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Directed by Marcelo Piñeyro

In Spanish, with English subtitles

Not rated, 125 minutes

''Plata Quemada'' (''Burnt Money''), a new film by the Argentine director Marcelo Piñeyro, which opens today at the Quad (34 West 13th Street, Greenwich Village), presents a curious mixture of strangeness and déjà vu. It starts out as a stylish, convoluted caper film in which a gang is assembled for a big score that doesn't go quite as smoothly as planned. The heist involves a disgraced tango singer, a crooked government official and an assortment of underworld types, but the movie's real focus is on the three younger members: Cuervo (Pablo Echarri), the girl-crazy, drug-addled getaway driver, and Angel (Eduardo Noriega) and Nene (Leonardo Sbaraglia), gay lovers known in criminal circles as the twins.

The robbery, in which several policemen are killed and Angel is wounded, is really a prologue to Mr. Piñeyro's main concern, which is the lurid psychodrama that develops once the thieves flee to Uruguay, where they spend most of the picture waiting for the inevitable bad ending. The crime story, which was difficult to follow in any case, fades into the background.

Angel, who has always heard voices in his head, becomes ever more unbalanced and remote from Nene, who leaves their claustrophobic safe house for nocturnal wanderings in wondrously cinematic locales. At one of these, a bar in the middle of a lushly decadent fairground, he meets a woman named Giselle (Leticia Brédice), and they begin an agonized love affair, which helps to hasten the long orgy of violence and currency burning that ends this sad tale.

The passions of ''Plata Quemada'' are as bold as the images. Mr. Piñeyro has an eye for arresting compositions, and his color scheme ranges from bruised to bloody. His juxtapositions show a taste for extremity that is no less effective for being a little obvious: Nene's sexual encounter in a men's room is intercut with Angel's visit to a church; later, Nene and Giselle's lovemaking alternates with Angel shooting up and mutilating himself. The desperate, destructive longing that binds Angel and Nene and the carnal spark that arises between Nene and Giselle seem to be matters less of psychology than primal blood rituals.

These characters exist without motive, but they pulse with a despairing, intensely erotic energy. Their moody romanticism has a curiously stylized feel, like the tango-tinged Argentine pop, at once fervid and formal, on the soundtrack. Along with Cuervo, Nene and Angel prowl the beaches and fairgrounds outside Montevideo in narrow-lapeled suits, dark ties and sunglasses, looking for all the world like the stars of a brooding Spanish-language remake of ''Reservoir Dogs'' or ''Ocean's Eleven,'' and then conclude their sojourn with a fusillade that makes ''Bonnie and Clyde'' look restrained. A. O. SCOTT

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Directed by Marcelo Piñeyro In Spanish, with English subtitles Not rated, 125 minutes ''Plata Quemada'' (''Burnt Money''), a new film by the Argentine director Marcelo Piñeyro, which opens today at the Quad (34 West 13th Street, Greenwich Village), presents a curious mixture of strangeness and déjà vu.

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contemporary latin american cinema: breaking into the global market

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performing arts / film / history & criticism

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performing arts / film & video / history & criticism

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Contemporary Latin American Cinema: Breaking into the Global Market

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This engaging book explores some of the most significant films to emerge from Latin America since 2000, an extraordinary period of international recognition for the region's cinema. Each chapter assesses an individual film, with some contributors considering the reasons for the unprecedented ...

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"The queer theorist Leo Bersani has argued for the "self-shattering" qualities of gay sex, but Plata Quemada foregrounds gay desire as a mutually shattering event. The film's romantic nihilism is at the heart of both its appeal and its essentially troubling nature."
Marcelo Piñeyro's Plata Quemada (2000) (the title in English is Burnt Money) is an Argentine film that won the Goya Award for Best Spanish Language Foreign Film in 2001 and several other awards. Based on the 1997 "dirty-realism" novel of the same name by Ricardo Piglia (given the English title Money to Burn), Piñeyro's film is a fascinating, hypnotic work that demands attention on its own stylized cinematic terms. Plata Quemada is especially interesting for several reasons. First, made on the "other" American continent for an expressly Argentine audience and yet managing to become an international art-house hit, the film offers an uncanny mirror image of the possibilities and potentialities, or lack thereof, available to U.S. filmmakers as well as audiences. These possibilities and potentialities relate specifically to the gay/queer themes foregrounded in this film. Based on a real-life historical event, Plata Quemada, about two gay bank robbers and set in the mid-1960s, is a languorous male-male version of Arthur Penn's seminal Bonnie and Clyde (1967). One question immediately arises: is this a queer version of that film as well as a same-gender one? (Penn's film itself has queer valences: Clyde Barrow [Warren Beatty] reassures Bonnie Parker [Faye Dunaway], "I don't like boys," after his failed initial attempt to make love to her. Part of his character arc is his eventual success in having sexual intercourse with her.) Argentina's homophobic history seems to be addressed and also pacified in this film that, at once, evokes with extraordinary erotic intensity the brooding, premonitory atmosphere of sexual desire between men but never shows actual sex between men.

