Friendship: a refuge

Two recent films, Celeste and Jesse Forever and Mosquita Y Mari, explore friendship as a "refuge".

Set in Los Angeles, C & J is the story of a married couple who continue live in the same house as friends after they dissolve their marriage. Their living situation presents a conundrum as it can't be classified. As Manhola Dargis describes in her excellent review of the movie, Celeste and Jesse "have split up without moving on or out." 

As I read the review, I figured that there is something crucial that keeps Celeste and Jesse together and that "something" is friendship. 

Culturally friendship is either exalted as an empty coinage--everybody uses the word with very little understanding of the fact that friendship is, like marriage and family, an altogether specific kind of institution. 

Else, friendship is seen as a poor and wobbly substitute for the real kinds of relationships--one framed within the family or marriage. Even being boy or girl "friended" to somebody is considered to be more respectable than being simply "friended". 

As Aristotle himself would vouch, compared to marriage and family, the institution of friendship is predicated on absolute parity. Two friends (ideally) share a relationship of laterality, not verticality. 

Unlike marriage and family, friendship remains un formalized as a "relationship". There are family groups and marriage groups that fight for the preservation and political rights of these two institutions, but there are no pro-friendship groups. 

"Friend" sometimes is perceived as the lowest rung on the relationship ladder. When one wants to call a more "serious" relationship off, the usual excuse is, "let's stay friends."

Films like Celeste and Jesse Forever might help rectify the notion that to be in a relationship of friendship is to be a "loser". 

Dargis compliments Celeste and Jesse Forever for daring to come out 

[...] with a story about two people who, together and alone, express an ideal rarely seen in American movies: a man and woman whose equality is burnished in friendship, not just in bed and marriage.

The second film Mosquita y Mari is eons apart from the class structure in which Celeste and Jesse's friendship blossom (though both are set in Los Angeles). 

It's the story of two Hispanic adolescents Yolanda and Mari:

Yolanda, an A student, is the fiercely protected only child of a hard-working immigrant couple who have invested all their hopes in her and who continuously remind her of their sacrifices. The sullen, rebellious Mari is an illegal immigrant and a failing student who lives with her single mother and younger sister; she helps support the family by handing out fliers on the street. A sultry, tempestuous beauty, she is just becoming aware of her sexual power and puts on an air of arrogant bravado.

Yolanda wants to act as a buffer between the harsh world of male-sexual predators and Mari by taking Mari under her wings and giving her free lessons in geometry. 

In the process of spending long hours together--Yolanda and Mari become roommates--Yolanda finds herself falling in love with Mari. Or, at least she experiences strong feelings but isn't sure that Mari would or could return them. 

Yolanda keeps her feelings to herself.

The film doesn't get inside lesbian-love territories, nor is it a "coming out" narrative. It's a story of friendship as a genuine refuge from the onslaughts of an unpredictable and antagonistic world.