“TEMBLORES”: Hope and desire

Juan Pablo Olyslager, Mauricio Armas Zebadua

Published February 16, 2020 by Robert W. Butler at Butler’s Cinema Scene

My rating: B-

107 minutes | No MPAA rating

“Temblores (Tremors)” begins with an intervention.

Returning home one rainy night, Guatemalan businessman Pablo (Juan Pablo Olyslager) discovers his entire family gathered in the living room of his posh domicile.  They’ve learned that Pablo is having an affair with another man and are determined to put an end to this abomination.

Their approaches differ.  Pablo’s sister cradles her sobbing sibling and insists that his gayness must be the result of childhood trauma. Her alpha male husband is sneeringly contemptuous.  Pablo’s mother finds a religious lesson: “This is a trial.” Dad is a denier: “It’ll blow over.”

Meanwhile Pablo’s model-pretty wife Isa (Diane Bathen) sits silently, wrapped up in her own cocoon of humiliation.

Their deliberations are interrupted by one of the small earthquakes that regularly wrack their region of Central America.  “God’s punishment,” asserts Mom.

Jayro Bustamente’s “Tremblores” follows Pablo as he moves into a shabby apartment with his lover, the good-natured Francisco (Mauricio Armas Zebadua), who works as a masseuse at a local clinic.  But almost immediately the repressive society around him kicks into high gear.

Pablo is fired from his high-paying  job as a consultant — the company adheres to a strict morality policy.  Isa goes to court where a judge declares Pedro a pedophile (he isn’t) and forbids him from seeing his two young children; the ruling also makes finding a new job impossible.

Diane Bathan (center)

With his new life as a gay man collapsing around him, Pablo is particularly vulnerable to the influence of the Pentecostal church to which his entire family belongs.  Especially to the ministrations of a slick lady preacher (Sabrina De La Hoz) who operates a gay conversion program.

Ultimately a desperate Pablo must make an impossible choice: his faith and family or his sexual identity.

“Temblores” has much in common with recent American films dealing with gay conversion therapy (“Boy Erased,” “The Miseducation of Cameron Post”) but by virtue of unfolding in a macho-fueled society — one decades behind the U.S. when it comes to sexual tolerance — it has some even sharper edges.

Bustamante’s screenplay isn’t a screed; it accepts that members of Pablo’s family (well, most of them) genuinely have his best interests at heart.

But its depiction of the gay conversion therapy is pretty over the top, with the lady preacher acting like a Nazi concentration camp warden, watching the men in her program showering together naked and directing them to grapple in wrestling matches like underwear-clad gladiators.

The film’s real shortcoming, though, lies in its leading man.  Olyslager is fiercely handsome (salt-and-pepper beard, widow’s peak…he sometimes looks uncannily like a latter-day Mel Gibson) but his performance is so internalized that there’s not much to grab on to.  A movie’s villains are often more interesting than its hero; but here the equation is so heavily tipped toward the minor characters that it leaves a hole where the central performance should be.

| Robert W. Butler