The Consul of Sodom (2009)

This is a thought-provoking and strong portrayal of a known poet , Gil Biedma (November 13, 1929 – January 8, 1990) . He stopped writing poetry some ten years before his death . Gil insisted that the character he had invented , the poet Jaime Gil De Biedma , as opposed to the respectable bourgeois executive of the same name , had nothing left to say and he refused to go on playing the role of a poet in literary society . He was rejected for membership of the then illegal Spanish Communist Party , allegedly because Franco's dictatorship could use his sexuality to threaten him if he were discovered to be a communist , and while performing a job at a multinational as an essential member of the management staff . He was a brilliant intellectual with extraordinary sensitivity and member of Barcelona's 'gauche divine' in the 60s . An important member of the Escuela De Barcelona, he befriends other prestigious members as : Joan Ferraté, Gabriel Ferrater, Jaime Salinas, Carlos Barral (Josep Binuesa) y novelist Juan Marsé (Alex Brendemühl) . Along with Ángel González, Claudio Rodríguez and José Ángel Valente, all of them formed ¨Generation of the 50s¨ . He died on January 8, 1990, of complications due to AIDS , at 60 years old .

This film deals with a riveting journey through the life and work of the notorious Catalan poet Jaime Gil De Biedma , including dramatic deeds , emotions , romances and strong sex scenes , both marked by crude sexuality and eroticism . As it depicts his homosexuality , love stories , his relationship to Bel/Bimba Bosé , blackmails , Philippines life and many other things . Biedma had a complex life , while he suffered dreadfully from the strange dichotomies strangling him : living at a bourgeois family and working as a businessman for a factory by day as well as communist and gay poet by night . Jordi Mollá gives an excellent acting as the charismatic homosexual and somewhat eccentric poet . And support cast is frankly excellent , such as : Alex Brendemühl , Blanca Suarez , Esther Regina , Marc Martínez , Vicky Peña , Biel Duran , Isabelle Stoffel , Manolo Solo , Carmen Conesa , among others . The motion picture was well directed by Sigfrid Monleón (Ciudadano Negrin , La Bicicleta , Ultimo Truco , L'Illa De L'Holandès).

This is an auto-biographic movie , adding more events to the deeply described in the movie , these are the followings : Among his readers , he is considered one of the most consummate Anglophiles in the field of contemporary peninsular literature . This Anglophilia was initiated when he first read T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets . He was also a considerable Francophile as befitted a young Spaniard of his elevated social class , bearing in mind that Spanish society had always been notoriously 'afrancesada' until well into the 20th century . This state of affairs begin to change under the influence of poets like Gil De Biedma and Luis Cernuda . His lifelong adherence to and assimilation of Anglo-American culture was consolidated by his studies in Oxford in 1953 where he read T. S. Eliot for the first time in English (along with W. H. Auden and Stephen Spender) , thus beginning a lifelong fascination with the work of the Anglo-American poet . Moreover, the long periods spent in the largely Anglophone circles of Manila would also contribute to his Anglophile literary sensibility and on numerous occasions he would declare England to be his 'second country', his second country, and would also say that he was 'in great measure, a product of the Anglo-Saxon literary tradition . Even though, also shows conscious relations with Spanish and French tradition. Gil De Biedma liked to describe himself as a 'poet of experience' and poetically, Gil De Biedma belongs to the group of poets known as the "Generation of '50", a loose term referring to poets who come from the cultivated social realism in the wake of the Civil War . While earlier post-war poets focus strongly on social issues and lack attention to the poem itself, poets from Generation of '50 as Gil De Biedma , Ángel González, José Ángel Valente or Francisco Brines , while still concerned with democracy or class struggle, are aware about the literary character of their work . They all introduced in Spain , partly because of the late Cernuda's influence, what Langbaum called poetry of experience', the main poetic trend in Spain from the 1980s . In their writings from 1950 to 1970, at least, they all tried to rearrange intellectually immediate experience, by the means of a fictional-self . As a homosexual in a strongly conservative environment , Jaime Gil De Biedma suffered discrimination all his life . Nevertheless, he did not hide his sexual orientation and displayed it openly in his poetry. In his early poems, he displays a strong criticism of Spanish dictatorship , titling his first important publication Compañeros De Viaje , after a Trotskyist expression for Communist sympathizers . Gil De Biedma was known for his hard-partying ways and his unrepentant social life, and addressed the schism between public and private personae in several famous poems, arguably the most well-known being 'Against Jaime Gil De Biedma' or 'After the death of Jaime Gil De Biedma'. Along with Francisco Brines, he helped to reinvigorate homoerotic topics on poetry, probably inspired by the exiled Luis Cernuda .