Slow waters: Marco Berger’s Taekwondo and the queer erotics of boredom

In the opening moments of the short British film Baby (WIZ, 2000), the close-up image of a hand brushing slowly against a bare chest triggers the film’s interrogation of the erotic potential in screening touch. Accentuated by a shallow focus on the individual body hairs and bumps of the protagonist’s skin, this suggestively haptic introduction at once emphasizes the centrality of vision in the filming of the sensual yet denies its epistemological mastery through the textural quality of its image. The film’s slow narrative structure, composed entirely of a series of erotically charged flashbacks during an act of masturbation, is matched by a lack of dialogue and by long, static takes of the naked and semi-naked bodies in and around a public swimming pool. During these flashbacks, the protagonist – played by a twenty-year-old Ben Whishaw – negotiates the homosocial hurdles of gender-specific changing rooms and communal showers. As he does so, his constant proximity to water, which envelops bodies and distorts the senses, provides a now familiar backdrop for the exploration of a developing sexuality and its concomitant potency for queerness. Moreover, as the suggestive smirk from a confident, muscular diver implies when his gaze meets that of Whishaw, the cinematic spaces of Baby are conceived as sites not only where the queer subject is able to find pleasure in looking, but where the eroticism of being looked at can often prove to be similarly as pleasurable. When both narrative and protagonist climax in the film’s closing moments – after a flashback of Whishaw removing his swimming shorts in a crowded public shower – vision, sexuality and sensation collide through a scene that both formally embraces the spectatorial gaze and queers its relationship with the on-screen image.

To invoke the sensual, if rudimentary, formal and thematic aspects of Baby in an essay on a film from the Argentine director Marco Berger is to contextualize these two works within a broader cinematic lineage of slow queer film, over and above their shared emphasis on the latent eroticism of the quotidian. If Baby serves to represent the origins of what we might consider to be a contemporary ‘moment’ in global queer cinema, anchored in an art-house slowness with a subdued aesthetic focus on the mundane, then it also exemplifies the recurringly haptic nature of many recent filmic explorations of queerness.¹ Strikingly, moreover, both Baby and Berger represent distinct junctures in a long history of combining queerness with narrative and thematic emphases on the aquatic: spaces, that is, such as swimming pools, beaches, lakes and saunas that have come to serve as the loci of both emergent and veteran queer desires.² For instance, films such as L’inconnu du lac/Stranger by the Lake (Alain Guiraudie, 2013), Moonlight (Barry Jenkins, 2016) and Beach Rats (Eliza Hittman, 2017) have evocatively linked water to the unpredictability, deviance and, at times, violence connected with queer subjectivities. Other productions have instead sought to cast distinct bodies of water as sites of adolescent discovery (Naissance des pieuvres/Water Lilies [Céline Sciamma, 2007], Hoje Eu Quero Voltar Sozinho/The Way He Looks [Daniel Ribeiro, 2014], Der Mitte der Welt/Centre of My World [Jakob M. Erwa, 2016]), or as spaces for a more profound interrogation of the queer cinematic body (XXY [Lucía Puenzo, 2007], El último verano de la Boyita/The Last Summer of La Boyita [Julia Solomonoff, 2009]). The connections between Baby and these more recent films effectively shed light on an evolving formal and thematic vocabulary of global queer film, underscoring the ubiquitous preoccupation in these works with the politics inherent in screening queer corporeality. Moreover, the recurrent emphasis on a tactile, textural mode of spectatorship, provoked in large part through a shared repertoire of watery spaces, is a reminder, as Karl Schoonover and Rosalind Galt note, of queer cinema’s capacity to ‘revise the flows and politics of world cinema and forge dissident scales of affiliation, affection, affect and form’.³