Plata Quemada intersects provocatively with the major themes of post-millennial Hollywood films. This period of Hollywood history has been dominated by the new "body genres" of torture-porn horror (exemplified by Eli Roth's Hostel [2005]) and the Beta Male comedies popularized by Judd Apatow. What crucially links these seemingly antithetical genres is their shared fascination with not only exposing but ravaging the male body, marked as straight, white, and heterosexual. In many ways, Piñeyro's film offers its own version of this representational project. While the traumatic events of September 11, 2001, are usually identified as the defining "cause" for the tortured representations of masculinity in post-millennial Hollywood, Plata Quemada, like other films of its moment, illuminates the broader issues at work in these representations. Its fascination with the exposed and suffering male body cannot be explained by 9/11, but the film is also representative of those being made in its own period and in the years to follow in terms of its depiction of both masculinity and male bodies. The further question, surprisingly even for this film with explicitly queer content, is, to what extent is the representation of the male body a queer act or event? Because so many overlaps exist between Plata Quemada and Pedro Almodovar's film Law of Desire (1987), I will conclude with a comparative reading of both works.

Plata Quemada recreates the events of a famous bank robbery in Buenos Aires in 1965. El Nene (played by the Argentine Leonardo Sbaraglia) - an aspiring doctor who did not complete his medical training, the black sheep of his prosperous family, and a petty thief who has served time in prison - and Angel (played by the Spaniard Eduardo Noriega), a drifter, become known as "The Twins," recalling the famous Kray brothers of English crime lore. (Peter Medak made a 1990 film called The Krays about these titular criminals. Twin brothers, one gay, one straight, they presided over London's criminal underworld in the 1960s.) But Nene and Angel are not biologically related but, rather, lovers who initially meet in the bathroom of a Buenos Aires subway station and form an unbreakable, if shattering, bond after this first sexual encounter. The queer theorist Leo Bersani has argued for the "self-shattering" qualities of gay sex, but Plata Quemada foregrounds gay desire as a mutually shattering event. The film's romantic nihilism is at the heart of both its appeal and its essentially troubling nature.

The lovers join a group of well-established gangsters who plan to hold up an armored truck. Fontana (Ricardo Bartis), the boss of the group, and the elderly lawyer Nando (Carlos Roffé), preside over a motley crew that includes the Twins as well as the young, dark-haired Cuervo (Pablo Echarri), who recalls the sensual male crooners of the 1950s but with palpable sexual intensity. His girlfriend is an equally sexually palpable presence, a lascivious 16-year-old teenager named Vivi (Dolores Fonzi). During the bank robbery, the armed guards unexpectedly retaliate, and Angel is wounded during the exchange of gunfire, which leads an enraged Nene to massacre all of the guards as well as the police. As David William Foster points out, Nene's behavior here violates all of the codes of such heists, in which any participant who happens to be injured is either left behind or executed on the spot by the other heist members to avoid any interrogation by the police (Foster 146). The Buenos Aires police, enflamed by the loss of some of their own, make finding the heist team a top priority on a national scale. The gang first hole up in Vivi's apartment, but then escape to Montevideo. The police extend their hunt for the gang to Uruguay. As the gang waits for new passports, the film explores the related narrative arcs of Nene's conflicted sexual identity - his need to prove that he is, if not heterosexual, at least capable of being so - and Angel's psychic disintegration. (Angel hears voices in his head and is also obsessed with his own Catholicism. The film strongly suggests that he is suffering from some form of schizophrenia.) At the same time, the real drama seems to be the lack of intimate contact, emotional and sexual, between Nene and Angel, a hiatus that began with their escape. Indeed, it is unclear whether or not Nene's own odyssey of sexual confusion primarily stems from some deep conflict within himself or from his deprivation as Angel withholds intimacy with him - on many levels, of which the physical is the most obvious.

Sexually spurned and melancholic, Nene goes to a movie theater alone where other men are cruising for sex. After making sexual overtures to an effeminate man he meets in a bathroom, Nene torments him by sticking a gun in his face, but then performs oral sex on him. Afterwards, Nene returns that night to the fair that he, Angel, and Cuervo had visited. There he meets a prostitute named Giselle (Leticia Bredice), with whom he develops a relationship. It is not clear what is primarily motivating this relationship - the need to prove that he can be heterosexual? Actual desiring feelings for Giselle (he does mention escaping with her alone as well)? A demonstrable need to secure a new hideout for the gang in Giselle's apartment?

