Gay Bandits

One of the major modifications Marcelo Piñeyro made to Ricardo Piglia’s novel Plata quemada is bringing the love story between Nene and Ángel to the forefront, which in the original is only a secondary detail in the plot of the heist. In some aspects, this emphasis on the “love story” over other aspects of the plot is not so unusual. After all, Lombardi did the same in his adaptation of Captain Pantoja. (The romance between Pantaleón and the Colombian—originally Brazilian—had only been a secondary aspect of the novel). But, of course, if the film’s emphasis on romance is not only conventional, but, perhaps, the core trait of a commercial movie, the fact that the love story in question is between two men could be seen as subverting Latin American (as well as U.S.) social norms.

Bingham, in a very perceptive comment, noted that he found the film of interest because it made overt the homosexual undercurrent present in action films. In fact, the film seems to point out this innovation in a sequence when, during the final shoot out, Cuervo declares the hoodlums to be just like “the last of the Mohicans, and he and Ángel start banging on the floor and making pseudo-Native American noises. The reference to Cooper’s Last of the Mohicans is particularly apt, since this and other of the author’s novels can be seen as the origin of the modern Western genre and, therefore, of all action narrative. It has been argued that the “detective” is nothing but the transposition of the Western hero to an urban setting; and Cooper would go on the write the first “spy” novel, appropriately titled The Spy.

Some decades ago, Leslie Fiedler described the friendship between Hawkeye and his Mohican mentor Chingachgook—two of the protagonists of Last of the Mohicans—as “innocent homosexuality,” thus pointing out the same-sex desire that runs through Cooper’s novels and the action genre which descends from them. Of course, in Piñeyro’s film, there is nothing innocent about the characters sexuality. Moreover, if Ángel and Nene are heroes, it is sort of by default. They are portrayed heroically—and who doesn’t love doomed lovers?—but objectively, given their disturbed behavior—Ángel is psychotic and obviously a psychopath—they can only be seen as villains.

Piñeyro is thus developing a by now common insight regarding action heroes. Moreover, there is a tradition in film of depicting anti-social characters as homosexual. While rare in American film—the only examples from a studio era Hollywood film I can think of are the gay killers in Joseph H. Lewis’s film noir The Big Combo—it is much more common in European art film. For instance, in Roberto Rosellini’s Rome, Open City one of the main Nazi characters is effeminate, while his companion is a sadistic lesbian. Luchino Visconti, openly gay himself, depicted Nazis as homosexuals in The Dammed. Bertolucci explained, or perhaps explained away, fascism by linking it with homosexuality in The Conformist. (The ultimate villain of the film, Lino, is shown to be a gay fascist).