Queer Adolescence(s) and Shifting Intersectionality in Don't Call Me Son

Don't Call Me Son, Anna Muylaert (2016)

Pierre (Naomi Nero) prowls around a makeshift party as Don't Call Me Son opens—his lavish locks draped around his face. After he (or they, or she; we'll return to this later) seduces a girl, the two make their way to a bathroom to consummate their youthful passion. Pierre takes off his pants, revealing a thong.  The film efficiently sets out one of its main themes in these opening shots—its protagonist's category-defying fluidity.

Don't Call Me Son tracks Pierre's fluid sexual and gender expression as he is forced to journey through social classes; when it is discovered that his supposed mom stole him from the hospital, Pierre is placed back into the biological upper-middle-class family that has been searching for him ever since.  While Don't Call Me Son's first 20 minutes take place in a working-class milieu—surveying emotional outbursts, profanity-spouting adults, cheap flip-flops, and trashy tattoos—its second part is situated within the frosty yet comfortable environment of the Brazilian upper-middle-class.

Don't Call Me Son, Anna Muylaert (2016)

The first (working-class) part of Don't Call Me Son portrays a permissive, liberal, and loving environment.  Pierre goes to parties, drinks, plays in a band, wears nail polish, and makes out with girls while also openly flirting with (and kissing) the male lead singer of his band.  Although they live in relatively poverty, Pierre's home is characterized by its close relations of kinship.  Though she curses, his mom holds Pierre tenderly; though they quibble, Pierre and his sister display a delicate camaraderie.

When Pierre is introduced to his biological family, the homes become more stylish, the foods more complicated, the environments more luxurious, their inhabitants more conservative.  Moving into his new room, Pierre is anxious for his biological mom to find his dresses and lies, saying they are someone else's.  Later while shopping Pierre picks a dress, and his new father throws a fit.  The film culminates as the freshly formed family goes bowling.  Pierre wears the dress and throws the ball effeminately.  The father loses his patience and screams at Pierre to behave in a more 'normal' manner. Richard Parker notes that, in Brazil, the performance of masculinity is intimately tied with being perceived as 'active,' one of the main markers distinguishing the good and 'macho' male from the 'passive' female [1].  Pierre's loose, non-forceful bowling style triggers his father insofar as Pierre's failure to assert himself as active subverts local gender expectations.

In this way, Don't Call Me Son breaks with how adolescence is often conceived.  Ana Maria Frota notes that adolescence is frequently depicted as a liminal space characterized by the (often rocky) journey of an impressionable child towards an agentic adult with a (relatively) fixed sense of self [2]—a transition towards an inner identity that needs to be discovered, a journey to 'find out who you really are.' This chimes with Geoffrey Maguire and Rachel Randall's study, which traces the idea of adolescence as transition to the post-WWII period: a time characterized by increasing leisure time and "a consumer culture that capitalizes on individuals' desires to establish an authentic, individual identity" [3].  One could start their professional life at a later age and therefore had more spare time; this slower maturation process led to an increased emphasis on finding and expressing one's true inner identity.  Rather than a 'given,' adolescence is conceived as moving toward an identity both materially and economically constituted, insofar as identity was linked to—and expressed through—particular consumption patterns.

While many films with queer protagonists revolve around a coming-to-terms with a non-normative identity, or an overcoming of a certain self-hatred, Don't Call Me Son never frames Pierre in terms of psychological conflict.  Although Pierre becomes bolder in his fluid gender expression as the film progresses, neither Pierre nor anyone else claims that he is in transition towards becoming or passing as a woman.  Nowhere in the film Pierre is named as—or expresses a wish to be—a transsexual, a homosexual, a pansexual or any such categories.  Pierre kisses girls and boys, and dresses both feminine and masculine, but never do these activities reflect a fixed, inner, or final identity.

The film's cinematography reinforces this sense of fluidity, using handheld cameras, unsettling close-up shots, and flickering natural light.  With its moving, morphing camera movement, Don't Call Me Son consciously departs from the elegant, distanced, and static compositions that characterize Muylaert's earlier films—such as Que Horas Es La Volta (2015)—insisting on a less rigid and more fluid mode of perception. Don't Call Me Son does not frame Pierre's adolescence, and specifically his queer adolescence, as a teleological process.  Pierre acts in both normative as non-normative ways with regard to gender and sexuality, but the film never explicitly links this way of acting to a certain identity category, or a way of being.  Rather, the film de-links acting and being, and through this, queers what it means to inhabit the space called adolescence.  It shows the possibility of identity flowing or floating between categories, and thus undoes the idea of adolescence as a period in which one moves towards a categorizable self.

Through its survey of two distinct echelons of Brazil's economic hierarchy, Don't Call Me Son moreover demonstrates how social positions shape one's circumstances.  Pierre initially lives in conditions more lenient towards his non-normative choices; the film's second part is materially richer but more punitive towards his fluid expression of gender.  Maguire and Randall note how an increasing number of recent Latin-American productions featuring adolescents have begun to address questions regarding class, Muylaert's Que Horas Es La Volta named among them [4].  Tracing the forced upward class mobility of a non-normative protagonist, Don't Call Me Son adds an intersectional twist to this conversation.  It shows how coming-of-age is impacted not merely by class, but rather by the imbrication of class, sexuality, race, and an endless list of other factors.  Despite his new-found wealth, Pierre is not exempted from the harassment nor the physical and psychological violence enacted upon non-normative acting bodies. Pierre's experience of adolescence plays out and is determined by the confluence of these axes, thus emphasizing an intersectional take on the production of identity, privilege, and violence.

Through its intersectional view of class, cultural context, gender, and sexuality, Don't Call Me Son undermines a critique often leveled against developing-world films screening adolescents, which have been viewed as commodifying the adolescent experience insofar as they "capitalize on the capacity of young protagonists to make distant, complicated realities more easily understandable or consumable by global audiences and thereby aid their transnational circulation" [5].  Muylaert's film, on the other hand, explores gender expectations—and certain parts of the upper-middle-class' conservative opinions regarding gender—specific to Brazil.  The film's screening of adolescence is not used to gesture towards supposedly transcendental ideas surrounding coming-of-age in order to render it more palatable for transnational audiences.  Rather, the figure of the adolescent is used to open onto site-specific issues and politics.

Anna Muylaert's Don’t Call Me Son thus queers conceptions of adolescence as it decomposes linear and teleological trajectories of identity formation, proposing a shifting intersectionality as the basis of identity construction. The film deconstructs a historically contingent conception of adolescence, situating coming-of-age culturally and geographically, while spotlighting a queer(ing) fluidity, an unnamed dwelling between categories.

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Essay by Aldo Kempen
Guest Curator, Filmatique

 

 

References 

[1] Parker, Richard. "Changing Sexualities: Masculinity and Male Homosexuality in Brazil." In Changing Men and Masculinities in Latin America. ed. Matthew C. Gutmann, Duke University Press, 2003, pp. 307–332.

[2] Frota, Ana Maria Monte Coelho. "Diferentes concepções da infância e adolescência: a importância da historicidade para sua construção." Estudos e Pesquisas em Psicologia. Vol, 7. No. 1, 2007, pp. 147–160.

[3] Maguire, Geoffrey, and Rachel Randall, 3. New Visions Of Adolescence in Contemporary Latin-American Cinema. Palgrave Macmillan, 2019. 

[4] Ibid, 21.

[5] Ibid, 14.