Nando is apprehended by the police, and when the group must abandon their refuge, Fontana goes off on his own. Nene brings Angel and Cuervo to hide out in Giselle's apartment before they leave the city at night. When Giselle attempts to convince Nene, whom she clearly loves, to escape with her, and then forces him to choose between her and Angel, he chooses Angel. The devastated Giselle calls him a puto, or fag, and goes, not for the first time, into enraged hysterics; for his part, Nene tells Giselle that he will find her and kill her if she alerts the police to their whereabouts. Giselle, however, does just that. The police surround the building, and a cataclysmic shootout occurs. But during the shootout, in which the thieves decide to go out in a blaze of glory, Nene and Angel reconnect sweetly, passionately, and with a spiritual abandon to match their physical intimacy. After the round of police attacks, Angel tells Nene that he can no longer hear his maddening "voices." Soon, Cuervo is killed (and dies being cradled in Angel's arms), and as they await the next and most lethal rounds of police attacks, Nene and Angel burn all of the titular money. Unlike the real-life version of Nene, who survived the attack, was brutally treated by the police, and died shortly afterwards in the hospital, the film's Nene is shot and dies in Angel's arms. Angel is still in this "Pietà" position holding Nene as the police commence their unstoppable final attack. We do not see Angel die, but it is strongly implied that he willfully allows himself to be killed by the police.

Given the notorious near-ban on representing scenes of same-sex love and intimacy in American films, Plata Quemada's very subject matter for a film meant for mainstream audiences makes for a provocative contrast. In the view of critics like David William Foster, however, the lack of representation of sexual contact/intercourse between the two men is "laughable" in a film purportedly about this very subject. In an interesting contrast, 2001 saw the release of openly gay French director Patrice Chereau's English-language Intimacy, about a tormented heterosexual love affair. Starring Mark Rylance and Kerry Fox and based on short stories by Hanif Kureishi (who also wrote a novel of the same title), the film was immediately notable for its graphic depictions of onscreen sex, literally engaged in by the actors. Catherine Breillat's brilliant Fat Girl also notably depicts sexual intercourse in an explicit way (we see the erect penis of the boyfriend of titular heroine's sister; part of the heroine's sustained emotional humiliation is being forced to watch her conventionally attractive older sister having sex in front of her). We can say that, with Plata Quemada, Intimacy, and Fat Girl, 2001 was the cinematic Year of the Penis.

While I do not wish to exculpate Piñeyro or the filmmakers for their cowardice in failing to show same-sex screen sex, or for the misogynistic aspects of their representation of women, I do want to suggest that Piñeyro's film is, much like Ang Lee's 2005 Brokeback Mountain, which received similar criticisms, a study in the torments of the closet. Both Nene and Angel, it is strongly suggested, are left adrift by the sexual anomie they face within a culture of not only compulsory heterosexuality but also rigidly constructed and maintained gender roles. I would argue that, while a full range of sexualities would certainly seem to be unavailable to the characters in the film, even within the conventional homo/hetero divide that organizes it, the lovers are presented as balked in the very desire that unites and on some level liberates them. Angel's hearing of voices emerges as an allegory for the barrage of social messages against his desires that attend the inner life of the closeted homosexual. "Don't you hear voices, confusing you, saying 'This is wrong,'?" Angel, slumped on the beach, asks Nene at one point. Similarly, Nene's various, conflicted attempts at sexual contact with others, male and female, appear to be a reaction against, on the one hand, Angel's spurning of him for much of the film and, on the other hand, his own conflicts over being a "puto," an identity - or a set of practices - which he claims was foisted upon him in prison. But as played with palpable sorrow by Leonardo Sbaraglia, Nene is exquisitely tormented chiefly by his longing for connection with Angel and inability to break through his wall of psychic and emotional impenetrability. The film becomes a study in not having - not having either emotional or sexual intimacy, one of the reasons why the final connection the two men do make with one another, a restoration of their intimacy while they are fending off the full fury of the police force, is so poignant and ecstatic.

What Piñeyro's film chiefly thematizes are the varieties of frustrated desire: waiting, longing, deprivation. We can interpret these forms of affect as queer melancholia, ways of inhabiting a maddening and inescapable queer identity. These affectional modes also allegorize the melancholia of the capitalist subject. All of the cash amassed by the thieves do little to alleviate their sense of tense and unrelieved boredom. Nene's intense pining for the unavailable Angel is part of this melancholia of boredom - and also one of the forms of gender play in the film. While Angel is the more conventionally feminine of the pair - with his mad scenes, hysteria, and obsessive religious devotion - he also possesses all of the power in the relationship. This power is figured as chiefly the power to make his ardent lover wait. So, while Nene is someone who can easily "pass" as heterosexual, he is also cast into the passive role by Angel, waiting for any flicker of recognition from him. On its own terms, the film offers a probing rereading of gender codes. In Manhood in Hollywood from Bush to Bush, I discuss the "double-protagonist film" that emerged in the 1990s, in which two male leads vie for narrative dominance; often, one of these male protagonists is typed as narcissistic and the other as masochistic. As a double-protagonist film, the film plays with modes of narcissistic and masochistic masculinity , with the surprise being that the seemingly suffering Angel, his injured, bleeding body bearing the evidence of his spiritual torments, is actually much more readable as the narcissist, the straight-acting Nene as the genuine masochist.

