This movie was just plain weird. I really went in wanting to like it, but the whole pretentious, overly poetic vibe, combined with this choppy editing that keeps hopping back and forth in these tiny five to ten second bursts, just made it feel dragged out for no real reason, way too self indulgent if you ask me. Honestly this could've been trimmed down to a fifteen minute short and lost nothing. And I still don't get what the deal was with women dancing along the beach while some overwrought, flowery narration plays over the top. The plot creeps along at a snail's pace, slowly building toward some confrontation that you can see coming from a mile away and that just gets duller the closer it gets. By the time it actually happened I'd totally checked out as a viewer, even with two genuinely good looking guys leading the film. The setup itself is pretty basic. Lorena and Diego are trying to settle into a new life in a small town by the coast, both nervously starting fresh ...
The setup itself is pretty basic. Lorena and Diego are trying to settle into a new life in a small town by the coast, both nervously starting fresh jobs, she's a baker, he's a teacher. On their own, each of them crosses paths with a thoughtful young guy named Vicente, whose passion for art draws them both in. Lorena brings him on board for a film project she's working on, while Diego finds himself pulled toward him in a way that makes it harder and harder to keep suppressing his attraction to men, something that's quietly been putting a strain on his marriage this whole time. So while Diego and Vicente start something on the side, with Diego constantly second guessing himself and never fully committing to it, it's only a matter of time before it all comes out. The three of them head off on a weekend camping trip, and during it Lorena ends up kissing Vicente, then later catches Diego and Vicente having sex together. At first she's devastated and heads home, but then in this strange finale she basically comes around to accepting the whole thing, leaving you wondering if the three of them are about to become a throuple.
There's also this bizarre subplot running through the whole film from the start, something about women who are deeply connected to nature and the universe, kind of an earthy, almost Aztec island vibe tied to the sea, and they even use it to split the movie into chapters. Except that thread just gets dropped completely and never gets wrapped up, because there's no final chapter to close it out. On top of that, the romance between the two guys feels really underbaked. They've barely spent any real time together and Vicente's already throwing around the word "us." You want to root for their struggle, but honestly both of them are so grating to watch that it's tough to feel anything toward either one. The wife's got her own weird side plot going on too, wandering around collecting leaves in nature, which just didn't make sense to me. You'd think everything builds toward her catching them together near the end, and it kind of does, except then she walks up behind the two guys sitting on the beach and starts passionately kissing both of them. Then all three of them start stripping down and walk into the ocean together, hand in hand. Seriously, what was even the point of any of that? I genuinely think I could cut this same footage into a fifteen minute short and it would hit way harder emotionally. Sometimes filmmakers just need to step outside their own head a little. (2.5/10)
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