If slowness, in its varying emanations, is a frequent attribute of many, if not all, of the films mentioned above, it seems striking that such a recurring formal and narrative strategy has seldom been explored through these works in direct relation to queerness. Indeed, given that such slowness encourages – and at times even celebrates – a haptic screening of the queer body, it appears equally surprising that recent phenomenological work on the ‘material turn’ in film studies has been similarly myopic in its consideration of the queer. As Schoonover and Galt point out in their work on the slow, sexual politics of touch, ‘much film scholarship on phenomenology and the haptic brackets sexuality along with other political issues. Even when the examples are queer, cinema as a medium emerges unscathed by queerness.’⁴ It is precisely this critical gap within contemporary queer film studies that I address in this essay, through a framework that combines a phenomenological reading of Berger’s work with an examination of the ‘sexual politics of the slow and the boring’.⁵ In doing so, I explore how Berger mobilizes slowness and the haptic through both the structure of the image and its sensually suggestive content, queering the relationship with the viewer not only by encouraging an erotic gaze on the naked male physique but also through a cautious deviation from the conventional formal and aesthetic registers of screening the body. Though critics of Berger’s oeuvre have largely evaded these and related issues in their studies, choosing instead to focus on the director’s avoidance of queer stereotypes,⁶ or on the narrative representation of non-heteronormative desire,⁷ Berger’s is undoubtedly a cinematography that demands a critical sensitivity towards the nexuses of touch and sexuality, and of slowness and queerness; these are elements inherent to the very structures of his filmic gaze.⁸ From the voyeuristic inspection of the adolescent physique in the showers of Ausente/Absent (2011) to the drawn-out contemplation of poolside bodies in Hawaii (2013), Berger’s haptic, protracted caressing of the naked male form at once invites the spectator’s gaze and queers its relationship with the sensual images of skin and sweat on screen.

On closer critical inspection, however, the stubborn visual insistence on male corporeality that pervades the majority of Berger’s work belies a tension present in contemporary queer film more broadly, namely surrounding the representational politics and queer potential of certain formal and aesthetic techniques. In Luca Guadagnino’s Call Me By Your Name (2017), for example, the camera’s elliptical movement during a pivotal scene between the two lead actors has attracted criticism for its censoring of gay sex, particularly, as critics point out, given the relative openness in screening heterosexual intercourse at an earlier point in the film. As Guy Lodge writes, ‘Once the two lovers begin having sex for the first time, the camera coyly drifts over to an open window, their early coital moans gentle in the background – the kind of tasteful dodge that practically nods to Code-era Hollywood’.⁹ While Berger’s film Taekwondo (2016), co-directed with Martín Farina, can certainly not be accused of shying away from homoerotic images of its protagonists, including scenes of full-frontal nudity and a sensual dwelling on bare skin and toned muscles, its formal composition nevertheless exhibits an implicit reluctance to confront queer sexuality directly or to dispense entirely with certain dramatic techniques of mainstream narrative cinema. The film’s slow, relentless focus on the naked male body thus gestures towards a queer form of spectatorship while at the same time hesitating in its exploitation of the ‘radical potential of slowness’, to use a term borrowed from Schoonover and Galt.¹⁰ The first section of this essay will consider Taekwondo’s formal structures of slowness and strategies of narrative boredom, paying close attention to how its sensual, haptic screening of the body is mobilized in and through time. The second and third sections will then explore how this collision between the haptic and the slow simultaneously incites and impedes the film’s queer potential, ultimately revealing a caution on the part of the directors to embrace fully a queer undermining of normative modes of seeing – and feeling – the cinematic image.

In the minute-long opening sequence of Taekwondo, Berger and Farina introduce the film’s slow, sensual tone. Through a fixed shot, the two main characters, Fernando and Germán, walk towards the camera, their conversation progressively more audible yet never proving to be of any narrative significance. When they reach the foreground of the shot, immediately before the film’s title screen appears, Fernando’s toned, unclothed torso momentarily commands the screen, prefiguring the film’s preference for the corporeal over the narrative, as well as its more specific aesthetic rumination on the naked male physique. This is a scene in which duration consumes narration, given that the static nature of the shot allows the spectator to focus not on the characters themselves, or on their conversation, but on their existence as bodies in time. When Fernando and Germán enter the country house in the subsequent scene, the formal aspects of the film do very little to introduce a sense of motion to the narrative: the men idly discuss the unremarkable details of the previous night, while the camera slowly maps out the semi-naked bodies sleeping on the sofa and sunbathing by the poolside, all screened to the diegetic sound of trickling water. Indeed if, on the whole, any strong sense of narrative thread can be considered largely absent from the film, it can at times be deemed to be stubbornly so: shots of slumbering bodies recur frequently, as do images of glistening, athletic torsos reclining by the swimming pool (figure 1). The diegetic ennui of the protagonists – all childhood friends who have come to spend a relaxed vacation together in a quinta, or villa, on the outskirts of Buenos Aires – manifests itself in a boredom on the level of content, while the composition of the shots often invites us, as spectators, to do nothing more than contemplate the beauty of the male form, dripping with water or sweat and lounging in close proximity, one body beside, or entangled with, another (figure 2).

