Demonios tus ojos - Sister of Mine

Directed by Pedro Aguilera

Starring: Ivana Baquero, Julio Perillán, Nicolás Coronado, Lucía Guerrero, Elisabet Gelabert, Juan Pablo Shuk

Year: 2017

Country: Spain, Colombia

Author Review: Roberto Matteucci

"You make me horny with that dress."

“It would, of course, be most natural for the child to select as the sexual object that person whom it has loved since childhood with, so to speak, a suppressed libido. But owing to the delay of sexual maturity time has been gained, for the erection beside the sexual inhibitions of the incest barrier, that moral prescription which explicitly excludes from the object selection the beloved person or infancy or blood relation. The observance of this barrier is above all a demand of cultural society which must guard against the absorption by the family of those interests which it needs for the production of higher social units.” (1)

Can the sexual relationship between a brother and a sister, with a common father, who have lived far apart for many years and have had very few relationships, be considered into that moral prescription, of which Freud speaks?

Oliver and Aurora have a father in common and are the protagonists of the film by Pedro Aguilera in the film Demonios tus ojos - Sister of Mine presented at the 53rd Pesaro International Film Festival.

Oliver is a famous director, he has lived in Los Angeles for many years. He has many perversions, he is a tireless consumer of porn movies. He adds to his voyeurism another even worse immorality - again as Freud says - for the "demand of cultural society ". While he is playing around surfing the porn sites, one day he sees a porn video in which he recognizes the half-sister Aurora as an actress. He has a raptus in his mind, an unstoppable libidinous thought, he wants to meet her again.

The film begins with his journey by train to come back home. In the train, we learn the first characteristics of his personality. He is travelling with a woman, Karen, while a film critic recognizes him and asks for an interview. Start a dialogue between the two, but the camera is always on the director, we hear the voice of the critic but not the face. The interview is ridiculous, meaningless except to show the immeasurable and arrogant ego of Oliver. "You're an asshole" the interview is interrupted by the quarrel between Oliver and Karen.

The meeting with Aurora is warm, even for the libido of the director who will court her insistently. But his sensual pleasure is so strong and push him to use his experience as a film-maker to place a webcam in his room to spy on her.

The intrusive presence of his brother will force her to fight furiously, at a party, with her boyfriend. Then she wants to take revenge on her brother when she discovers to be spied with the cam. So she invites her boyfriend to fuck her in the bedroom, positioning themselves at the exact centre of the visual aware of being seen by Oliver.

The meeting between voyeurism and the excitement of the forbidden pushes the two stepbrothers into their respective arms. It is a consenting relationship, rather perhaps wanted more by Aurora, as indeed the director explains:

"Ella no es una víctima, es quien sube la apuesta. Para mi esto es feminismo -apunta-; ella tiene los cojones de hacer algo que una niñita bien nunca haría. No le corta las alas al hermano, le permite actuar y sólo asume el rol de víctima del sistema, no de él". (2)

It is important to observe how the search for pleasure, of the voluptuousness happens through the perversion of the incest. It is not only the man who wants it, as the director says but above all it is a form of feminism, of freedom, of the choice of the half-sister Aurora.

The relationship between the two brothers becomes exaggerated, Oliver even directs his sister during sexual meeting with her boyfriend.

After a while, everything starts to get damaged.

Previously, we understood they had come from a rich family and there were some problems pushing Oliver to move to Los Angeles.

We do not know the reasons and if there is a link between his current behaviour and past events.

We start seeing the cocaine, the erotic games BDSM with Karen, also she is a victim of his lust. Oliver's behaviour is more and more decadent and without rules: he goes to bed with Aurora's friend and increases the use of drugs. But the perversion is mutual as when Aurora sends him, provocatively, the hairs of his vagina.

The obvious discovery of the secret will provoke the violent reaction of the boyfriend against Oliver and above all the rage of the mother: "You are used to deceiving people".

What is the perversion? Does it exist? Do we have any limits to test daily?

The director has equitable distant, as for the presentation of the strong character of Aurora to be counterbalanced with the perfidious Oliver.

The author loves telling the characters by surrounding them with quotations, such as the Norwegian novelist Knut Amsut: they use his novel to sniff cocaine; or the red mask with the book The Prophet in furnishing the house.

The director is happy with the final quote, in which he adds a scene from the film Cannibal Holocaust by the director Ruggero Deodato: the wild anthropophagous tribes resemble the western savages of the big cities.

The barbarian Oliver brings disquiet and trepidation in modern Spain.

In common, there is also the fake documentary, the cinema in the cinema, as happens with the circular and false vision of the lively sister in Oliver's computer.

An ocular, anatomical, physiological way of viewing perversion.

Beyond the vivid editing, the frames are as essential as the beautiful scene of the stairwell during the party. One sees an open and at the same time complicated world.

(1) Sigmund Freud, Three Contributions to the Sexual Theory, New York, 1910

(2) https://242peliculasdespues.com/2017/05/21/entrevista-a-pedro-aguilera/