Leap Year

A bleak study of loneliness set in a claustrophobic apartment in Mexico City featuring a fearless performance, or a masochistic one, take your pick, by Monica Del Carmen as Laura. Laura spends most of her days and nights in her joyless apartment spying on her neighbors and inventing relationships with them in her mind. She occasionally goes out to clubs and brings home men for unrewarding sex. They invariably leave her lonelier than before. She meets Arturo (Armando Hernandez) who brings a sado-masochistic satisfaction to her sexual life. Meanwhile she ominously checks off the dates of her calendar toward the end of the month marked in red. This film is as explicit as it needs to be and Laura's world is not easy to view. Director Michael Rowe has achieved the film he sat out to make, I'm sure, and the totality of the realism can be uncomfortable as it should be. By setting the movie entirely in the small apartment and by the astonishingly natural performance of Ms. Del Carmen, you feel, smell, and know this movie like it was a fever dream. You want to give Laura a big hug at the end. Not for the squeamish or near squeamish.

Laura's character is so complex. We see her living a superfluous life when she interacts with other characters, except for her brother Raul and a guy named Arturo. We descend to the darkest levels of the human psyche along with the main character and that exploration is highly successful by the director. The film is linear, with no jumps in time as does Inarritu or Guillermo Arriaga, and also includes sex scenes which are pretty explicit. Although it seems the movie is just porn, it goes beyond sex. The aesthetic is like simple and I think the merit of the movie is the story and how it show us the life of a lonely woman living on a big city. So, after painful and rough journey, perhaps it is possible to find hope and redemption. A great Mexican film.

Watched this last night with my wife and we both agreed it is perhaps the most accurate depiction of modern life of young adulthood that either of us have ever seen. This film is to that lonely time of self discovery in the mid to late 20's that Apocaplyse Now is to the Vietnam War. Not only is the depiction of sex graphic and frank but it isn't sexy. And there is about the best explanation for U.S. Mexico relations -and the Mexican gov. in general (or lack thereof)- in this film that I have ever heard: i.e. the monetization of security. If you have seen and liked the films of Carlos Reygadas, Fernando Eimbcke and Arturo Ripstein then you will understand the type of aesthetic at work here. If on the other hand your idea of Mexican cinema is Vicente Fernandez or the Santos lucha libre films you are in for a rude awakening.

We are introduced to Laura and her sad life. She is a contributor to a business magazine, but spends most of her time in her apartment, wearing pjs. Apparently she took at face value a man to be named businessman of the year for the magazine, wrote the article and it turned out he was a total fraud, but the magazine was already on the stands. She didn't do a background check, since she didn't think it was necessary. So she loses her job, or at least suspended for a time. On her calendar, she marks off the days of the month for February, with filled in red for February 29th. That day has a special meaning which we find out later. She lives in a somewhat seedy apartment (ants, cockroaches) and lives through watching neighbors. It is comfortable for her being there. Other than a brother, she seems isolated, and has numerous one night stands, not wanting to even know their names. One man gets into a rather violent and degrading relationship with her, and it borders on being very dangerous. But she encourages it. As the days count down to the end of the month, just what does she have in mind? She seems to accept the life that she has made for herself, and it is rather dreary and depressing.

So, we've got this chick with a real weird hard-on for the looming February 29th, like it's the expiration date on her sanity, and wouldn't you know it, the whole shebang ends in a climax that's about as pleasant as discovering a hairball in your morning coffee. Mónica del Carmen as Laura exudes flesh and blood for this character and her journey through the personal tragedy, marked by urban solitude and loneliness. She stumbles into some kinky business that apparently glues her body, her space, and her shot at redemption together. Turns out, there's no "do not cross" tape on Laura as she begins to experience transgression and dedicates herself to licentious exercise of sadomasochism.

This is definitely an arthouse character study into a love-lust-and-loneliness casualty. Think of it as the kinky cousin of Jeanne Dielman, a watered-down Hisayasu Sato that kinda smells like the leftovers of Jean-Claude Brisseau, Götz Spielmann, Silvio Soldini, Catherine Breillat, Lars von Trier, Conrado Sanchez, Werner Schroeter, Julio Medem and Fabrice Du Welz's recent Alleluia (which, let's be honest, was pretty damn bonkers). Now, while this film delivers a potent whiff of alienation and an uncomfortably raw artistic realism, this soul-baring cinematic enema, with its troubling eroticism, is supposedly a vehicle of compassion for this deeply messed-up woman. My advice? Maybe skip this one. Seriously, proceed with the kind of caution. You've been warned.