Plata Quemada uses the standard psychoanalytic register of homosexual narcissism - emphasized here in the physical similarities of these lover-"twins" - in innovative ways. The film is a study in doubles - the dark-haired twins and dark-haired Cuervo, who resembles Angel especially, and Viv as his double. (Emotional doubling also occurs. In her passionate and angry pining for Nene, Giselle doubles his pining for Angel.) So little, in the end, distinguishes Cuervo from the twins that the very dividing line of hetero versus homo comes to seem more than blurred, a matter of semantics. When Cuervo dies in Angel's arms - the suffering, wounded Angel now the calm, generous comforter - the line is more than blurred: it's redrawn as an entirely new form of bonding between men. (Perhaps the main point is that it is the straight Cuervo who seems like the "clone" of the gay lovers.) The film suggests that their shared outlaw position makes all of these men queer on some level - shunned, hunted, socially abnegated. The film evokes Jean Genet's famous depictions of the gay outlaw, but it heals the overriding "anti-relation" motif in his work with tender, sorrowful connections in the face of death (eventually reached). Or the film can be said to be a surprising study in the possibilities of straight-queer solidarity in the face of a larger persecution.

If the film can only represent sexual intercourse when it occurs between a man and a woman, either Cuervo and Viv or, much more intensively, Nene and Giselle, and if it can only show us male full-frontal nudity during this scene, Plata Quemada also skillfully, in a way that recalls the more ingenious strategies of classic Hollywood directors who found ways to subvert the Production Code, uses its own limitations to extend its allegories of the constrictions of the closet and of what T. Walter Herbert calls Code Manhood. In the scene in which Nene has sex with Giselle, his naked body is forced into a tight two-shot in which her naked body also appears. It is almost as if the full range of pleasures he seeks is as constricted as the frame itself into which his much more expansive body must be crammed.

I would argue that in many ways Plata Quemada is a remake of Pedro Almodóvar's Law of Desire (1987). A bracing film that represents the near peak of Almodóvar's first phase, which would conclude spectacularly the next year with Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, Law of Desire showcases the Spanish director's signature blend of deconstructive cinematic techniques; melodramatic emotionalism that fuses classical Hollywood with the telenovela; vivid, almost cartoonish color; and garish costumes imbued with a camp sensibility. As José Quiroga has shown, this is a pivotal text not only in Almodóvar's career but also in post-Franco Spanish culture. "La Movida Madrileña" emerged in Madrid after Franco's death in 1975, a movement that represented the explosive releases from social, cultural, and esthetic repression of the era and that had powerful implications for gender, class, language, custom, race, cultural identity, sexuality. The emotionally aloof movie director at the center, Pablo Quintero (Eusebio Poncela), loves handsome young Juan, but Juan does not love him; the fiery and unstable Antonio (the young Antonio Banderas, a fixture of early Almodóvar) loves Pablo, but Pablo cannot return his love. Quiroga analyzes the rich thematic of the "chase" in this film as an allegory of the way that "gender is chased by sexuality, or the other way around - to the way in which gender and sexuality operate as a kind of mutual chase of affection and flight" (25-6). As Quiroga further analyzes, "Desire never quite involves the transit solely from one point to another, from a subject to an object, from one body to a different one" (30). The climax of Plata Quemada vividly recalls that of Law of Desire. Pablo, the cold, aloof, rejecting lover, finally holds Antonio in his arms and makes love to him with sweet, sexy tenderness. (Of course, this being an Almodóvar film, they only have one hour to be together in emotional and erotic unison, given that the police surround the building they are in and will soon shoot Antonio to his death.)

The scene of male lovers either making love or passionately embracing one another as bullets fly seems to be a queer interpretation of the final moments of Bonnie and Clyde. (In Plata Quemada, what the film lacks in explicit scenes of sexual intercourse between men it makes up for in its sustained study of homoeroticism. The entire climactic shootout is performed by the beautiful swarthy, hairy men in their underwear, an ironic commentary on their armored, heavily clothed pursuers.) Just before Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway, surrounded by police officers brandishing guns, step out of the car at the climax, they exchange looks that would appear to be meant to suggest reserves of love and loyalty. Then once they step out of the car, they are annihilated by a blaze of bullets. As their bodies writhe in their death-throes, Arthur Penn famously slows down the action, turning the scene into a choreographed slow-motion dance of death. In Law of Desire and Burnt Money, this moment transforms into forms of ardent queer lovemaking that defy death while also suggesting that it is only death that gives this queer dance its license. At the very least, we can say that the glamour of the outlaw is a cult that extends to queer representation no less influentially than it does the mainstream. We might read these climactic connections as allegories for queer representation. The lovemaking as the bullets fly - or the tender physical intimacy with an erotic charge in Plata Quemada - is a desperate and fierce performance of erotic affiliation that burns brightest as the forces of conformity extinguish the flames of queer desire.
Works Cited
Bersani, Leo. Homos. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995.

