The new jungle adventure Ardor (opening Friday) is a hoot-and-a-half for savvy LGBTQ filmgoers on a number of intriguing grounds. The film, written and directed by Pablo Fendrik, stars and is executive produced by the Mexican-born, multilingual hottie Gael Garcia Bernal, first celebrated by queer fans for his complex friendship with his co-star and real-life childhood buddy Diego Luna in the hilarious and passionate 2001 Mexican road comedy Y Tu Mama Tambien. That film got them selected as gorgeous straight cover boys for The Advocate.
The good news to report from Ardor is that the Gael many of us swooned over for his passionate male-on-male kissing scene with Luna at the climax of Tu Mama is back, although this time, his male shaman protagonist, Kai, limits his lip-locks to his female co-star Alice Braga (Vania). At the conclusion of a professional chat with Tu Mama director Alfonso Cuaron, he asked wickedly, "Why do gay men love Gael so passionately?" Ardor, not entirely successful as a "save the rain forests" Western, does remind us of the power of a charismatic star to get us to enjoy a drama that would be totally lost in the jungle without his charming, bare-chested presence.
Back in 1964, Philippe de Broca's That Man from Rio, a satire sending up the newly launched James Bond franchise, starred the French hottie (and Gael of his day) Jean-Paul Belmondo. Looking back over half-a-century of satires and mockumentaries, it's now possible to see That Man from Rio as a multi-targeted spoof with a time-release edge that is still paying dividends. In the high-energy prologue, Belmondo searches for treasure in the rain forests of Brazil, the very jungle then being cleared to make way for Brazil's new capital Brasilia. Fendrik and Gael's sincere political-drama argument for saving a patch of Argentinian rain forest could have used an injection of the de Broca/Belmondo brand of screwball-comedy satire.
The makers of Ardor also pay homage to the classic 1950s-era American Western, specifically George Stevens' Shane, where Alan Ladd's "pacifist gunman" character faces down a sincere (therefore subtly campy), mean Jack Palance as the hired gun threatening the lives of Shane's farmer/sheepherder friends. At the very end of Shane, as the lone-wolf hero rides off the sheepherder's spread, the family's young boy (a haunting Brandon de Wilde) calls out to his hero, "Come back, Shane, come back!"
With all my reservations about Ardor, I urge you to see this unusual experiment in movie multi-tasking for the gutsy way its reach exceeds its grasp. There are many bad movies out there, but few are worthy of 100 minutes of your time, not to mention $12 from your wallet. In the end, a still-handsome Gael Garcia Bernal, dancing provocatively on the cusp between youth and middle age, is back, and we should all count our blessings.