Though the origins of the current trend of global slow cinema can be traced back to the turn of the twenty-first century, a more recent critical debate has unearthed specific tensions surrounding such an aesthetic of boredom.¹¹ A now famous argument, labelled by one critic as ‘deeply parochial in its film buffery’, brought to the surface the formal and political anxieties at stake in the production and reception of contemporary slow film.¹² Nick James suggested that such films are ‘passive-aggressive in that they demand great swathes of our precious time to achieve quite fleeting and slender aesthetic and political effects’.¹³ For his part Steven Shaviro condemned the ‘routinized’ formal aesthetic of contemporary slow cinema, which he argued had become ‘a sort of default international style that signifies “serious cinema” without having to display any sort of originality or insight’.¹⁴ In an earlier, distinctly more positive critical assessment of the slow aesthetic, Matthew Flanagan drew attention to the ‘unique formal and structural design’ of the genre, but nevertheless warned that its ‘sustained emptying out of deeply entrenched dramatic elements […] often risks boredom on the part of the spectator, dissolving traditional components of storytelling to either the most rudimentary basis of central conflict or a series of de-centred digressive events’.¹⁵ It is precisely this lack of dramatic narrative, with its extension of temps morts and non-events, that constitutes the boredom that is inherent to Taekwondo and firmly woven into its formal structures. The prolonged shots of reclining bodies are matched by formal, often overt, gestures towards narrative ellipsis. When the group of men leave one evening to go to a nightclub, for instance, they are screened walking away from the quinta in an extended shot before immediately being filmed returning the next morning; they each appear visibly tired, yet we are given no glimpse of the events that have taken place in-between. Here the abruptness of the change in outside light levels draws attention to an abridged form of narration, denying the spectator access to the event while explicitly emphasizing the fragmented passing of time. In its active deployment of boredom, Taekwondo challenges the normative criteria against which slow cinema has been judged, refusing, in any explicit sense, to ‘entertain’ through conventional narrative structures and instead engaging the viewer in a more contemplative form of spectatorship.

As Tiago de Luca has noted in his study of the phenomenological aspects of spectatorship in the context of slow cinema, digressive shots such as those that populate Taekwondo allow ‘empty cinematic time [to come] to the fore, exposing in return the calculated temporal mechanisms by which cinema conventionally abides in its production of meaning’.¹⁶ The established filmic hierarchy that restricts duration to the service of the narrative is, as de Luca writes, reversed:

Not only does it supply the viewer with time to scan within and across the screen, […] it provides too much time, triggering a self-conscious mode of spectatorship whereby the viewer becomes aware of the viewing process and the time spent in such a process.¹⁷

Taekwondo regularly makes recourse to, and capitalizes on, this cinematic realignment of shot duration over narrative resolution, imbuing the film’s boredom with both formal and thematic significance. As noted above, the film habitually dwells on bodies drawn out in time, devoid of any explicit narrative consequence. Actions such as sleeping, reading¹⁸ and waiting take precedence via sequences that wilfully withhold any sense of narrative gratification: in one instance, a cleaner’s household chores are filmed in monotonous repetition, overtly drawing attention towards the tedium of our own viewing experience. Subsequently, when she has sex with one of the heterosexual men in the house, the way in which the intercourse is filmed is mechanistic, distancing and objectifying, relying on a mere moment of eye contact as the only tangible means of narrative framing. If, as Schoonover and Galt note, ‘slow cinema wastes our time, asking us to spend time in visibly unproductive ways, outside efficient narrative economies of production and reproduction’,¹⁹ then here Berger mobilizes this representational inefficiency on the levels of form as well as content, creating a sense of boredom in the very act of what might have been – in both figurative and literal terms – a point of narrative climax.

