Mutt
Written and Directed by Vuk Lungulov-Klotz
Starring Lío Mehiel, Cole Doman, Mimi Ryder, Alejandro Goic
Unrated
Runtime: 1 hour, 27 minutes

by M. Lopes da Silva, Staff Writer

Vuk Lungulov-Klotz (he/him)’s directorial debut is about a Chilean-American trans man living in New York City. Feña (he/him), a trans man played by trans masc actor Lío Mehiel (they/them), is alienated from everyone else around him. Shots tend to center him in the frame, isolating him in irises of darkness. Even in crowds talking among friends, Feña is alone, and the conversations around him are reduced to sounds, overlapped and unimportant.

Mutt is ultimately a story about self-alienation in a city: choosing to forgo the communities that could potentially offer external support, and instead choosing a tenuous life of capitalist “individuality” that might not really be the independence that Feña would like it to be. Mutt depicts the alienation and constant tension of transition without trans community, of Chilean-American life without Chilean-American community. When Feña is reluctant to claim the extant relationships around him in an authentic way and embrace the care of people who love him as sincere, he ends up reinforcing bonds with family members that he hasn’t seen in over two years.

Feña’s “individuality” is nebulous; financially insecure, he has a network of people that he depends upon but is reluctant to claim deep relationship statuses with. He obviously depends upon his roommate Fiona to give him advice and assistance the way that a good friend would, but only feels comfortable offering the capitalist label of “roommate” when he introduces her to his father. Similarly, it’s implied that his relationship with the absentee character Ken is an intimate one, but he’s only willing to state that Ken is “just a friend.” This constant unwillingness to fully recognize the extent to which people actually support and care for him may give Feña the illusion of individuality, but it ultimately leaves him feeling alienated, and particularly vulnerable to his desire to form an intense bonded relationship. When his ex, John, returns to the city, Feña is ready to project a happy romantic reunion onto a curiosity hookup that’s seemingly provoked by John’s interest in exploring the physical changes that Feña has made to his body.

In the world of Mutt, recognition of your gender can come from racists, and your own father will use a self-owning racist stereotype as a joke to make you smile. That world is our world, today. Complex and messy. A little ugly sometimes. Feña strives to make room for his gender and identity and desires in places that don’t quite accept him. His father, unable to understand, asks his trans son why he “picked” his transness, a question often posited by cis people who haven’t done any effort on their own to investigate gender. This question, so unfair in its framing alone, provokes his son to confess that being trans is exhausting and frequently alienating – it’s not something he would ever choose. Trans is what he is.

This film, like Feña, is still very attracted to cis masculinity, and flirts with these ideological discussions about gender without getting into anything too uncomfortable for any protracted amount of time. Conversations about gender are generally brief preambles to plot material – an apology, a hookup, etc. – and might have landed even harder if the expected soothing bandages of familial succor or hookup drama had not arrived. Further, there are no conscious connections made between Feña’s decision to not seek out community and the constant stress that he subjects himself to by not doing so.

Mutt swirls the ugliness of our world together with brief moments of sweetness: Feña gets a chance to bond with his little sister on the day of her first period; Feña’s father offers the sort of parental apology a lot of kids would like to hear from absentee dads; but the film is neither particularly saccharine nor sour. Mutt is a film in survival mode: it’s in the middle of things, trying to figure stuff out, staying afloat; frequently that’s the best thing queer people can do until we realize that there’s other folks out there ready to help us out of the water.