Éxtasis

"Rober" (Javier Bardem), "Ona" (Leire Berrocal) and "Max" (Daniel Guzmán) are restless and need a change. How to fund their ambitions? Well that's when they start robbing their family businesses until an incident sees the latter man with an hole in his foot and doing some prison time. It's there that they hit on the idea of fleeing his estranged father. "Daniel" (Federico Luppi) is a successful theatre director and hasn't seen his son since the boy was nine. "Rober" is to pinch his friend's identity and see if he can't dupe the man. What becomes clear is that the older man is all too willing to set aside any scepticism and embrace his new "son" and that is rather where the wheels came off for me. The jovial elements of the drama dried up and the thing became a rather meanderingly cynical story that didn't really seem to root very much in reality. When his son starts sleeping with his girlfriend "Lola" (Silvia Munt) I began to lose interest as it sort of stumbled along to a contrived denouement that didn't really make too much sense. Was "Daniel" just a lonely man looking for the joys of a son, or was he really the most stupid of men? It has it's moments - all in the first fifteen minutes, and perhaps there's a moral about leopards and spots, but it's all just a bit too far-fetched and disappointing. Pity.