David Davis
For some likely algorithmic reason, the same week that Jade and I saw, enjoyed, and discussed Passages—the newly released sex drama starring the incandescent Franz Rogowski as a crop-topped chaos bottom compelled to emotional escalation—Twitter surfaced a clip of the legendary scene in Y tu mamá también (2001) when the frankly perfect Maribel Verdú teases teen puppies Diego Luna and Gael García Bernal around her body to the dovelike yodel of Marco Antonio Solís, his ballad of tragedy pulling the hair-trigger on the trio’s horniness—the perfect soundtrack for a drunken beach threesome doomed to nostalgia before it’s even come to pass.
Troubled MMF love triangles never go out of style, at least not for me. From the traditional to the transgressive1, this artifact of compulsory heteromonogamy seems almost perfectly designed to generate the urgency required to scale unmapped desire. Unlike the more stable couple form, whose secrets are more easily satisfied, the troubled MMF love triangle, wherein gendered punishment (emasculation for the male counterparts; neutering for the female) looms for all parties, has 50% more membership to feint, dissemble, prevaricate, and occlude. With power both obscured and decentralized, the trouble MMF love triangle is in a constant battle for balance—like a helicopter, it functions precisely because it must fight against upending itself.
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Would that include Passages, with the established, rather than subtextual, queerness of its MM?