While it is certainly true that Taekwondo mobilizes many of the slow strategies identified by the critics mentioned above, particularly in terms of its persistent lack of narrative progression, it must be noted that Berger and Farina’s direction does depart from the more radical formal uses of slowness that have conventionally been associated with the genre. The long opening take of the film, for example, replicates what Flanagan has termed ‘a cinema of walking’, a filmic lineage that through ‘the mere act of walking signifies a rupture in the organisation of drama’, echoing the distinctly modernist bent of films such as Roberto Rossellini’s Viaggio in Italia (1953), Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’Avventura (1960) and Alain Resnais’s Hiroshima mon amour (1959). Yet despite several repetitions of the protagonists walking to and from the quinta over the course of the film, in very few instances are the shots left to linger statically for longer than half a minute, significantly less time than the five- or six-minute sequences associated with the directors and their films above. While, as Emre Çağlayan claims, ‘it would be no exaggeration to claim that walking constitutes a typical, even emblematic feature of slow cinema’,²⁰ these iterations of the walking scene in Taekwondo fall subtly into the service of the narrative. At times they create a loose sense of anticipation, such as when Leo obliquely warns Germán that his desires for Fernando will be unrequited as the pair wander along a country path; and in the opening sequence of the film, mentioned earlier, Germán’s introduction to the character of El gordo serves as a foundational illustration of the film’s hesitation to release temporality from its narrative function. When the two men meet, a torso-level shot records the unremarkable routine of an introductory saludo; moments later, when El gordo jumps up to sit on the counter, the viewer realizes that he is naked from the waist down. The subsequent close-up of his penis, while he peels and eats an orange, lingers voyeuristically as the introductory conversation between the three men continues (figure 3). Thematically, the dripping juices from the orange evoke a raw sexuality and sense of virility, and the length and directness of the shot confront the spectator with an unambiguous display of male genitalia.²¹ If, as Richard Misek writes in his discussion of dead cinematic time, ‘By imposing its own temporality onto objects, [cinema] can make possible boredom in response to objects that are not ordinarily associated with it’, Taekwondo here intimates such boredom through its extended focus on El gordo’s penis, yet ultimately fails to ‘exhaust the image’s representational dimension’ by cutting away to the next scene after only ten seconds.²² Furthermore, Germán’s discernible surprise when first meeting El gordo thus becomes decipherable for the spectator in retrospect, allowing us to share in understanding the reason for the protagonist’s initial shock. In this way the camera’s intimate voyeurism serves to reflect and exacerbate Germán’s sense of discomfort, imbuing the scene with an erotic hue that contrasts with the mundanity of the script. The unambiguous image of the naked male body, which at other points of the film works to defamiliarize the spectator’s gaze, finds itself restricted to its function as narrative device, exposing in this instance a reliance on composition and editing that displace the slow potential of a longer, unharnessed take.

The quietly evolving relationship between Fernando and Germán, which one critic refers to as the film’s ‘unrelenting hormonal ballet',²³ provides the only impulse of what may be considered to be a sustained narrative thread in Taekwondo. When the country vacation draws to a close and the pair are left alone in the quinta, an extended scene in the swimming pool consolidates this space as the centre of gravity for the film’s screening of their (as yet unexpressed) mutual desire. While the pool serves throughout the film as a site for the brazen display of the men’s toned physiques, in the latter stages it becomes the space for a more exploratory, daring interaction between the two, now released from the policing gaze of their heterosexual friends. In this particular scene, introduced via the sight and sound of Germán splashing into the water, the two men competitively hold their breath underwater and hover in close proximity, their mouths just below the water’s surface (figure 4). The tension is quite literally embodied in this sequence, as the two men visibly struggle to remain submerged in order to win the contest. On a broader level the scene also expresses the ambiguity that has existed between the pair over the course of the film, and it is in many ways unsurprising that Fernando is the one who emerges victorious, reflecting his unflinching capacity to remain calm and controlled while the younger Germán struggles to cope with the homoerotic tensions of the quinta. Indeed water, and specifically the water of the swimming pool, becomes a metaphor over the course of the film for the unpredictability of the pair’s developing rapport, visually emphasized in this final scene by the potent image of their proximate faces and penetrating stares. If, as Fernando Gabriel Pagnoni Berns notes in his discussion of queer Brazilian film, ‘water is a space that, contradictorily, provides intimacy but also the possibility of fleeing from it’, then both the length and the composition of this sequence constitute just such an ultimatum, allowing Fernando and Germán to be intimately close to one another while wearing very little, yet still remaining within the bounds of an ‘acceptable’ homosocial interaction.²⁴ In the subsequent scene, which lasts for almost two minutes and contains very little dialogue, we see Germán tacitly cycle through a range of emotions, intensifying the swimming pool’s capacity to serve as ‘more than merely a setting, instead providing a dynamic space in which a film’s central themes are played out’.²⁵

