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.

Frameline 34: 'Plan B' and 'From Beginning to End'

I can't say the idea of men falling in love with one another has occupied much of my mind until now, but Plan B has changed all that forever! This playful, smart, sexy film from Argentinian director Marco Berger is like a hormone injection for languishing humans everywhere, but perhaps especially for uninitiated straight folks who might not know that young men in love are a force of nature! I am not talking about tolerance, which is boring despite its being essential to the project of civilization and modern identity blah blah blah. I'm talking about mirror-neuron activation, physical, sexual (if vicarious) delight! The plot involves two straight men who fall in love despite themselves. If you are a conscious human being you will recognize these people, you will identify with them and wish them well, and in the context of this story, that means you will hope and then actively want them to get over themselves and get it on. This is a testament to the film's sophisticated understanding of the dynamics of desire, gay, straight, or otherwise. It patiently explores the erotic charge that accumulates around obstruction, the way in which unattainability translates to sensation, and what is more unattainable for a young straight man than another young straight man? He must overcome, quite literally, himself. That takes some doing - and Plan B shows how. Actors Manuel Vignau and Lucas Ferraro are luminous, brilliant; pacing is unhurried, confident, masterly even; soundscape is by turns haunting, permissive, intriguing; cinematography seductive, gorgeous, with painterly flourishes reminiscent of Dutch masters, and sudden urban still-lives like modern photographs that connect obscurely to the action - cracks in stucco, holes in buildings, giftwrapped boxes; script as consistently real, up-to-date, and provocative as anything out there, anchored in the culture of contemporary Buenos Aires; plot funny and sweet and satisfying ... there really is nothing wrong with this picture. See it and know; you have nothing to lose but your habits and assumptions!


As fate would have it, I watched Plan B in double bill with Brazilian director Aluizo Abranches' utterly abysmal From Beginning to End, so the whole experience was one of total antithesis. From Beginning to End might actually be the worst film I've ever seen. It matches its wretchedness point for point with Plan B's delights; both films feature beautiful young men, and From Beginning to End actually takes its protaganists for a quick romp in Argentina; both plots hinge on a twist in the ordinary configuration of male desire, but where Plan B gives us something rapturously fresh, From Beginning to End serves up the most unlikely coagulated nonsense it has ever been my misfortune to see. Francisco and Thomas are not just lovers, but half-brothers whose relationship has developed since infancy; their saccharine-sweet love, like a thick layer of frosting over a cardboard cake, consists entirely in appearance; never once confronting the least opposition from reality, it is on the contrary nourished by the wealth and generosity of family and friends alike, all of whom seem to move in the viscous medium of some other idealized world parallel to ours, an atmosphere reminiscent of glossy magazines, where Calvin Klein models who double as doctors and Olympic swimmers read passages of Hilda Hilst to one another in faux defiance of a script. It is so ludicrously inert and contrived it could be a delirious farce given different treatment, but as it stands, solemn and romantic and ridiculous, it is beyond a joke.