Foster, David William. " Plata Quemada: Social Violence and Gay Idyll." Chasqui, vol. 34, Special Issue no. 2: Cinematic and Literary Representations of Spanish and Latin American Themes (2005), pp. 145-150.

Greven, David. Manhood in Hollywood from Bush to Bush. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2009.

Herbert, Thomas Walter. Sexual Violence and American Manhood. Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 2002.

Quiroga, José. Law of Desire: Queer Film Classics. Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2010.

Rocha, Carolina. "Contemporary Argentine Cinema during Neoliberalism." Hispania, vol. 92, no. 4 (December 2009), pp. 841-851.

- David Greven

David Greven is Associate Professor of English at the University of South Carolina. His books include Psycho-Sexual: Male Desire in Hitchcock, De Palma, Scorsese, and Friedkin (University of Texas Press, 2013), The Fragility of Manhood: Hawthorne, Freud, and the Politics of Gender (Ohio State University Press, 2012), Representations of Femininity in American Genre Cinema: The Woman's Film, Film Noir, and Modern Horror (Palgrave, 2011), Manhood in Hollywood from Bush to Bush (University of Texas Press, 2009), and Men Beyond Desire: Manhood, Sex, and Violation in American Literature (Palgrave, 2005). He is on the editorial boards of Cinema Journal and Genders and is currently working on a book about post-millennial Hollywood masculinity called Ghost Faces.

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Making Love While the Bullets Fly: Plata Quemada (Burnt Money), Representation, and Queer Masculinity - Bright Lights Film Journal

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"The queer theorist Leo Bersani has argued for the "self-shattering" qualities of gay sex, but Plata Quemada foregrounds gay desire as a mutually shattering event. The film's romantic nihilism is at the heart of both its appeal and its essentially troubling nature."

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Pew Research Center's Global Attitudes Project

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Greater Acceptance in More Secular and Affluent Countries

Overview

As the United States and other countries grapple with the issue of same-sex marriage, a new Pew Research Center survey finds huge variance by region on the broader question of whether homosexuality should be accepted or rejected by society.

The survey of publics in 39 countries finds broad acceptance of homosexuality in North America, the European Union, and much of Latin America, but equally widespread rejection in predominantly Muslim nations and in Africa, as well as in parts of Asia and in Russia. Opinion about the acceptability of homosexuality is divided in Israel, Poland and Bolivia.

Attitudes about homosexuality have been fairly stable in recent years, except in South Korea, the United States and Canada, where the percentage saying homosexuality should be accepted by society has grown by at least ten percentage points since 2007. These are among the key findings of a new survey by the Pew Research Center conducted in 39 countries among 37,653 respondents from March 2 to May 1, 2013.

The survey also finds that acceptance of homosexuality is particularly widespread in countries where religion is less central in people's lives. These are also among the richest countries in the world. In contrast, in poorer countries with high levels of religiosity, few believe homosexuality should be accepted by society.

Age is also a factor in several countries, with younger respondents offering far more tolerant views than older ones. And while gender differences are not prevalent, in those countries where they are, women are consistently more accepting of homosexuality than men.

Where Homosexuality Is Most Accepted

The view that homosexuality should be accepted by society is prevalent in most of the European Union countries surveyed. About three-quarters or more in Spain (88%), Germany (87%), the Czech Republic (80%), France (77%), Britain (76%), and Italy (74%) share this view, as do more than half in Greece (53%). Poland is the only EU country surveyed where views are mixed; 42% say homosexuality should be accepted by society and 46% believe it should be rejected.

Canadians, who already expressed tolerant views in 2007, are now even more likely to say homosexuality should be accepted by society; 80% say this, compared with 70% six years ago. Views are not as positive in the U.S., where a smaller majority (60%) believes homosexuality should be accepted. But Americans are far more tolerant today than they were in 2007, when 49% said homosexuality should be accepted by society and 41% said it should be rejected.

Opinions about homosexuality are also positive in parts of Latin America. In Argentina, the first country in the region to legalize gay marriage in 2010, about three-quarters (74%) say homosexuality should be accepted, as do clear majorities in Chile (68%), Mexico (61%) and Brazil (60%); about half of Venezuelans (51%) also express acceptance. In contrast, 62% of Salvadorans say homosexuality should be rejected by society, as do nearly half in Bolivia (49%).

