Temblores

I truly enjoyed several aspects of this film including the scenography and the environments used here. Great acting as well. I read other criticisms as accusations to the gay life on this movie but I believe the intention was to show us that could also be the hell dressed up in religion.

Set in Guatemala, Pablo (Juan Pablo Olyslager) faces a crisis in his life when he reveals to his family that he is gay and will be moving out to be with his male partner Francisco (Mauricio Armas Zebadua).

Pablo's wife Isa (Diane Bathen) gets the courts to issue a restraining order against him so he cannot see his two children. She eventually will threaten him that unless he enrolls in a gay conversion therapy program in their radical religious church, she will take the children to America.

Overall, I thought this drama was solidly acted with realistic characters, as well as ably written and directed by Guatemalan filmmaker Tayro Bustamante.

"Temblores" is another in the "gay conversion" film genre, so, though it's a solid enough movie in its own right, it suffers from having a "been there done that" quality.

This time around the setting is Guatemala, and the protagonist is a married man with children whose affair with another man sends his strict religious family into a tailspin. The movie marches through its predictable paces with decent if not especially memorable performances and a suitably downbeat ending.

"Temblores" isn't a film that I'm going to spend much time mulling over or have a strong feeling about one way or the other, but it does shed light on some really backwards cultural beliefs and laws in Guatemala, so if it brings some awareness to the harm yet one more country's rigid convictions are doing to a subset of its population, I can forgive it for being a bit late to the party.

Grade: B

Temblores is the second full length feature film by Jayro Bustamante, following the much acclaimed Ixcanul from 2015.

The film follows Pablo, a married man with two children who comes out as gay and whose life begins to unravel as society rejects him and his evangelical family goes to great lengths to cure his homosexuality.

The story starts out strong, perhaps too strong. The issue with the first scene is that we are thrusted into the conflict without much context to make us care for the protagonist or any of the characters in the movie. The stakes are so high, but without much needed backstory or exposition to engage the audience before this event takes place the whole mood feels very premature.

The relationship between Pablo and his boyfriend, Francisco, lacks chemistry, they also come from very different social backgrounds and have very different beliefs. I would've liked for the movie to provide some backstory as to how they met and what made them fall in love, or at least provide this information through dialogue because I didn't buy it. There's also very little physical contact between them, which is not realistic for a gay couple living alone in an apartment.

Juan Pablo Olyslager and Sabrina de la Hoz deliver the strongest performances out of the cast. I also enjoyed the performances of the two kids. They are very well written, the way they rebel at not being able to see their father is heartbreaking and the dialogue they share is very well written. There isn't really a bad performance in the movie. The issue lies in the writing. All the characters in the movie function around the protagonist, they have no story arcs or motivations of their own. The lack of character development reduces all the supporting characters in the film, except for Francisco and the kids, to vile religious fanatics with zero redeeming qualities who will ruin Pablo's life as long as he's gay.

In conclusion, the film didn't know the right place to begin or the right place to end and the middle is a myriad of sequences that eventually lead nowhere. For a film to tackle such sensitive issues, I feel like it still walked on eggshells around them. I expected it to be more crude, more real, to go all in on these issues, but for a film called Temblores, I expected to be shaken to my core and it barely made me shiver.

A wife of unspeakable beauty, two adorable children, a flourishing professional activity, ... It's a wonderful life for Pablo, until the discovery of an extramarital and homosexual affair. In this Guatemalan microcosm, an extramarital affair is already inadmissible in itself. And homosexual?!? This is definitely the trigger of a profoundly repressive modus operandi. Pablo is then high and dry, in the depths of the abyss, as a pawn at the mercy of a coercive environment, wedged between two concomitant loves: with his family and with Francisco. Even if the first twenty minutes are a bit messy, the cast is excellent and the photography is neat.