking 1971 movie first appeared allows Albaladejo to imagine a character less devoted to standard notions of commitment. Albaladejo reveals newly contrived relationships and longings. Pedro, who survives HIV-infection with considerable difficulty, encompasses many of the issues that have come to define gay life in the post-Stonewall and AIDS era—a struggled-for self-sufficiency, an erotic restlessness. His profession allows him a certain middle-class license, yet he traverses both the demimonde of gay life's alleys and sex clubs and its bear-fetish subculture that is now mainstreaming. (In a recent episode of The Simpsons where Smithers is seen talking to Homer, a group of gay men shout out "Who's the bear, Waylon?")
It helps to have a movie star play ambassador for a subcult, and Albaladejo certainly found one in José Luis García-Pérez, who has some of that burly magnetism Javier Bardem exuded in 2002's Mondays in the Sun. He's as unique among today's short, anorexic glamour-stars as he is among the stereotypes of gay movies. Casting an actor with this outsized physicality makes a commitment to generosity (expanding the panoply of gay movie types beyond the international Chelsea-boy cliché). And Garcia-Perez isn't a Santa Claus type either; he's straight-acting with some effeminate traits and a temper—which means he's recognizably human. You don't doubt the mutual teddy-bear affection between Pedro and Bernardo, and Albaladejo achieves a breakthrough—for both gay movies and 2004 movies—in the climactic moment when these good friends part: a demonstration of love without selfishness.
More of Albaladejo's artistic liberation shows in his female sympathy (another Almodóvar lesson learned) and his unembarrassed feeling for the customary family virtues represented by the ostracized grandmother Doña Teresa (Empar Ferrer). This middle-aged woman first seems intrusive and untrustworthy, as if symbolizing the kind of tyrannical social assimilation that would demonize Pedro's homosexuality. She's from the monied establishment with law and tradition on her side, while well-off Pedro resides in the gay ghetto. But Albaladejo sees into Doña Teresa (a grieving mother and lonely elder) and respects her desperate need for family, as she respects Pedro's lifestyle. How bitterness twists a person into villainy makes Doña Teresa as complicated as Pedro; it's an insight worthy of those great ambivalent characters in some of DeSica's neorealist films. More proof of Albaladejo transcending the usual polarizing controversies of gay movies.
Almodóvar's films get bigger media exposure partly because he's earned it, teaching audiences to see humor and passion in alt-life melodrama. Yet it can't be denied that he has mastered the trick of appealing to heterosexual taste by always seeming to be so fancifully transgressive. To judge by the way his disciple Albaladejo takes the torch for gay humanism but carries it forward, that old saying, "The child is father to the man" is surely correct. Albaladejo has even described his film as "a rather disconcerting education sentimentale."
That sly Flaubert/Almodóvar reference isn't opportunistic. It's the key to what makes Bear Cub notable. As its story deepens, Bear Cub very cannily depicts the moral toss-up that gay men engage throughout their lives as they waver between boy-to-man maturation. Pedro's own need for role models is mirrored in his relationship to Bernardo. (The scene where he teaches him to brush his teeth is about love as much as hygiene.) This doesn't promote father-son tradition; it's something else that Albaladejo illustrates through the queerness of Pedro's love life.
In its humor and warmth, Bear Cub recalls Vincente Minnelli's 1963 bachelor chronicle The Courtship of Eddie's Father where Glenn Ford portrayed a playboy widower raising his son (Pedro has lost a lover to AIDS), but this is a romantic comedy with a paradigm shift. Unlike Ford, Pedro beds or parties with a parade of men (mostly big, bald or bearded) who suggest a unique fraternity, rather than a potential nuclear family. Opening his life to his nephew demonstrates a sense of sacrifice, and this example gives Bernardo what all young men need to learn: access to compassion. Bear Cub insists that love makes family of us all. Respect paid to Almodóvar's controversies, Albaladejo puts aside the need to be subversive. He is free to beguile—proof that the cub is father to the bear. o