In the Asia/Pacific region, where views of homosexuality are mostly negative, more than seven-in-ten in Australia (79%) and the Philippines (73%) say homosexuality should be accepted by society; 54% in Japan agree.

Where Homosexuality Is Rejected

Publics in Africa and in predominantly Muslim countries remain among the least accepting of homosexuality. In sub-Saharan Africa, at least nine-in-ten in Nigeria (98%), Senegal (96%), Ghana (96%), Uganda (96%) and Kenya (90%) believe homosexuality should not be accepted by society. Even in South Africa where, unlike in many other African countries, homosexual acts are legal and discrimination based on sexual orientation is unconstitutional, 61% say homosexuality should not be accepted by society, while just 32% say it should be accepted.

Overwhelming majorities in the predominantly Muslim countries surveyed also say homosexuality should be rejected, including 97% in Jordan, 95% in Egypt, 94% in Tunisia, 93% in the Palestinian territories, 93% in Indonesia, 87% in Pakistan, 86% in Malaysia, 80% in Lebanon and 78% in Turkey.

Elsewhere, majorities in South Korea (59%) and China (57%) also say homosexuality should not be accepted by society; 39% and 21%, respectively, say it should be accepted. South Korean views, while still negative, have shifted considerably since 2007, when 77% said homosexuality should be rejected and 18% said it should be accepted by society.

Religiosity and Views of Homosexuality

Updated May 27, 2014

The original version of this report included public opinion data on the connection between religion and morality in China that has since been found to have been in error. Specifically, the particular survey item that asked whether one needed to believe in a higher power or God to be a moral person was mistranslated on the China questionnaire, rendering the results incomparable to the remaining 39 countries. For this reason, the data from China has been removed from the current version of the report, re-released in May 2014.

For further information, please contact info@pewresearch.org.

There is a strong relationship between a country's religiosity and opinions about homosexuality. There is far less acceptance of homosexuality in countries where religion is central to people's lives - measured by whether they consider religion to be very important, whether they believe it is necessary to believe in God in order to be moral, and whether they pray at least once a day.

There are some notable exceptions, however. For example, Russia receives low scores on the religiosity scale, which would suggest higher levels of tolerance for homosexuality. Yet, just 16% of Russians say homosexuality should be accepted by society. Conversely, Brazilians and Filipinos are considerably more tolerant of homosexuality than their countries' relatively high levels of religiosity would suggest.

In Israel, where views of homosexuality are mixed, secular Jews are more than twice as likely as those who describe themselves as traditional, religious or ultra-Orthodox to say homosexuality should be accepted (61% vs. 26%); just 2% of Israeli Muslims share this view.

Gender and Age and Views of Homosexuality

In most of the countries surveyed, views of homosexuality do not differ significantly between men and women. But in the countries where there is a gender gap, women are considerably more likely than men to say homosexuality should be accepted by society.

In Japan, Venezuela and Greece, where about six-in-ten women say homosexuality should be accepted (61% in Japan and 59% in Venezuela and Greece), fewer than half of men share this view (47%, 44% and 47%, respectively). About half of women in Israel (48%) express positive views of homosexuality, compared with just 31% of men. And, while majorities of women and men in Britain, Chile, France and the U.S. say homosexuality should be accepted by society, women are more likely than men to offer this view by at least ten percentage points.

In many countries, views of homosexuality also vary across age groups, with younger respondents consistently more likely than older ones to say homosexuality should be accepted by society. Age differences are particularly evident in South Korea, Japan, and Brazil, where those younger than 30 are more accepting than those ages 30-49 who, in turn, are more accepting than those ages 50 and older.

For example, in Japan, 83% of those younger than 30 say homosexuality should be accepted, compared with 71% of 30-49 year-olds and just 39% of those 50 and older. Similarly, 71% of South Koreans in the younger age group offer positive views of homosexuality, but just about half of 30-49 year-olds (48%) and 16% of those 50 or older do. In Brazil, about three-quarters of those younger than 30 (74%) say homosexuality should be accepted, compared with 60% of those in the middle category and 46% of those 50 or older.

In the EU, solid majorities across age groups in Britain, France, Germany, Spain, Italy and the Czech Republic express positive views of homosexuality, although Italians and Czechs ages 50 and older are considerably less likely than younger people in these countries to say homosexuality should be accepted. At least eight-in-ten Italians younger than 30 (86%) and ages 30-49 (80%) share this view, compared with 67% of those ages 50 and older. In the Czech Republic, 84% of those ages 18-29 and 87% of those 30-49 say homosexuality should be accepted, while 72% of those ages 50 and older agree.

In Greece, where acceptance of homosexuality is not as prevalent as in most of the EU countries surveyed, majorities of 18-29 year-olds (66%) and 30-49 year-olds (62%) say homosexuality should be accepted by society; far fewer Greeks ages 50 and older (40%) share this view.