In their work on the cinematic swimming pool, Christopher Brown and Pam Hirsch note that the site functions as a ‘transitional, liminal space’, in which ‘sexual identity becomes fluid, like the water in which the protagonists swim; it is a space of bodily and sexual metamorphosis’.²⁶ More than a metaphor for the fluidity or unpredictability of sexuality, however, the aquatic spaces of Taekwondo are also sites where slowness and hapticity collide, endowed with the potential for a powerful examination of (queer) filmic embodiment. Deborah Martin has suggested in her work on the Argentine director Lucrecia Martel that the significance of the relationship between the queer and the aquatic in contemporary film lies not only in water’s capacity ‘to be contained and controlled, or to transgress the boundaries which attempt to contain it’, but also in ‘its sensual qualities on the skin’.²⁷ Indeed, during the episodes that are shot in the house’s sauna and showers, the haptic nature of filming the group’s naked bodies is unambiguous: a protracted shot of the men crowded into a sauna, for instance, in which the camera focuses on the sweat on their torsos (figure 5), becomes a potent means of, in Laura Marks’s terms, ‘bringing vision close to the body and into contact with the other sense perceptions; making vision multisensory’.²⁸ In The Skin of the Film Marks explores the potential of cinema to provoke an embodied response from the viewer, arguing that visual disruptions within the frame disturb a spectator’s cognitive control over the image and thus demand a more active viewing experience. Both in this scene and in Taekwondo more generally, the partial screening of bodies through the filmic dissection of limbs, chests and groins means that the viewer must indeed not only ‘engage in [the] imaginative construction [of the image]’ but also, consequently, ‘be aware of her or his self-involvement in the process’.²⁹ In much the same way as the film’s structures of slowness demand an increasingly contemplative response from the viewer, so too do the fragmented and textural images of the men’s bodies, screened to demonstrate how ‘vision itself can be tactile, as though one were touching a film with one’s eyes’.³⁰

The sweat on the men’s skin thus demands a multisensory relationship from the viewer, as the spaces of the swimming pool, shower and sauna come to function as sites of renewed queerness; queer not because of the occurrence of any non-normative sexual act but through the prolonged and fragmented textural caressing of sweat, skin and limbs. In this way Taekwondo harnesses both the erotic potency of the haptic and the queer potential of slow spectatorship. As the protagonists are filmed in fragmented sequences, toying with their body hair or picking their toenails in scenes devoid of any explicit narrative content, the viewer becomes ‘bodied forth’ by the image.³¹ For Marks, this embodied relationship between viewer and on-screen image disrupts normative hierarchies of spectatorship, meaning that ‘it is not proper to speak of the object of a haptic look as to speak of a dynamic subjectivity between looker and image’.³² Such an embodied response in Taekwondo is triggered by a visual erotics of slowness that exposes normative cinematic structures of narration, time and perception, and reconfigures – or queers – the viewer’s relationship to the image through an intersubjective dynamic that confounds conventional hierarchies of spectatorship. As I argue here, however, the film’s own intersubjective drives are undercut in both temporal and affective terms. In the aforementioned sequence in the swimming pool, for instance, the haptic slowness that pervades the two-minute scene foments a sense of romantic tension, strategically positioned to directly precede the film’s ultimate narrative resolution when the pair finally embrace, moments before the closing credits roll. In this sense, then, the anticipation that Taekwondo creates through scenes such as this one delimits the potential of its intersubjective slowness, suppressing it through an ultimate reversion to normative structures of narrative expectation.

