Rotting in the Sun (dir. Sebastian Silva, USA/Mexico, 2023) – *** – Sebastian Silva’s Rotting in the Sun is a dark comedy following a film director, Sebastian, played by Silva himself, who is grappling with depression. Encouraged by his friend Mateo, Sebastian visits a gay nude beach where he encounters Jordan Firstman, a social media influencer whom Silva accuses of lacking authenticity for being social media influencer.
The film attempts to capture an edgy, 90s Queer New Wave vibe, characterized by its deployment of a cinema verite style. It delves into two realms of reality: the unsimulated reality of Mexican society (but otherwise a product of performance) and the mediated reality of social media and the internet that pervades the narrative. Both Silva and Firstman navigate these realities in a drugged state, seemingly interested in each other yet ultimately disengaged. Caught in this whirlwind of dissociations is Vero, the maid, burdened with the truth about Silva’s death.
Vero, the central protagonist, shoulders immense responsibility for all. She remains the moral compass of the story. As a cis-female Mexican woman from a struggling family, she must also confront her employers’ homosexuality, all while worrying about her father’s medical bills and the threat of unemployment. She grapples with life’s most practical problems, which is a stark contrast with her privileged employers. In Vero, we see the income disparity of the ‘artists’ and their servants. She dwells in precarity, while her employers live autonomously. Even the work of mourning for Silva’s death is part of her undeclared job responsibilities. She’s clumsy but hardworking. Unlike the archetypal murder suspects in other films, Vero lacks the otherworldly tenacity and intelligence to resolve the conflict. She is humanly ‘real,’ and the film problematizes Vero’s mistakes of being all-too-human.
The movie also explores the subtext of melancholia in many gradations: first would be what I call the artist’s sadness, embodied by Silva himself in his search for himself, his own self-realization as a creator himself. The second would be the sadness negated by toxic positivity, embodied by Firstman, whose toxic trait of not seeing through Silva’s sadness, makes a classic case of contemporary capitalism’s demand for people to be happy. And finally, the sadness of inequality, as embodied by Vera, who just wants to do her job but is thrown in a series of unlucky events, that led her to her own fall.
The culprit for these gradations of sadness remain unwritten and unsaid, but implied when Vera said that the police in Mexico City are unreliable and, given her stature, she would eventually be jailed over an accident. The system is flawed, and the value system, askewed, as if Silva is saying, everybody and everywhere is fucked up. Silva’s rotten corpse on the rooftop symbolizes the rottenness of this displaced sense of justice in an unkind, disunited world.
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OMNITUDO 