The Mission

Frameline 35: 'Absent'

This unusual thriller from Argentinian director Marco Berger is a complete departure from his debut Plan B.  Both films are psychologically astute, intelligent and erotic, but Absent swerves into much darker territory with its study of youthful obsession, sexual taboo, and paranoia.  In a clever twist on the seduction-of-a-minor theme, so prevalent in anti-gay rhetoric, 30-something swim-coach Sebastiano (played by Carlos Echevarria) is tricked early on into first driving his 16 year-old student Martin (Javier de Pietro) to a doctor's office one evening and then extending his hospitality to a couch for the night when Martin's supposed arrangements go awry.  The relentless way this innocent-looking boy draws the well-intentioned but increasingly nervous older man into his web of attempted seduction is developed in tense, spiralling detail, with claustrophobic sound design and camerawork, but at some point the discomfort it generates splits into divergent streams in the viewer's mind; one stays with the action, while the other begins to question the film's intentions - its bowing to genre conventions and persistent invocation of Hitchcock become a shade too heavy-handed, perhaps ironic (?), close to parody without ever exactly crossing the line, and for some time we are unsure just where Berger is going with it all.  

Given the revelations in the second half of the film these self-conscious effects make wondrous sense, and I marveled all over again at the intellectual facility of this young director for whom elements of film grammar/history double as psychological clues and even plot devices.  The slightly ramped-up genre tropes refer not to the action after all, but to the windmills in its unfortunate protaganist's unconscious mind, and when events swerve into more dreamlike territory the sense that we are witnessing the exteriorization of a sealed, completely occult experience intensifies, with layered cuts, sequencing distortions, and obscure visual keys (darkness, shots through water, through glass, broken windows, eye movements, eyes ... ) which extend the ominous effects of Carolina Canevaro's weird soundscape and Pedro Irusta's incredible, spooky, thrilling score.
 
Berger has commented somewhere that he makes 'gay films for straight people', and it's true that straight audiences will identify completely with the characters in both Plan B and Absent.  They hover on the cusp, they are straight people who find they are gay, or gay people who think they are straight; they are embroiled in scenarios as complex, challenging, or ambiguous as any we have seen or can imagine - and when sexual orientation comes in as somehow integral to all that, we respond to their situation as if it were our own.  It's an oblique approach to the theme which works well, completely sidestepping the 'otherness' that usually inflects gay films and situating characters inside our shared predicament.  I hope he finds the crossover audience he deserves, for his sake, but mostly, for ours.  We all need films as good as this.  Berger is a master already and he's barely out of film school - its phenomenal.