Martín (Hache)

Aristarain strikes back again.

After the beautiful "Un lugar en el mundo", he gives us this film which is nearly a theater work.

He repeats with two beasts of Argentinian's cinema. Cecilia Roth (whom half the Spanish talking world has been in love with), and one of the five best actors of all times, FEDERICO LUPPI.

It's impossible not to think about my own father seeing his personage, with this overwhelming love for his son and yet unable to communicate with. Maybe I've seen it over five times, and still I cry each time when Federico Luppi stands on the balcony talking about the desperation of life after the idea of loosing his son misunderstood. It's the nearest you will get to understand fatherly love if you don't yet have a baby.

The plot is banal, and the filming nothing complicated, just a camera fixed to let all the attention to actors........but then, the hit. What an acting!!!!!. You hardly are going to see something similar, Luppi is a monster, a giant, he fills the screen with a strength rarely seen away.

A must see in Spanish, where you can really judge their beautiful work. The pity is that it would surprise me a lot if the titles are able to reproduce all that complicated and quick talking.

This is one of my favorite films.

Terribly sincere, talks about relationships and silence, about how doubts and questions not answered can turn love in death or slow suicide and about how everything comes to pain.

But is not a sad story at the end. The role of young Martín (Hache), perfect and tender Juan Diego Botto, as the real survivor of the script, turning sour into sweetness, and insecurity into strenght, even though he's lost in hesitations, is a message of faith in life.

The dialogs are intelligent and sharp, the actors, gorgeous. And I fell in love with Martín (Hache) for the rest of my life.

Thank you, Adolfo Aristarain for such a great, sensitive, risky and intelligent movie and thank you, Federico Lupi, Cecilia Roth, Eusebio Poncela and, specially, Juan Diego Botto for your incredible work.

Wonderful film that sadly was not released in the U.S. Beautifully written and acted character-driven piece about many things, among them the role of a parent in our modern civilization - and the role of the child as well; the relationships between men and women, and the friendships between straight men and gay men; the role of artistic expression in the lives of artists and in the lives of those who will never be artists. The film is also noteworthy for its portrayal of the hypocrisy of adults who impose upon their children "values" that they themselves reject in their day-to-day lives. The gay character is refreshingly unapologetic. And the female lead is heartbreakingly real, a brilliant and deeply moving performance by Cecilia Roth. If you ever get a chance to see this film, I highly recommend it.

After the kind and tender portrait of human condition made in so wonderful film as "A place in the world", the Argentine film-maker Adolfo Aristarain submerges again into the storming sea of human relationship, but at this time he does with a harder and scrawnier outlook in this "Martín (Hache)", played by a dazzling Federico Luppi, which character, marked by the contradiction between his longing of independence and solitude and his need of surrounding himself with his loved persons, swings in a continuing "pendulum" of affection and disaffection that marks deeply the life of two persons more important for him: his son, Hache (Juan Diego Botto), and his lover, Alicia (Cecilia Roth) -both in masterful performances, too-. And marks, of course, his own life, that he tries to do utmost in his working face but without getting it.

"Martin (Hache)" is the typical proof of the "cinema of the word", this cinema in which the script, strong and solid, is construed over a torrential, permanent dialog that the characters express what they feel, what they think, what they are in what they say...

Heche (which means letter H) is a nineteen year old boy that nobody wants. After his parents' divorce, his mother's got a new life in Argentina, and there's no place for him. After he survives an 'accident' that is believed by everyone as an attempted suicide, his mother asks his father to take care of him. His father agrees, even if he still does not think he has a place for his son. Only his father's woman and his best friend, an homosexual drug addict, show affection for this boy who is lost and can't find a way to really grow up and become independent.

Being raised in a family of people who flew Argentina before I was born, I was used, kind of, to the heavy Argentinian accent that the actors have, Federico Luppi especially. However, I agree it might be difficult for other Spanish speaking people who are used to a more 'orthodox' Spanish to understand parts of the dialogs, which is a shame. Dialogues are what makes this film so interesting and touching. The things that are said contrast with the things that remained unsaid, and you can only imagine by reading the character's eyes. Alicia, for example, is almost always laughing and having fun, but her eyes are dark, worried. Her happiness is just a mask she wears to avoid realize how much she feels bad about what she is missing for, a real family, with children. She only tells Hache about that, she wishes she were his mother. Hache apparently is resigned to being a nuisance for his parents, but he wants to escape this situation by living alone, even though he's not ready yet. He uses drugs and only his father's best friend manages to keep him away from danger.

The two main actors were great. Federico Luppi's portrayal of a father who is very disappointed for his son's way of life was so real I wanted to kick him! Juan Diego Botto was perfect, too. You could think he was portraying himself. I wonder if it's a pity he lives in Spain and his works are not known across the Atlantic Ocean, nor east of the Pirineos.