Recent critical studies of queer cinema in Latin America have similarly observed the theoretical potential of drawing on phenomenological approaches such as that taken by Marks.³³ Vinodh Venkatesh writes in New Maricón Cinema, for example, that such intersubjectivity between looker and image triggers an ethically active form of spectatorship, through which the viewer is actively encouraged to confront a spectrum of non-normative sexual potential: ‘We no longer simply see difference, we are invited to actively touch, caress, and participate in the sensuality of libidinal urges, body identifications, and often-multidirectional orientations that engender new structures of feeling vis-à-vis bodies and desires’.³⁴ Santiago Peidro, writing specifically about the work of Berger, also notes the political potential of this more active form of spectatorship: ‘There is a clear interpellative impulse […] that seeks to unseat the spectator from the inertia of passively accepting those cultural norms of sexual and gender intelligibility that command human relations’.³⁵ These critics do, however, neglect to account for the intrinsic limitations of the haptic viewing processes described above, equating a capacity to queer normative structures of spectatorship with an implicitly utopian account of a more ethically active mode of viewing. In their emphasis on the ethical potential of embodied spectatorship, and its visibilization of alternative libidinal positions and recognition of pluralized sexual identities, they too eagerly overlook how these haptic strategies are mobilized – and often constrained – through time. As noted above, the formal and narrative slowness of Berger’s work does indeed facilitate a haptic engagement with the cinematic body; importantly, however, it also renders such an embodied response more complex through its parallel, contingent demand via the slowness of the image that ‘spectatorship alter its accustomed pathways, orient itself otherwise’.³⁶ Slowness here encourages a visual caressing of the male form at the same time as it underscores the impossibility of any such tactile engagement; it gestures towards the presence of non-normative desires just as it curtails their very modes of representation. When Fernando repeatedly touches the insect bites on Germán’s chest during an extended episode in the bathroom, the haptic potential of the scene is abridged by the abrupt departure of the latter, an exit only visible through the internally framed mirror behind Fernando’s head (figure 6). The tension that runs throughout Taekwondo, and through contemporary slow queer cinema more generally, between a haptic approximation of spectator to image and a reflexive recognition of the film’s own ‘asymptotic, caressing relationship to the real’, is thus problematized through the identificatory possibilities and limitations of cinematic slowness.³⁷

In Queer Cinema in the World, Schoonover and Galt categorize Andrew Haigh’s Weekend (2011) and Julián Hernández’s Mil nubes de paz cercan el cielo/A Thousand Clouds of Peace (2003) as recent examples of ‘faux-slow’ cinema, a genre of films they identify with artistic pretentions that are critically at odds with their formal and aesthetic realization.³⁸ ‘Whereas these films stylistically seem to involve a loosening of narrative’s grip on filmic temporality’, they write, ‘in the long run they do not allow critical boredom to take hold’.³⁹ In their analysis of how these films manipulate the spectator’s gaze via specific formal techniques (such as subjective framing and narrow depth of field), Schoonover and Galt argue that such works thereby display an ultimate reluctance to confront the spectator with the ‘radical registers of slowness’:⁴⁰

Whenever either film comes close to depicting time emptied of narrative content, it anxiously undermines its more ambitious aesthetic impulses by overly managing the viewer’s gaze, as if scrambling to counteract any wandering attention. […] These faux-slow gay films trope slow-moving narration without cultivating the critical potentials of slowness, and they display nervous tics around unleashing the gaze in time.⁴¹

