In stark contrast to unsettling dramas with homosexual themes that were also released in 1967, such as «Reflections in a Golden Eye» and «The Fox», veteran Argentine filmmaker Carlos Hugo Christensen opted for the tone of a lyrical fantasy to tell a story with homoerotic content, in an indirect but unequivocal way, inspired by Aníbal Machado's story «The Wind Initiate».
When Latin American film historians think of Christensen, the first movie that comes to their minds is «The Sloop Isabel Arrived This Afternoon», shot in Venezuela, based on Guillermo Meneses' novel. But few of us know that he was one of the most audacious and progressive filmmakers in the continent (and in cinema) in the treatment of eroticism, usually disturbing the gospel of "leagues of decency" that defend "values" (they never say which), with films as «Safo: Story of a Passion» or «The Naked Angel», in which actress Olga Zubarry made the first female nude in Argentinean industrial cinema.
Christensen opposed Perón and his political party, so he migrated to Brazil, where he filmed this work, that also makes evident his talent as a poet. In the story, a 25-year-old engineer returns to a remote Brazilian town to defend himself against accusations of being responsible for the disappearance of a teenager. The engineer rejects the defense and confronts the court with his account of how --after living disconnected from his feelings-- his world changed when he faced the pure vitality of the country boy, a "wind initiate" who helped him discover the force of nature.
The engineer gives an interest background of himself: as he grew up in a family with mostly "unpractical men" (a painter, a writer, a journalist, an actor) and saw how they were misunderstood and underpaid by an unstable country, he took the philosophical and mathematical determination to study a precise and "practical" profession. His decision ended up distancing him from his real emotions.
In his own way, with a disarming simplicity and inspired dialogues, Christensen anticipates Visconti in a story without tinsel, giving free rein to the "juvenile emotions", more platonic than physical, that the encounter unleashes in both men.
As I searched for more information on Christensen, I was surprised when I learnt that 12 years later, a 65-year-old Christensen adapted Jorge Luis Borges's drama «A instrusa», about two macho-queer gauchos that make the cowboys from «Brokeback Mountain» look like two old lady weavers...
