by Jorge Molina
Award season means trying to watch as many movies as possible in the shortest amount of time to feel included in the zeitgeist (well, in our zeitgeist here, at least; movies from all across the board that, apart from wanting to be in the awards conversation, often have little in common.)
Recently I watched two movies that, at first glance, couldn’t be more different. On one hand there’s Coco, Pixar’s newest entry about a Mexican boy wandering into the Land of the Dead. And on the other, there’s Call Me by Your Name, the much-discussed festival favorite that follows the romance between a teenager and an older man in sun-drenched Italy. On the surface, these two films don’t share much yet they offered me a very similar cinematic experience.
Both made me feel seen (yes, in italics). They reflected parts of my identity that I rarely get to see reflected on screen. How did they do that? By being as specific as possible...
This is something that has come out in many a therapy session over my life, but my Latino and gay identities are two sides of me that can’t seem to be fully validated by the world. This feeling is constantly reflected on the entertainment I consume, where representation of either is lackluster, narrow, and often wrong. However, these movies seemed to perfectly grasp and portray parts of them like no other movie had before.
As I wrote for the site before, Coco is Pixar’s most specific movie yet, centering the narrative around a very particular culture and group of people. It portrays Mexican culture (my culture) in ways that I’ve never seen done before. It is an homage to the people, colors, sounds and textures that I grew up with.
Coco, however, portrays a very external part of my identity. Something I share with an entire country; something that is loud, colorful, and familiar. Call Me by Your Name reflects an entirely other part of myself: a more internal, quiet, and emotionally complex part.
Call Me by Your Name is specific in a very different way. While Coco portrays very concrete traditions that are common to millions of people throughout generations, CMBYN tries to pinpoint ephemeral feelings around experiences that people have lived differently. Coco’s characters and story, while still in its own specificity, are more commonplace than those in CMBYN. A story about an upper-class Italian-American Jewish family in a summer villa is something far less people can relate to in the same way that I (and millions of other Mexicans) can relate to the pueblo of Santa Cecilia.
However, it’s not the character types, or the location, or the specific narrative circumstances in CMBYN that are likely to resonate with (not only, but particularly queer) audiences. It’s the feelings around and about them. The feeling of overwhelming desire and lust during puberty, the desperate need to be noticed and approved of by a crush, the suppression of “unnatural” feelings, the ecstasy over requited love and utter despair over the unrequited.
I’ve never had a romance that looked like Elio and Oliver’s. I’ve never travelled around Italy (or anywhere, for that matter) with a significant other. I can’t even relate to acting upon my sexual desires while I was a teenager, because those were just not my life circumstances. But I’ve felt every single one of those feelings.
I’ve lived Coco. I’ve felt Call Me by Your Name. Not all forms of representation are the same, but all forms of representation matter.
In being two of the most specific movies of the year, one in its way it treats a culture, and the other in the way it treats the way its characters feel, Coco and Call Me by Your Name have given me the gift of seeing myself (two widely different parts of myself) up on screen. That doesn’t decrease their value in tackling bigger, more universal ideas: you don’t have to be Mexican to enjoy Coco, and you don’t have to be queer to enjoy Call Me by Your Name. But they are a Mexican film and a queer film, respectively, and their universal appeal springs entirely from their specificity.