People ages 50 and older in the U.S., Canada, Argentina, Bolivia and Chile are also less likely than those in the two younger age groups to say homosexuality should be accepted by society, although at least half of those 50 and older in all but Bolivia are accepting, including 75% in Canada. In the U.S., 70% of those ages 18-29 and 64% of those ages 30-49 are accepting of homosexuality, compared with about half of Americans ages 50 and older (52%). In Bolivia, however, 53% of 18-29 year-olds and 43% of 30-49 year-olds say homosexuality should be accepted, but just 27% of those in the older group share this view.

Mexicans and Chinese ages 18-29 are more likely than those in each of the other two age groups to offer positive views of homosexuality, but there is no significant difference between the views of 30-49 year-olds and those 50 or older. And in Russia, El Salvador and Venezuela, those younger than 30 are more tolerant of homosexuality than are those ages 50 and older, while the views of those ages 30-49 do not vary considerably from those in the youngest and oldest groups.

Across the predominantly Muslim countries surveyed, as well as in the six sub-Saharan countries, solid majorities across age groups share the view that homosexuality should be rejected by society. In Lebanon, however, there is somewhat more acceptance among younger respondents; 27% of Lebanese younger than 30 say homosexuality should be accepted, compared with 17% of 30-49 year-olds and 10% of those 50 or older.

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Greater Acceptance in More Secular and Affluent Countries As the United States and other countries grapple with the issue of same-sex marriage, a new Pew Research Center survey finds huge variance by region on the broader question of whether homosexuality should be accepted or rejected by society.

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Molina, a window dresser who has been jailed for soliciting boys, recounts his favorite movies to pass the time. Molina's cellmate, a political prisoner named Valentin, at first derides him for living in fantasy. But over time, Molina learns political commitment from Valentin, and Valentin learns from Molina the power of fantasy to sustain him through confinement and torture.

Although the setting for ''Kiss of the Spider Woman'' - a jail during the Argentine junta's ''dirty war'' against dissidents in the early 1970's - is more intrinsically dramatic than the backwaters Mr. Puig depicted in ''Betrayed by Rita Hayworth'' and ''Heartbreak Tango,'' his theme remains consistent.

''Not everybody is born in a big country with access to other forms of culture, education,'' Mr. Puig said. ''There are many people who live in the sticks and have no means. They are soaking in machismo, in a hostile environment. What do they do? They have no choice.

''The movies provided them, as they did for me, an alternative. They help you to not go crazy. You see another way of life. It doesn't matter that the way of life shown by Hollywood was phony. It helped you hope.''

Mr. Puig's affinity for Hollywood's films - he names ''Spellbound,'' ''Rebecca'' and the original ''Love Affair'' as personal favorites - sets him apart from some foreign artists and intellectuals who criticize American ''cultural imperialism.'' On the other hand, as one of the leading Latin American writers, Mr. Puig is not entirely unsympathetic to the concern that American popular culture can supplant indigenous national arts.

Suspicious of Rock and Roll

''I think it depends on what you're exporting,'' he said. ''If you're exporting John Ford and Judy Garland and Irving Thalberg and that kind of talent, you are not damaging anyone. But if you overwhelm a market with mediocre products, that's a real problem.

''I'm not terribly happy about rock and roll, for instance. Certain rock music is uninspiring, numbing; it makes you feel like an idiot. I don't want to name names, but the least I can say about rock and roll is that I'm suspicious.''

The movies played a liberating, almost transcendent role in Mr. Puig's own life. Born in Vallegas, Argentina, in 1932, he started his movie-going career with ''The Bride of Frankenstein.'' Through his childhood and adolescence, he went to the local theater five nights a week, using the same seat for 10 years. He kept notes about the films and collected photos and newspaper clippings of the stars - much like the autobiographical character Toto in ''Betrayed by Rita Hayworth,'' a frail boy who ''cuts out actresses from the newspaper and colors them in with crayons.''

Mr. Puig's passion ultimately became his profession. He won a scholarship to study film in Italy in 1956 and went on to work on several films, including ''A Farewell to Arms.'' But it was his futile attempts to write screenplays that pushed him toward literature.

''I didn't choose literature,'' Mr. Puig insists. ''Literature chose me. There was no decision on my side. I have never, never fantasized about writing fiction. My only fantasy about writing was that in my old days, after directing many masterpieces, I would write my memoirs.

How a Novel Developed

''I started writing movie scripts. They excited me a lot but I didn't like them when they were finished because they were simple copies of the films I saw in childhood. My pleasure was to copy, not to create. But I had a good friend advise me to write about the people I knew, the emotions I'd felt. That was the real story and I began to develop it.

''I began to write an introduction in the voice of an aunt of mine - a kind of voice-over. It was supposed to be three lines long and what happened is I couldn't stop for 30 pages. It was one banality after another. But I found I could not cut a lot of it. It was the sum of the banalities.

