Rotting in the Sun (2023)
Directed by Sebastián Silva
Written by Silva and Pedro Peirano
For the first time ever, I feel like I have to put a warning up front: This movie features a lot of full frontal made nudity, unsimulated gay sex, discussions of suicide, and drug use.
Recall, if you will, the excellent 1999 drama “The Talented Mr. Ripley,” directed by Anthony Minghella. After Matt Damon’s Ripley has killed Dickie Greenleaf in a fit of rage and disposed of his body, he’s living a sumptuous life in Dickie’s clothes and identity.
A friend of Dickie’s — Philip Seymour Hoffman as a smarmy, sarcastic, and extremely annoying Freddie — then arrives unannounced at the Rome apartment Ripley has rented in Dickie’s name. The concierge has just pointed Freddie to the door of the man she knows as “Signor Greenleaf,” so he’s surprised when Ripley opens the door wearing clothes he can identify as belonging to Dickie.
Freddie barges in, asking suspicious questions and (even more threatening to Ripley, who likes things just so, the better to sustain the illusion of being Dickie) putting his fat fingers on everything. Enraged once again, Ripley kills Freddie and dumps his body near the Coliseum (then, as now, a gay cruising spot — a fitting resting place for the closeted Freddie).
Sebastián Silva’s film “Rotting in the Sun” brought this scene to mind, and with it the whole gestalt of the work of novelist Patricia Highsmith, who wrote five Ripley novels and many others, including “Strangers on a Train” (Alfred Hitchcock filmed it in 1951) and “The Price of Salt” (Todd Haynes made it into “Carol” in 2015).
Highsmith was a driven writer, an alcoholic, and a closeted lesbian Don Juan who went through crushes and lovers with the same frenzy she churned out thrillers, short stories, and, intriguingly, scripts for comic books1. To be sure, her productivity was driven by her need to support herself. But suppressed and heavily controlled emotions of desire and rage that inspired the characters of her fiction — and turned into bitter racism and anti-semitism later in life, as alcohol destroyed her — were what gave her work tension.
“Rotting in the Sun” changes up the roles, but like “The Talented Mr. Ripley,” it has a mid-story death of a main character, another who tries to hide both the body and the fact that the person died at all, and a third snoopy, almost unbearable gay character who becomes suspicious. As in the earlier film, when the police finally look into the matter, they’re easily diverted. There’s even a doubling of a character and moments, at least, of mistaken identity.
The story concerns a depressed Mexican filmmaker named Sebastián Silva (played by writer-director Silva himself2). Addicted to Ketamine, he lives in a crumbling, under-renovation colonial-era mansion in Mexico City’s Roma3 neighborhood; his put-upon housekeeper Veronica, called Vero (Catalina Saavedra), attempts to keep order as Silva droops around the house reading a book titled “The Trouble with Being Born” and inscribing nihilistic lines from it into his notebook.
To get away from the construction noise, he goes to a gay nude beach. By now we’ve already seen footage of a homeless guy shitting in a park where Silva walks his dog, but the scenes at the beach will be startlingly graphic for most viewers. Full frontal nudity is the least of the visuals (visual treat or visual assault depends on your taste); handsome men perform oral and anal sex — not simulated — on camera. These aren’t sex scenes in the sense of showing sexual congress as a moment between main characters, or for titilation. The sex is incidental, taking place in the background, or during dialogue. But it is graphic, and plentiful.4
At the beach, a short, hairy man recognises Silva and introduces himself. This is Jordan Firstman, an Instagram influencer, and he’s played by Jordan Firstman, in real life an Instagram influencer. Firstman has already contacted Silva to ask the filmmaker to collaborate on a TV project. Now, having just seen one of Silva’s movies — he names one of director Silva’s actual films — he spends the next several hours relentlessly pitching Silva on this proposal, called “You Are Me” (or perhaps, in the way of the internet, YOUAREME). The project’s name, together with the main characters being named after, and based upon, the real people who are playing them, is another echo of Highsmith’s predilection for switched identities.
