IN SANTIAGO, CHILE, attractive, professional Bruno (Francisco Celhay) is having a tough time of it. He’s a successful architect, husband and father, but he’s crashing solo above his own father’s workshop because, as he tells his wife, he needs “some time, some distance”. The cliché doesn’t express more than a vague middle-class, mid-life crisis, and neither does the pat excuse he gives his father. “Happiness gets old,” he says, when the old man suggests Bruno has a perfect life.
In The Grayscale does not revel in its reveals. The audience isn’t entirely sure, and neither is Bruno, precisely why he needs this space, or why it is a struggle just to get out of bed. Even masturbation feels like a chore. As a celebrated architect, his designs are not stock utilitarian but ideological, precisely what his latest civic tribute commission demands. To find inspiration, he sets off to explore the hidden sites of Santiago by bicycle with a charming tour guide named Fernando (Emilio Edwards).
When the irrepressibly endearing Fernando turns out to be gay, and is very black and white about his identity – Bruno’s gray areas begins to blush. He appears determined to seek out options he may have earlier forestalled; alternate existences he didn’t fully explore. When he was a much younger man, Bruno was self-aware enough to want to check out a gay bar, but on the very night he was headed there he got waylaid and ended up meeting his future wife. So he never did explore other tendencies, which didn’t torture him because being with women was always an option. However, a lingering je ne sais quoi has snuck up, and intensifies with fun-loving Fer.