Across the Great Divide

Boy
directed by Auraeus Solito

Emerging out of the Philippines’ post-Marcos, post-Edsa Revolution context, Boy’s protagonist is a young, Aquino-era gay boy with an absent, congressman father and a mother who is nostalgic for the pre-democratic days of Ferdinand Marcos, when everyone but her son’s sex worker friend had money. From a Western perspective, it’s a classic film of rich kid loving poor kid. Fortunately, it is also a film that pushes (however tenderly) on issues of class in a newly democratic country, by generating images of young, privileged queers gathering to support one another at poetry readings alongside images of young, poor queers dancing and singing onstage to make a living.

Director Auraeus Solito has called Boy his “ode to the erotic Filipino genre,” which for him was critical to the acceptance of his own homosexuality. The film is cast with only two professional actors (the mother of the rich boy, the father of the macho dancer), which leaves a lot to be desired in terms of craft. In terms of authenticity, however, it is politically interesting for the macho dancers to be played by real-life macho dancers, and for the young poet to be played by a young poet.

Boy moves from the dark, dirty, empty gay bar to the brightly lit home of a teenage poet who lives with an overbearing, lonely mother trying to figure out why her son hasn’t gone out as much lately. The locus of this film isn’t being in or out of the closet, or the problem of an intolerant, wrathful mother (actress Madelaine Nicolas is in fact my favorite part of this film). Boy offers slightly more complexity than that. It’s a story of two boys (Aries Pena and Aeious Asin) from different worlds –– a pretty poet who collects expensive tropical fish, and a gritty, illiterate sex worker living in the slums –– and whether or not humans can exist out of their natural habitats. Boy is about how these boys’ worlds coincide and conflict with one another, but also about the failures of the democratic project in the Philippines.

As an American, my ability to comprehend this important, even canonical, gay film might be lacking; it seems clear that Solito was not making this film for Westerners, although it’s had a great run on the festival circuit here. In any case, you may feel ambivalent after seeing Boy: enjoying parts, hating parts, feeling generally underwhelmed, but happy to have seen it.

–– Sofia Rose Smith