Vies brûlées

Burnt Money is an exceptional film in the crime drama genre and stands quite well as director Marcelo Pineyero provides Hollywood with an example of what subtlety can bring to cinema. This film also does its best as a commentary of the internal division between the people and the corrupt government in Argentina, as showcased by the character Nando, played by Carlos Roffe. A few scenes strike out at me for recounting the director's work and it also must be said that the work of the actors that portrayed Nene, Angel and Cuervo was thoughtful and delivered with subtlety to match that of the director's nuanced vision of the world that the trio inhabits.

Two scenes that immediately jump to mind are those that weave both dramatic long takes with clever use of diagetic sound to create a suspenseful dramatic scene. The two scenes are of the moment that Vivi is captured by the police and the 'relaxing' scene at the beach party with the trio. I enjoyed both of these scenes very much due to the director's courage to use a long take to add suspense. The suspense in these scenes however is not the same as the violent and gore soaked films we call 'suspense', but a more chilling and ominous sense of dread is evoked with the stillness of each scene. There is a moment that both scenes erupt with action, and the music within each scene accentuates the moment that the juxtaposition of mood occurs. Basically the manipulation of music within the scene such as the record being torn off the player just as the party erupts show that the director made disciplined use of all the tools in his arsenal to create a fully imagined atmosphere and mood.

I won't rehash the details again, as so many previous comments have done wonderful jobs on discussing the plot and technical aspects of this film.

I want to commend the leads on their brilliant job. Often when (male) actors are asked to "play gay" you get an overly sexualized relationship - as though they feel the only way to portray the connection between men is through overt lust.

The director and actors here, have instead sought out a more subtle, but infinitely more honest portrayal. Every touch and sidelong glance between Nene and Angel just burns with intimacy. They might have the least on-screen sex, but this is the relationship that you really believe. The actors truly seem comfortable with their bodies, with touching one another, and so whether they are touching or just looking at each other - you can feel that familiarity they share and the intimacy translates beautifully onto the screen. Really an amazing performance of body-language.

My one complaint about "Plate quemada" is the rather shoddy subtitles. I can understand enough of the language to be able to pick up when the sub's aren't direct, or are leaving out dialogue. I HATE that. In a film such as this, when so much of the plot depends on the characters and their relationships, it becomes agonizing not to know exactly what they're saying.

Argentina, 1965. A heist goes wrong. Three men are on the run looking for a place to hide. They find it in Montevideo, they need false passports to leave so they wait day after day until the police come and everything goes apocalyptic.

The bare facts.

But the real movie is about the two killers in the gang, El Nene and Angel, called Los Mellizos (the twins). They are not related. They are lovers: two fugitives sharing loneliness and pain, living their lives on the edge. It's the story of a doomed relationship, confined into four rooms where intense passion and violence push the extremes.

In their hostile world of drugs, cheap sex, prejudice and revenge they have to deal with a feeling born from repression and the fear of naming it. There is, above all, their desperate search for love and loyalty that makes them some kind of tragic heroes in the end.

Seldom has cinema faced the subject of masculine desire and affection in such a natural, honest and even tender way. For sure a different sight of an action movie and a remarkable piece of acting.

Worth seeing.

Burnt Money, a provocative, severe crime thriller from Argentina, begins like a Spanish- language Guy Ritchie narrative, with an assembly of criminals arranging a heist. Yet the heist is over in a glance. The lion's share of the story is the impact of the job. So much of this film seems already acquainted, from its appealing crime thriller stylization to its narrative echoes of Reservoir Dogs, Heat and Bonnie and Clyde, that when it takes one of its unprecedented turns it overcomes you. There are a lot of unforeseen detours.

The opening introduces us to Angel and Nene, gay lovers who live in a murky Buenos Aires apartment. A narrator notifies us that they are known as "the twins." After showing how they met, in a grungy public restroom, the narrator distinguishes the one telling way they are similar: "the still eyes, the lost glare." The knifelike center on character relationships, and the novelistic way the story is divulged through sequential narrators, featuring internal monologue, prepares us to pull back to enmesh the "twins" in the heist. Neither they, nor the story, are as they appear.

Leonardo Sbaraglia plays Nene with scorched vigor. He has the loose-hipped walk of a younger Robert Downey, Jr., yet oozing even more with suggestiveness. His underhanded approach to life is not smug or justified, but rather self-assuredly devoid of any overeagerness or vanity. Eduardo Noriega brings a preyed-upon sentimentality to Angel. We feel at first as if he may be slow, and perhaps to some extent he is, but in a way that is lost in emotionally charged internalized delusions, a return to the primordial dilemma. He seems afloat in dissolution, a dream state readily seen. And their emotional holding out becomes a game that neither wins. Where they are intimate, there is peace restored, and there are religious obstacles.

The robbery of an armored car goes awry. The thieves, one of them injured, must stay completely out of sight. Law-sided demoralization and violence are initial drives of the story's turning point though not at the center. The film, which is based on a true story, offhandedly concedes that the lines separating cops from robbers are obscured, but its focus remains tight on the robbers.

One should not write this film off as categorized for a gay target audience. Though it revolves around the two implicitly loving leads, Burnt Money seems to compete with much more vivid heterosexual pairings. Nene swings both ways, and Cuervo, the getaway driver played by Pablo Escharri, has a girlfriend who figures integrally in the plot. After the men flee to Uruguay, police beatings push the left-behind girlfriend to give them up. Their status revealed, the robbers must stay out of sight, pressures mounting. Anti-gay implications add to the enmity. They don't trust each other, everyone keeps a gun at hand, but attachments gradually solidify nonetheless.

Burnt Money could have almost been made in the 1970s, when a film with the promise of spectacle in its subject matter was almost expected to take the more complex way to the end, no matter what the end may be. And yet the film reaches a climax we've seen so many times. Nevertheless, even in its brutal execution which extrinsically offers not much in the way of variation on a device dating back to the original 1932 Scarface, it maintains a theme of dissolution, a dream state made real to them, of feelings taking over, a theme which, in the end, makes the film its own beast.

WOW! Rivetting! The faces of Eduardo Noriega and Lorenzo Sbaraglia fighting and surrendering to their love is pure cinematic art. I left the theatre unable to utter a word. I wanted to revisit their world, no matter how tragic, there was truth in it, twisted, painful truth. PLATA QUEMADA deserves a larger audience. On my second viewing, I forced two friends, who hate subtitles, and are as far removed from the gay world as anyone I know and they loved it. They were seduced by the universe Marcelo Pineyro created for those superb characters to inhabit. More, Mr. Pineyro. More Eduardo and Lorenzo! Bravo!