300 Letters (Santa Ana, 2025)
Warning–this review mentions plot points that may be considered spoilers.
I wrote in a review of One Big Happy Family that films about groups or cultures to which one does not belong can provide particular challenges, especially when those films are critical of the group depicted. I do not typically experience that difficulty as a straight person reviewing films by or about LGBTQ+ people, but 300 Letters announces in its promotional materials that it thinks of itself as being for other gays.
“We always talk about the discrimination we suffer from outsiders,” says director and co-writer Lucas Santa Ana, “but we rarely think about the discrimination we inflict on ourselves due to the prejudices we carry.” He claims to want to explore that theme “with a fun and relaxed perspective.” I can see how the script explores issues of judgmentalism and prejudice within a gay community, but I totally missed the fun and relaxed perspective. To me, it had a bitter, nasty tone, as the characters, one in particular, sought to blame one another for their own cruelties.
The conceit of the plot is that Tom (Gastón Frías) breaks up with his lover, Jero (Cristian Mariani), leaving him the titular three hundred letters which will ostensibly explain his reasons for ending the relationship and make Jero see himself and their relationship in a new light. Turns out his reasons were pretty straightforward, Tom, while enjoying the sex they had together, did not like a single thing about Jero. That it takes Tom three hundred letters and two poetry recitals to hammer that point home makes me think the project was more vindictive than introspective.
To try to even matters up, the film does present us with an early scene in which Tom overhears Jero speaking with a friend who calls Tom the sort of gay person that the two of them used to laugh at. I can see how such a revelation would be painful, but since Tom confronts Jero about it (and claims to his own confidant that he only wants the sex anyway), it is hard to see how Jero is unilaterally to blame, even in Tom’s mind. Tom, of course, does the exact same thing by holding Jero up to ridicule in his poetry recitals. If one suspects, as I do, that there is an element of self-loathing in Tom’s justifications that Jero is his muse and that he only suffers his lovers irritating bourgeois entitlement to inspire great poetry (and for the great sex), it is tough to tell if 300 Letters is asking us to share Jero’s pity for him.
In case it is not clear by this point, I didn’t like 300 Letters, mostly because I didn’t like the characters, either individually or as a couple. In the romance genre, one needs to be rooting for the couple. In the break up genre, it helps if you don’t think that the characters are better off without each other. And if it needs to be said, my reasons for not liking them — shallowness, pettiness, pretense, emotional cruelty, entitlement — are not personal characteristics specific to gay people. I am not a big fan of Whose Afraid of Virginia Woolf? or A Marriage Story either.
I did wonder, though, whether the reasons I found myself pitying Tom were the same reasons Jero had for pitying him. (If Jero did indeed pity him and did not just claim to do so as a means of face-saving once it became clear that Tom would be more hurt by his indifference, feigned or not, than his hatred.) In a discussion with one of his own friends from the poetry set, a character pushes back on Tom’s claim that all he cares about is the sex. Well, then, what’s the problem? Just see him for sex and don’t date him. That this is seen by both characters as a viable alternative, makes me dislike them. Gay or straight, I think that using someone for sex without caring about them as people, is … less than admirable, something other than being sexually liberated.
To the extent that Tom cannot do that, is there an implied criticism of the assumption that sex can be separated from emotional attachments? Or just an implied criticism of Tom that he cannot do so? And is that assumption meant to be understood as more prevalent within the gay community? Circling back to the promotional quote from Santa Ana, are the “prejudices” and “discriminations” he says the gay community imposes on one another meant to be understood as part of arguments about what it means to be gay — and the willingness/ability of the characters to conform to group consensus — or simply individual pathologies of prejudiced people who merely happen to be gay?
