Desire as Mirror: What Deseo Tries to Say
On the surface, Deseo appears to be a sequence of erotic interludes, each linking to the next in a chain-like fashion. This is the modern-Mexico version of Arthur Schnitzler’s Reigen, re-cast not in fin-de-siècle Vienna but in contemporary Mexico. It is playful, scandalous and uneasy. It asks: how does desire transcend class boundaries, how does innocence flirt with shame, and how many stories in shame exist behind a smiling face?
Rather than depicting the journey of a single protagonist, the film pieces together characters — a “lady”, a youth, a singer, an actress, a mother, a teen — and each encounter is interlaced with the next. Lust, power, attraction, and regret are cyclical. There are no clear, moral, neat-and-tidy answers. Some characters find solace, others are left to sink in irony. It is as Much about the keen embrace of the unanswered than it is about the steep price of defeated desire.
Because Deseo adapts Reigen, a theatre piece notorious for revealing the hypocrisy of civility, the film carries its own built-in tension: what is laid bare and what remains concealed; the interludes of public propriety and the wild abandon of private shame. In Deseo, these impulses span age, gender, and class constraints suggesting that desire, in its most primordial form, knows no social boundaries.
Faces in Motion: Actors Who Ride the Echoes
Although Deseo does not have the popularity of a mainstream blockbuster, its cast includes people who are recognizable figures in Latin American cinema. Mention the names Edith González, Christian Bach, Paola Núñez, Leonor Varela, or Paulina Gaitán and the history of Latin American cinema shifts. Even in a film like Deseo, where these actors have limited lines, their presence serves to enrich the film’s texture.
Paulina Gaitán, who in Deseo plays the young character, has also in Narcos been typecast to play the innocent characters who are vulnerable. Gaitán’s personal history as a young actress in lead roles of powerful dramas contributes to the subtle tension Deseo contains. When she portrays a character who is in doubt, the audience picks up the extra weight she carries as an early offspring of a powerful star motivated by caution and ambition.
Varela is another familiar face to the audience. She has grace, with years of international exposure including Hollywood adjacent work. Varela chose to work in an erotic art film and avoided the Mexican commercial cinema which is formulaic and commercially safe. This choice to embrace something sensual, dangerous and risky brings echo. She bridges the gap between the audience who expect glamour and those who are uncomfortable.
Two well-known names in Latin America’s film and television, Christian Bach and Edith González, add a touch of prestige to Deseo. Their images come steeped in memories and nostalgic associations in telenovelas, primetime dramas, and theater. Bach and González’s presence in Deseo evokes everything they have done in their cinematic and performative history, and the film capitalizes on that allusion. Their casting is akin to tapping into the audience’s emotional reservoir for a return on invested memories.
In its most basic outline, Deseo capitalizes on the exploits of its cast, and the audience familiarity with their off-screen personas so that the film’s characters can be performed with greater emotional depth.
Scenes that Hold Breath: Plot and Emotional Beats
Though the film presents Deseo in a non-linear fashion, some portions of the emotional plot can be traced with the pattern of a line of small waves.
There is the youthful temptation where innocent flirtation with the predator must eventually live with the regret.
There is the experienced woman, with memories that have left her passion craving, and decorum must plead silence.
There is the, singer, the actress, the older figure, each encounter, layered with the past, with loss, and all that is left unspoken.
One sequence might depict a hidden embrace in soft light; the next shows the awkwardness that follows. The soundtrack, costume, and the juxtaposition of modern urban spaces and interiors steeped in shadow accentuate the fact that every encounter is shadowed with the possibility of being seen.
As the film is based on Reigen, the structure itself becomes part of the commentary: a meeting leads to another, the players change, and the power dynamic flows through faces you thought you understood, then don’t. The erotic slips into the political; the intimate becomes an allegory.
In the film Deseo, when someone reaches for connection and then pulls away, it is more than character fatigue that you feel. It is the weight of memory, shame, and lost hope. The film does not answer. It leaves you with the burning memory of waiting for the next spark, or the next ache.
In India, where cinema combines sensuality with taboo, Deseo feels both foreign and oddly familiar. Desire that crosses class boundaries is something many know in private: teacher-student flirtation, family-expectation versus personal longing, and the silence surrounding something people don’t openly speak of.
Deseo doesn’t take a moral stance and doesn’t preach a sermon either. Instead, it mirrors some of the hidden narratives: what occurs after the lights dim, what lingers behind the smiles and the social performances. That mood also lingers in Indian art films: in quiet pain, in uncomfortable silences.
When the films were presented in Latino film circuits or to art-house audiences, its sensuous style drew some attention, and again, the restraint was noted. It doesn’t fetishize the nudity; it situates it within the politics of regret, identity, and age. That balance is what gives Deseo depth beyond the flesh.
Whispered Threads: What You May Not Know.
As Deseo is not a mainstream blockbuster, a lot of its production stories are still in the dark. But some stories are worth tracing. One of them is the film’s structural ancestry: director Antonio Zavala Kugler took Reigen and reframed it for contemporary Mexico, meaning that he was purposefully reaching back through time, envisioning how age-old hypocrisy might remain hidden behind contemporary garb and present-day bodies. This choice of adaptation is risky; it requires the actors to embody desire while representing a social structure that is tightly bound and repressive. They are to perform the desire to show how the structure for desire is fluid.
Another piece of behind-the-scenes gossip concerns the music and casting decisions. In this film, the singer Lila Downs is not just a passive presence; her music is integrated into the film as a key component. The use of her voice, or the echo of her persona, provided a perspective texture which, to a good portion of the viewers, may not have been expected in an erotic drama. This suggests that the film expected to incorporate not just a few “names” in terms of acting, but also a significant “musical” presence.
Many actors in Deseo, especially the leads, are known to the public from television and telenovelas. Their choice to do Deseo, from this perspective, may involve the risk of being typecast, or facing backlash from audiences who have come to expect ‘safe’ roles. It is a known fact that accepting roles in an erotic art drama often requires a choice in favor of creative respect over commercial comfort.
Finally and perhaps in entropy stronger sense, the film is sensual but not just about sex. It is also about the longing for something when the words fail. For actors who have spoken about the weight of their image, especially the actresses in Latin America, emotional labor is also a factor on roles that invite the gaze, and judgment. For them to choose Deseo is to expose themselves to a risk of critique and to a lack of safety in their home market, in return for a narrative honesty.