Made with production difficulties that would have discouraged a weak soul, "Caballos" finally made it to the arranged appointment with its audience. The final product is undoubtedly aimed at a small number of spectators, since it is a work that, although it can be seen and understood by anyone, is hermetic as its source, as the universe that engendered it, which is the exclusive property of Fabián Suárez, the director. The cinema of poet and playwright Fabián, like his verses and dramas, expresses a particular tessitura in which his perception of the (Cuban) environment merges with influences from diverse sources and cultures, the memories and the icons of an intellectual and emotional load that he knows better than anyone else.
The anecdote –as told by me from a reductionist and even prosaic perspective- is known by almost all adults, whose adhesions and judgments will play a key role in the appreciation of the film, which, precisely because of its closed nature, allows a very wide margin for personal interpretations. We have all met an ambiguous, ambitious young male, here a photographer (Alejandro Halley), who once loved or was seduced by a virulent and ritualistic homosexual, here in the twilight of his appeal (Pablo Guevara), who is defined -as character- by possessions that the young people around him could inherit. The drama is completed with a young, black fashion girl (Linnett Hernández) that seems like a mirror of the photographer and who replaces him with a mature French tourist; and with a Havana boy, a mulatto survivor of the street (Milton García), apparently a musician whose survival has depended on his sexuality.
Fabián Suárez describes the drama with coldness, against glossy surfaces (with the usual excellence of cinematographer Javier Labrador Deulofeu), in which the emotional connection between the photographer and the dying are almost absent, intermittent, denying empathy with the audience. That privilege is granted to the model and the musician, who live every day of their lives with more authenticity and freshness. To the interaction between the main four and the secondary characters, add Fabián's obsessions and hidden references, from Patti Smith's "horses", the ghost of Robert Mapplethorpe and many others that I do not know. I believe that the day the filmmaker decides to close his catalog of cultural references of beauty and gives us his own inner beauty, so rich and valuable, the dialogue with the audience will be broader and more varied.
However, the film flows with appropriate rhythm for 97 minutes and I believe it is because of the cast's work, a small group of actors who complemented each other. Alejandro Halley is distantly correct, while Milton García serves as a counterpoint with earthly strength. Both actors establish a balance of their registers, as the two focuses of attraction of the dying homosexual, played by Pablo Guevara with declamatory impulses that reinforce his fragility, make him inscrutable and arouse emotional estrangement in us viewers. Linnett Hernández has little to do, with a character whose blackness seems more emblematic in its Cuban context, than a key element of the drama.
At the end, I suppose, I just suppose, that "Horses" is a film within its own, unclassifiable genre, a sort of "fabiansuaresque drama" that in time, as it goes around life, screening rooms, projections, and events, will find and increase its audience. We do not always have the opportunity to talk about the cinema of someone we know, but it we must be said that "Caballos" was a work that Fabián Suárez had to execute according to an inescapable programmatic design.