Schoonover and Galt posit that these tensions are fuelled by concerns over the reception and distribution of contemporary queer film, reflecting a desire to appeal to consumer demands beyond the festival circuit as well as a recent impulse towards the ‘gentrification of gay world cinema’.⁴² Although, at times, their theorization of the faux-slow genre emerges as problematic, not least given the arbitrary policing of specific aesthetic and formal strategies of slowness, the anxieties they identify in contemporary queer cinema surrounding the ‘unleashing of the gaze in time’ do nevertheless provide a productive basis for critique. While critics of Berger’s films argue, in the ways explored above, that his work triggers a recognition of non-normative desire through an embodied form of spectatorship, a more sensitive analysis of how Taekwondo’s haptic cinematography interacts with its slow aesthetic can thus expose a series of paradoxes that restrict the film’s political potential. These paradoxes revolve around, on the one hand, modes of eroticizing the male body and, on the other, a hesitancy to dispense with certain conventionally scopic filmic techniques. That is, although the attempt to draw the spectator cognitively closer to the cinematic image through the textural, fragmented screening of the body is unmistakable, the tendency to do so through a set of eroticized images nevertheless implicitly serves to ‘entertain’ the viewer through conventional, well-worn cinematic means. Scenes in the sauna and shower room, for example, are filmed in a suggestively warm palette, evoking the image’s sensual content through tone and hue. Similarly, the subtle and intermittent recourse to traditional formal strategies, such as point-of-view framing, tactical focus and strategic reverse-shots, all display an ultimate reluctance to deny the spectator a sense of diegetic resolution.

In relation to the distinctly erotic hue with which Berger paints his protagonists, various critics have noted a consistency in the slow, sensual emphasis on the male form throughout his oeuvre, from Plan B (2009), through Absent and Hawaii, to Taekwondo. Attention has been drawn in particular to Berger’s progressively more pervasive reliance on close-up, static shots of the crotch area, seldom uncovered though often filmed in a provocative manner. Pagnoni Berns notes, for instance, that the recurrence of swimming pools, showers and saunas in Berger’s cinema legitimizes in narrative terms the filming of men wearing items of clothing ‘that reveal more than they hide’.⁴³ For Peidro, frames centred on the crotch area constitute the quintessential ‘Berger shot’, which in its formal persistence ‘expects a distinctly participative response from the spectator, whose attention cannot be relinquished’.⁴⁴ These shots appear frequently in Taekwondo and, for the most part, bear little relation to the film’s diegetic (in)action; they surface, for example, when Germán talks on the phone to his friend or when the men wait for their turn in the shower, with their loosely draped towels barely covering their genitals and pubic hair (figure 7). The suggestiveness of these shots introduces an unambiguously sexual tone to the image, not simply in the visually erotic manner suggested by Marks but also in the sense of the frankly pornographic. In this regard they reveal a fundamental tension that runs throughout much of Taekwondo, between the desire to defamiliarize the naked male body through stubborn, fragmented, haptic shots that withhold narrative and thematic coherence, and a parallel formal impulse to aestheticize such images of the men. On the use of these intimate shots in Berger’s Absent, Peidro writes:

In effect, when some sort of excess, rupture, digression or emphasis emerges with respect to the logic of the narrative, the spectator’s inferential process is triggered, not only interrogating the cause of such a discursive sign, as is the case with the close-up of male genitals outlined through underwear, but also becoming interpellated by it.⁴⁵

For the reasons discussed above, however, Taekwondo’s interpellation of the spectator through shots such as these is more intricate than Peidro here suggests. At times the ‘Berger shot’ is used subjectively to align the viewer with the perspective of Germán, such as when Leo actively provokes him by undressing in front of him, fuelling the younger man’s fears over being ‘outed’ to the rest of the group; at other times these shots are employed only momentarily, curtailing the slow, haptic potential of the image and instead relying solely on its potential for sexual arousal. Rather than ‘unleashing the gaze in time’, therefore, these instances of resorting to conventionally scopic means of narrative and formal framing compromise the ethical appeal that Taekwondo generates for its audience, undermining the film’s potential to ‘deny [the spectator] the comfort of inhabiting the certainties of gender, sex, sexual attraction and culturally hegemonic forms of desires’.⁴⁶

