Acné

Acne is a remarkably clever and subtle film about poverty. On the surface it looks like the opposite, but the impoverishment conveyed in this movie is not easily visible to the naked eye, or at least, this film explores a common type of poverty we would not normally recognise.

The central character is Rafa, a middle class teen with severe acne which is a nuisance to him and for which he receives medical attention, but it does not affect his confidence. He is softly spoken, his voice is childlike and he never shouts or displays bad temper, but he is clearly spoilt and has everything he wants including money whenever he asks for it. None of Rafa's many privileges which he uses to the full and which he takes for granted seems able to raise him out of a monotonous, disconnecting lack of engagement (this could be an early manifestation of depression). His only fixation and his search throughout the film is for the closeness contained in a proper kiss.

This film was, I first thought, an interesting observation on the malaise of privilege, but it is more than that. Rafa is a victim of middle class poverty, a sufferer from a fairly frequent form of abuse; that of middle class deprivation. He is a casualty of emotional abandonment by his divorcing parents who think the comfortable life style and freedoms they provide for him are enough. Rafa's parents only understand monetary value, they seem unable to provide the time and love all children need. When Rafa goes to help his dad at his business, he spends his time working alone in a warehouse, while his dad works in the office.

The emptiness of his life is brought into sharp focus when the closest Rafa comes to sharing something with his father is when he goes into the same brothel he has just seen his dad has come out of. This flips the whole film from the two dimensional surface story depicting the overindulged restlessness of Rafa, to the deeper narrative depicting the tragedy, loss and neglect of the teen by his egocentric, self-centred and self-absorbed parents.

This is a kid who gets all the money he wants (he can even wake his parents up in the middle of the night to ask for money, no problem), who goes regularly to brothels at age 13, who takes piano, tennis and karate lessons and doesn't seem to enjoy neither. And we are supposed to care for him because he has a fierce acne attack (for which, after seeing several specialists, he is taking the most expensive medicine in the market, without much improvement) and because he has never kissed a girl? Character identification really fails in this movie, and there's not much of an ironic distance, either.

Neither we learn much about the Jewish community in Montevideo, which is the supposed cultural backdrop. Well, maybe we do learn a couple of things: that they do fairly well, and that your classmates will laugh at you if your father happens to be a bricklayer.

This is not a badly made movie, only a pointless one.