Robert St. James
A truly delightful film to see at this year Frameline 48 Film Festival in San Francisco is Marco Berger’s The Astronaut Lovers (Los Amantes astronautas, Argentina/Spain, 2024). This is the eleventh feature film of Marco Berger whose first feature film Plan B (2009) helped establish him as one of the most interesting gay directors in Argentina at depicting queer desire. Marco Berger has received critical acclaim for his award-winning Absent (2011) as well as The Blonde One (2019) and Taekwondo (2016). Light in feeling like an Eric Rohmer film, The Astronaut Lovers is more than a homosexual love story: Its cleverly written script deconstructs the rhetoric of gay melodrama in the playful banter between its two main characters.
Pedro and Maxi, the two bright and joyful protagonists of The Astronaut’s Lover are two men around thirty years of age who run into each other at a summer seaside resort near Buenos Aires. play in freedom and spontaneity with love, with sexuality, with their own identities. Pedro (Javier Orán), charmingly homosexual in his boyish and features an enigmatic, smiling face, half Spanish and half Argentinian, has come to Argentina for the summer on vacation and to reconnect with the country he knew as a boy and is staying at the beach cottage owned by his uncle. There he meets Maxi (Lautaro Bettoni) who Pedro knew as a boy and a childhood friend. Maxi is staying at the beach house with this ex-girlfriend Sabrina (Mora Arenilas) and is presumed straight although his endless flirting makes him seem to be a real “cocktease.”
At the beach, Pedro engages Maxi in the beginning a long playful conversation that is full of sexual inuendo, joking with Maxi about being from Mars and puzzling over Pedro’s reference to being an astronaut – a slang expression for gay male penetrative sex. From the biting comments from their first dialogue at the beach, Maxi exhibits the poses, movements and appearance of having a gay “essence,” although he protests that he has never done anything sexual with another man. All this entices Pedro to think that Maxi actually wants to have sex with him, although all their amusing wordplay around sex seems more like a sport than any kind of passionate kindling.
The film proves to be a comedy of errors on the value of friendship and love regardless of gender. In The Astronaut’s Lover, Marco Berger allows himself to tell the story of the long hot summer of two childhood friends, “an unashamedly happy story” as he himself defines it, and which does not stray from the Berger’s favorite themes. Berger has already had the opportunity to explore many facets of same-sex love in previous films, lingering on naked bodies that touch each other, show themselves or escape the gaze of others.
A relationship of sincere friendship begins between the two men, made up of parties, late-night hangovers, jokes, complicity and the taste of salt: All this is placed against the backdrop of a summer that brings with it the desire for freedom, unexpected impulses and the laziness of long, sultry days. Pedro and Maxi become more and more intimate.
When they start pretending to be lovers to make Maxi’s ex-girlfriend Sabrina jealous, the situation changes. The others staying in the beach house fall for it and soon they too believe that Pedro and Maxi are actually in love. Desire and irresistible attraction will take them into uncharted territory as love can be a dangerous game. For Maxi at age 30, the fluid and emotional discovery of his own desire for another man brings on the tremors of a post-adolescent turmoil as he meanders into an increasingly physical awareness of what sex with another man entails.
This pretending to be lovers ploy used by Marco Berger closely resembles the one seen in Luca Guadagnino’s Challengers (2024), where Zendaya lures Josh O’Connor and Mike Faist onto her bed for a menage a trois, only to then slipping off and watching them kiss with great gusto. Sabrina, the ex-girlfriend of Maxi, had an interest in a menage a trois that fractured their relationship and that angst about sexual attraction is part of what leads him to Pedro. Marco Berger never sentimentalizes the budding romance between Pedro and Maxi but instead revels in their private language about sexual desire as “astronauts” exploring distant planets.
The Astronaut Lovers screens as part of the Frameline Film Festival at the Vogue Theatre in San Francisco on Tuesday, June 25, 8:30 PM.
Tickets: https://www.frameline.org/films/frameline48/the-astronaut-lovers.