As suggested above, the haptic potency of Berger and Farina’s filmmaking in Taekwondo is also diminished in terms of narrative and script. In the sauna sequence discussed above, the textural caressing of the sweat on the men’s bodies, though powerful, is eventually dampened by the entrance of El gordo, who interrupts the sluggish pan across the men’s chests with his conversation. Although the dialogue initially proves to be of no consequence to the narrative, the ensuing focus on the question of whether or not Germán has a girlfriend makes it clear that the viewer is intended to feel a sense of tension on the part of the younger man, exacerbated by the claustrophobic space of the sauna. This is, after all, where the men are at their most open to the homosexual (and spectatorial) gaze, an aspect that is accentuated by the deliberate, voyeuristic images of the men’s torsos for much of the two-minute-long sequence. As the fragmented inspection of the men’s bodies is here relegated to the narrative, the restriction of the film’s slow structures cuts short the opportunity for a more ethically contemplative response. On a similar level, while the camera angles for the most part deny any explicitly subjective stance, there is a sporadic tendency towards point-of-view shots at key moments of the film. Without exception these align the viewer with the perspective of Germán, who on many levels functions as the film’s outsider, reflecting our own position as voyeurs among the intimate scenes of the quinta. Notably it is Germán’s face that is most often presented in close-up, his eyes furtively catching glimpses of the men when they undress or shower, and his facial expressions ever-so subtly reacting to the displays of muscular flesh that surround him. Although, admittedly, these specific narrative and formal aspects do not dominate the film, and cannot be said to undermine the more pervasive emphasis on slowness, they do represent periodic impulses, to borrow from Schoonover and Galt, to ‘undercut the viewer’s experience of durée […] by overly managing the viewer’s gaze’.⁴⁷ The film flaunts its explicit desire to prohibit narrative coherence while, at the same time, its subtle visual cues intermittently condition the spectator’s response to the emotions of the primary character(s). In this sense, although Taekwondo does not fall squarely into the category proposed by Schoonover and Galt, it is a film that exhibits discernible tendencies towards the faux-slow.

In the final few moments of Taekwondo, the intimate scene of the two protagonists embracing in the shadows condenses the tensions discussed in this essay surrounding the film’s formal slowness and the potential of its queer representation. As the two men kiss, the tension that has been progressively more present in the narrative is resolved, displacing the radical uncertainty of slowness in favour of allowing the spectator to confirm their suspicions that Germán’s desires for Fernando are indeed reciprocated. Throughout Taekwondo, however, Berger and Farina’s cinematography represents a significant attempt to de-centre queerness from conventional cinematic modes of narrative representation, re-investing its non-normative potential instead within filmic surface, texture and extension. The film’s haptic appeal to the viewer through the visual erotics of the fragmented images of bodies is matched by a drive to queer the relationship between spectator and text through the film’s intersubjective structures of slowness. This combination of slow aesthetic and haptic cinematography not only delays, and at times proscribes, a sense of narrative gratification, but in doing so it also creates a self-aware form of spectatorship that exposes conventional cinematic structures of time and perception. ‘A belaboured spectator’, as Schoonover remarks, ‘mirrors in reverse the non-belaboured body of the character on-screen’.⁴⁸ Indeed, through its ‘alluring account of bodies and gazes’, Taekwondo’s unremitting screening of naked and semi-naked men in various states of repose demands that the spectator dispense with conventional modes of spectatorship.⁴⁹

However, as I have argued, rather than mounting an unwavering appeal to the spectator to acknowledge a spectrum of non-normative desire through its embodied form of spectatorship, the politics of the slow and the boring in Taekwondo are both realized and restricted. The formal and aesthetic strategies used by Berger and Farina deny a sense of narrative rigour while also occasionally undermining the film’s most challenging interpellative impulses; they queer the spectator’s relationship to the image while, paradoxically, also satisfying certain expected narrative and cinematographic conventions. Ultimately, though, there is in the film’s meticulous, sensual caressing of the men’s skin and sweat a potent examination of the potential of queer filmic embodiment. The ‘threatening queer counterproductivity that simmers discursively’ in the film’s fusion of the haptic and the slow cautiously undermines normative structures of narrative, time and spectatorship, gesturing towards the potential for non-normative representation through a distinctly queer erotics of boredom.⁵⁰

Footnotes