Firstman, apparently5 playing a version of himself, is as manic as Silva is depressed. He practically shrieks his ideas and his optimistic expectations for their collaboration, in a stream-of-consciousness rant that is half inspirational speaker, half self-satire. Unfortunately for Silva, it seems that HBO is actually interested in the project, and since he needs the money, he agrees to do it. Firstman suggests (insists? demands? It’s hard to tell the difference with him) he move into Silva’s house so they can work together all the time.
Returning early from the beach getaway, Silva recruits Vero the housekeeper to help him move a couch downstairs from the roof where it is stored for the influencer to sleep on. Vero is a strong woman, certainly, but struggles with the sofa’s weight; when she stumbles, Silva tumbles backwards down a light well to his death.
Vero now becomes the film’s main character. No one else saw the accident, so she realizes two things are true: first, if she calls the police to report it, they won’t believe anything she says; and second, as housekeeper her job is to clean up the mess.
She and a taxi driver cousin hide the body, and when Firstman arrives the next day expecting to find Silva so they can commence his project, she says she doesn’t know where Silva is. What happens next, in the movie’s second half, is a pas de deux between the oppressed Vero and the increasingly suspicious Firstman. Everyone treats her like crap anyway, and now this gringo is constantly in her face, demanding she produce Silva, demanding she account for inconsistencies, demanding whatever he wants. Cursing under her breath, she finds a way to resolve the situation while getting herself out of it. And in this she is also like Tom Ripley, whose murders are impulsive and whose actions to evade responsibility by obfuscating the situation are improvised.
I really admired Cataline Saavedra’s performance. She understands that while on the job Vero doesn’t have permission to display a range of emotion; no one has ever demanded it of a housekeeper. So the actress has to find other ways to show Vero thinking about the next step, only letting her feelings burst out when she steps outside the gates of the house. Saavedra previously played a domestic servant in Silva’s 2009 film “La Nana” (“The Maid”), and I really want to see her in that film and in “Problemista,” a 2023 movie. (Both movies, as well as “Rotting in the Sun,” are streaming on Mubi, a good source for Latin American films.)
When I started watching this movie I was a little lost, because the parts showing Silva’s depression and drug addiction are a little incoherent — perhaps necessarily so — and then Firstman’s energy is so shrill. But when Firstman finds Silva’s phone and wallet in the house, he sobers, switching from wondering if Silva has ghosted him in his own house to concerned friend to would-be Nancy Drew. As the situation grows more tense, narrowing Vero’s options, the film’s focus becomes clear.
So does the mood, as the film switches from comedy to more of a thriller. Comedy could have been made of the visit by the police, but director Silva resists. In fact, I was half suspecting that the character Silva might suddenly turn up, having awakened on the roof from a coma. But — spoiler — he’s really dead. After all the sarcasm and unserious talk about suicide in the film’s first half, death has finally become a serious thing.
Highsmith’s career as a comic book writer, which she later in life attempted to erase from her resume, is the subject of a New Yorker story in the Dec. 25, 2023 issue.
Like several other characters in the movie, writer-director Silva’s character has his same name as the person who plays him. Having seen this in some recent films from Argentina, I wonder if this is a trend, an homage, or simply a coincidence.
This is not an adjective referring to the Romany people but the name of a neighborhood in Mexico City. According to a Conde Nast Traveler article about the film, the Roma barrio is “wealthy, well-touristed.”
Would this film meet the Supreme Court’s definition of obscenity? No — because taken as a whole, the work contains social commentary and other elements of literature, and thus cannot be found obscene. Nevertheless, it does have a lot of asses and cocks. At one point a group of naked men approach a group seated on the beach and introduce themselves, and one of the seated men reaches up and shakes one guy’s dick.
Based upon the tone of the article in Conde Nast Traveler (see note 3), it seems that Jordan Firstman is not only an actual Instagrammer but also that the magazine expects its readers to be well acquainted with him and his, um, oeuvre. As for how close his movie character is to the Instagram persona, I’m in no position to judge.