''After three days, I realized I had a novel. I had stories that needed more space than the hour and a half or two hours a movie gives you.''

The difference between writing for print and for the screen involved more than length. Mr. Puig may be much taken with a visual medium, but his books are notable for the absence of descriptive prose. Unadorned conversations, soliloquies and internal monologues form virtually the entirety of ''Betrayed by Rita Hayworth,'' ''Kiss of the Spider Woman,'' ''Eternal Curse on the Reader of These Pages'' and ''Blood of Requited Love.''

''I mostly hear the action,'' Mr. Puig said. ''When I started writing, I found I trusted more the language of the characters than the first person. It was 1961 and I had been away from Spanish-speaking countries for a long time and I didn't trust my grammar. It was safer to have the characters make the mistakes instead of me.''

Working on Fourth Screenplay

Mr. Puig has gone on to write screenplays for three Spanish-language films - adaptations of his own ''Heartbreak Tango'' and ''Pubis Angelical'' and of the Mexican novelist Jose Donosa's ''Hell Has No Limits.'' He is now working on a fourth, ''The Seven Tropical Sins,'' for David Weisman, the producer of ''Kiss of the Spider Woman.'' Mr. Puig also has adapted ''Spider Woman'' for the stage - it has run for several years in Brazil, Mexico and Spain, but never in the United States - and has written one original play, ''Under a Mantle of Stars.''

But both stage and screen remain to Mr. Puig less appealing forms than literature, in part because they demand collaboration and compromise and in part because they depend so much on allegory.

''I only understand realism,'' Mr. Puig said. ''I can only approach my writing with an analytical sense -accumulation of detail, dissection of character. Taking it a little further, I can write dreams, but I use them as part of the accumulation of detail, as counterpoint.

''I can work in films as long as the story doesn't have a realistic nature. If I'm working with an allegory, a fantasy, it can be developed in synthetic terms - synthetic as a synonym of symbolic. The realism I save for my novels.''

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FOR THE AUTHOR OF 'SPIDER WOMAN,' HOLLYWOOD PROVIDED HOPE

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Molina, a window dresser who has been jailed for soliciting boys, recounts his favorite movies to pass the time. Molina's cellmate, a political prisoner named Valentin, at first derides him for living in fantasy. But over time, Molina learns political commitment from Valentin, and Valentin learns from Molina the power of fantasy to sustain him through confinement and torture.

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Directed by Santiago Otheguy. With Jorge Román, Daniel Valenzuela, José Muñoz, Alfredo Rivas. This visually stunning directorial debut is set in a place lost in time in northern Argentina. Alvaro is a gay man who is an outsider. He works for the violent El Turo, a captain of the water bus which links isolated communities.

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In a picturesque country house in Buenos Aires, Fernando gathers his mates for a boys-only vacation. Free from work, responsibilities and their girlfriends, this close-knit gang of bros kick back by the pool, sunning their impeccably toned bodies and sharing pot-fuelled stories of sexual conquests.

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Raul Julia and William Hurt star in this 1985 film directed by Hector Babenco which explores the relationship between two political prisoners in a South American jail, one a political dissident and the other a homosexual arrested on a morals charge. The film yielded five Academy Award nominations, with William Hurt winning the Oscar for Best Actor.

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Directed by Marcelo Piñeyro. With Eduardo Noriega, Leonardo Sbaraglia, Pablo Echarri, Leticia Brédice. Nene & Angel and their accomplice Cuervo participate in a botched bank robbery in 1965 Buenos Aires, then hide out from the police in Uruguay while the gang breaks down.

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Which theoretical framework will you use to better answer your questions?

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Which theoretical framework will you use to better answer your questions?

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I will look at the same-sex theory in Argentine gay cinema. One of two of my peer-reviewed articles deal with prison life and its role in dealing with a society's anxieties about homosexuality. The other article looks at how and why societal norms about homosexuality have changed in Argentina.

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I will look at four films: Kiss of the Spider Woman directed by Argentinian Hector Babenco;.    Plata Quemada (Burnt Money) directed by Marcelo Pineyro; La Leon by Santiago Otheguy and Taekwondo by Marco Berger.

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What will your paper contribute to better understanding your topic?

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What will your paper contribute to better understanding your topic?

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After a dark period of repression, the "Dirty War," Argentina has transformed into a model country for gender and sexual equality.

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How has gay stereotypes changed in Argentine films?  After a dark period of repression, the "Dirty War," Argentina has transformed into a model country for gender and sexual equality. Part of this change in public opinion can be traced backed to the changing representation of homosexuals in film.

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This article shows how Manuel Puig's book, Kiss of the Spider Woman, is an example of prisoners seeking redemption and how they can overcome differences between them.

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This article gives information about LGBTQ rights in Argentina which can be juxtaposed against Argentine films that feature gay characters ad stereotypes