The South Americans seem to have staked out very special territory in gay film: atmospheric and erotic - films that explore the many variations in homo-eroticism and sexuality and the lives of gay men with great subtlety. Much like my other favourites from Argentina (Hawaii, Plan B, Absent), Chile (In the Gray Scale), Urguguay (Leo's Room), Brazil (From Beginning to End), the pace here is slow and the story focuses on courtship and play as much as capture (or the potential of capture). What animates, inhibits, and satisfies gay sexuality is often the subject in these films and sometimes, as in this, it enacts those satisfactions.
This is a beautiful and very sexy film (in its second half) about a young college student hooking up with an older couple, and it takes the viewer much deeper into the feelings, expectations and fears of all three characters and is touching as well as very realistic to me. But the filmmaker is also a bit too clever for dramatic good: the first 20-30 mins (much too long) consists of small, difficult to see screen shots of the characters meeting and teasing online in a chat room - it's best to skip forward after a few minutes of this to the arrival of Fede, the younger "third one", at the home of Hernán and Franco. The latter are two 30-something men who've been together for 8 years - obviously they've a loving relationship, but it's gone a bit flat, esp sexually it seems. This is all marvelously (but very slowly) revealed in conversation at dinner before the anticipated sex, as are many touching and dramatically useful details of Fede's life. The film is relatively short, just over an hour, but that's still at least 20 minutes more than is essential: I found myself going back to about 35-40 minutes into the film savour over again the dinner's verbal foreplay and the intimate sexual encounter at the heart of the film.
This dinner conversation itself is marvelously well acted, as is the threesome that follows, the actors so full of pleasuring and delight once they've broken their reserve that I felt much of the same delight. The revelations, hesitations, and rapport that develop over dinner adds a distinctive depth, and eroticism, to the sex and the film overall. The actors' fine eye expressions, side- glances, hesitations, are all captured by the director.
Technically, there is a period after the dinner scene where subtitles, set against a yellow background, become difficult to read for about 5 minutes - no big deal, but as with the excess of exposition at the beginning (and resolution at the very end) this and the film require a little patience (and/or finger on the remote). But that said, it's a very satisfying film on most every level.
