I Am Happiness On Earth
Yo soy la felicidad de este mundo
Directed by Julián Hernández
Written by Julián Hernández and Ulises Pérez
Premiered May 4, 2014, at the Torino Gay and Lesbian Film Festival in Italy
Romance (foreign/Mexico)
122 min.
Review by Stephen O. Murray
August 27, 2015.
I was disappointed that the Julián Hernández [Thousand Clouds of Peace] film Yo soy la felicidad de este mundo (translated as “I am happiness on earth” rather than “this world”) shifted away from rehabilitating dancer Octavio [Alan Ramírez] who has a dazzling smile and with eyelashes that are astonishingly thick and long (which would seem impressive except in contrast to Hugo Catalán’s!) to the more narcissistic director, Emiliano Arenales Osorio [played by Catalán], who is making a documentary about real-life dancer/choreographer Gloria Conterras and some of her students.
Emiliano has his eye on Octavio, who falls in love with the relationship-averse director, who (sooner than later) stops responding to the injured dancer’s texts after capturing Ocatavio’s heart.
It seemed that the sex was all going to be with underwear-wearing men and women, but eventually there were a lot of shots of the flaccid penis of the hustler Jazén [Emilio von Sternerfels] Emiliano hires (and who sticks around), and even an erect penis [Javier Oliván’s] in a threesome interlude (the participants of whom are not included in the rest of the movie). There are also long, tedious scenes of masturbating inside clothes/underclothes, and some dance sequences. I’d have stuck with the dancers rather than with the selfish if self-destructive film director.
Hernández loves pans including some 720-degree ones and has a whole set of other arty stylistic ticks that have impressed some in his earlier languorous looks at semi-clad and unclad smooth chested young(ish) Mexican males. (Ramírez may be naturally smooth-chested, but Catalán’s has to be depilated: look at the stubble on the poster/cover [he’s the upper figure].) There are also some silly pretentious voiceover lines repeated and repeated. I think the time in which the characters speak to each other is considerably less than the time of intoning of the pseudo-poetry and of one repeated song.
The Broken Glass DVD includes four short Hernández films with a cumulative running time of an hour, while the main feature meanders on a few minutes past the two-hour mark.
Of the four, the most striking, positively hardcore one is Bramadero (which means a corral for bulls) in which two young (hairless-bodied) men get it on atop a building under construction, presumably in Mexico City. Its 22 minutes include three fellations, one rimming, one crouching onto the only hard dick shown (all the sex scenes are shot in profile; still with horizontal pans), and a simulated punching out (by the one who f*cked himself on the other’s penis, a departure from the usual pattern of post-coital fag bashings in Latin America or North America).
©27 August 2015, Stephen O. Murray
