Li Cheng (2018)
Twentyish José (Enrique Salanic) lives with his single-parent mother (Ana Cecilia Motos) in a small apartment in Guatemala City. Li Cheng’s film begins with a description of an apparently typical day for them. Mom (as she’s called in the cast list) wakes her son shortly before setting out to sell homemade sandwiches on the street. She and other local women who make a meagre living in this way ply their trade wherever they can; the authorities regularly move them on. José’s job is also in fast food, in an unusually literal sense. He runs about outside the eatery where he works, trying to attract passing drivers to stop and buy. He waits cars and trucks rather than tables. After work, José stands on a street elsewhere in town. Another young man approaches. They acknowledge each other then have sex in a dark, poky room. The routine is repeated next day except that José meets with another young man. They go to the same room but the sex is different – not so mechanical. Afterwards, José and Luis (Manolo Herrera) doze peacefully together. The following day, they meet up again.
At the front of the bus that José catches to work, a Christian preacher declaims – a sort of spiritual tour guide. He tells his fellow passengers, inter alia, that God loves a sinner. José doesn’t look too sure about that but he knows he’s a sinner. He isn’t breaking the law: according to Wikipedia, ‘Consensual, non-commercial, private same-sex sexual activity has been legal in Guatemala since 1871’. Even so, the country remains (as well as economically poor) socially conservative and strongly religious, with evangelical Christianity on the rise. José‘s director Li Cheng was born in China but emigrated to the US at the age of fourteen (he’s now in his mid-thirties). His background qualifies Cheng to give a double external perspective on Guatemalan life and he sets the scene very effectively. In one sequence, José and Luis stand in a crowded street at night watching a religious procession pass by. The look in Luis’s eyes indicates that, for him as much as for the man behind the camera, he’s observing the rituals of an alien culture.
Luis gives a similar impression in church with his mother Luciana (Evelyn Celinda Bautista Torres): he joins her in the happy-clapping but looks to be going through the motions. In bed together, José and Luis gently examine each other’s body, including scars. José explains that his was self-inflicted; Luis that his brothers attacked him when they caught him with another man in their village. Luis, a building worker, is currently on a job in Guatemala City. Cheng doesn’t suggest that homophobia is less of an issue here than in the sticks; it’s just that in a bigger place gay sex can go more easily unnoticed. José’s mother, like Luis’s, is staunchly religious. One weekend, she sees her son getting on a motorcycle and riding off with his new male friend. The bike breaks down temporarily, which delays José’s return until late that evening. When he gets home, his mother is curtly angry but Cheng has revealed her true state of mind before her son is back. She prays aloud for his safe return – she may well feel he’s in greater danger because (she suspects) he’s out doing wrong. In the days that follow, she repeatedly urges José to pray for God’s forgiveness and guidance.
The naturally reserved José says little about his own religious beliefs but there’s no doubting the strength of his devotion to his mother and awareness of the distress his sexuality will cause her. José, which Cheng wrote with his producing partner George F Roberson, is both a vivid portrait of present-day gay lives in a particular environment and part of a longer tradition transcending specific time and place: the film dramatises a mother-son relationship that’s mutually loving but, from the son’s point of view, emotionally oppressive. José is tied to Mom’s apron strings, his romance with Luis strangled by them. Both men are in love as never before but their predicament is expressed by the restricted setting of their lovemaking. (They rent the room for an hour at a time: on one occasion, a voice from the other side of the door announces time’s up and José calls back that they’ll pay for an extra hour.) Luis wants to get out of Guatemala altogether. When José says he can’t leave his mother, Luis stops seeing him and disappears.
It goes almost without saying that the bedroom sequences are the heart of this film. According to IMDb, none of the cast had acted professionally on screen before. If that’s right, Li Cheng has done a great job directing them. The love scenes between José and Luis are remarkably staged and played – frank yet discreet, natural and tender. Mom is benighted and unwittingly destructive; Ana Cecilia Motos makes her a more disturbing and poignant figure by convincing us of her deep love for her only son (she also has married daughters but that’s not the same). It’s a powerful irony that, by fighting for the domestic status quo, Mom will presumably ensure that José continues to live promiscuously. He’ll go on needing forgiveness but he’ll still be with her, which is her priority.
One scene I didn’t understand. Working her latest sandwich pitch, Mom sees Luciana, tells her that Luis is leading José astray and reminds her of the teachings of their pastor. Luciana is annoyed and moves away quickly. She’s already well aware of her responsibility to direct her son towards redemption – presumably why Luis was with her in church. The two women evidently know each other and this exchange implies they’re members of the same congregation. How does that square with Luis’s account of his family life outside Guatemala City? Besides, it’s not as if Mom’s words to Luciana have a direct effect in ending the affair.
José misses Luis immediately and fails to make phone contact with him. His efforts to try and find Luis take on a new urgency with the abrupt ending of the relationship between José’s work colleagues, Monica (Jhakelyn Waleska Gonzalez Gonzalez) and Carlos (Esteban Lopez Ramirez). (She is keen for them to settle down; he just wants to have fun. When Monica gets pregnant, Carlos promptly departs the scene.) The last part of José consists almost entirely of the title character’s unavailing attempts to track Luis down, which eventually take him outside Guatemala City and, in the closing scene, to the ruins of a Mayan temple. Throughout the film, Li Cheng and his DP Paolo Giron contrast the cramped conditions of José’s home, working and sex life with large spaces beyond the city – glimpsed from public transport or more fully enjoyed by José and Luis on their motorcycle outing to the country. In the later scenes, these open spaces dominate. Their physical scale now communicates a sense less of freedom than of the hopelessness of José’s quest.
As Luis, Manolo Herrera is such an expressive presence that the viewer misses him too. Enrique Salanic, with much more screen time, has a bigger challenge and meets it well. There are times with José when you feel you’re watching a person in a documentary rather than a drama but Salanic is often striking. He seems more feminine in the company of Luis and to have aged several years by the end of the story, despite its short timeframe. José is a small-scale film; even at only eighty-five minutes, it feels stretched a little thin. But it’s finely observed and thoroughly engaging. It makes you want to see what Li Cheng does next.
18 August 2020
