Pablo Perez (Juan Minujín) is a lonely writer dying of AIDS who hunts in vain for intimacy at hospitals, at his home, and at the private leather sex clubs of Buenos Aires. As his immune system declines, his need for affection increases, but when he hooks up with a hardcore sex gang, meets the charismatic Martín and decides to publish a frank autobiography, he drifts away from his supportive family. He doesn't want to take AZT either, but finally relents and begins a poetic affair with his tablets and capsules.
This is the first film from Anhai Berneri and, unfortunately, it's very much a "first film". Hand held camerawork, jump-cut editing and grainy lighting may have been meant to give the film an arty edginess, but it all made me feel a bit carsick. Get a tripod and turn the lights on! Aimless storylines and inert scenes don't become interesting just because they shake or keep leaping ahead a few seconds in time.
Also, I think we should have a moratorium on ear-splitting gay disco scenes that are inserted repeatedly and without warning and used as a subsitute for action and dialogue. Watching a dungeon full of sweaty gay men bop about under blinking Vari-lites, cruising each other and buying drinks doesn't tell us anything except that on a weekend night, city nightclubs have people in them. Showing a main character trying to groove the pain away or soothing his soul with the Ministry of Sound isn't something that, say, Alfred Hitchcock would have done. Clubs may be important to gay culture, but if they're to be in the film, they need to be used in some way, otherwise, like in this film, it's like looking at some kind of technotronic, meth-fueled aquarium.
I also don't understand why sex scenes have to cop a mandatory hi-NRG soundtrack - do the beats of C and C Music Factory fire up in your head every time you unzip your pants?
However, A Year Without Love is not without merits. Pablo's description of his AZT capsules as a work of art of the 1980s, which he ingests, is the film's great line of dialogue. There's a good sense of claustrophobia and Minujín's performance is gentle and interesting.
As usual, though, the guts of the storyline - AIDS - is given short shrift and replaced with a one-size-fits-all sentimental existentialism. A submissive s&m bottom who's contracted HIV from his sex life is a particular identity in a particular conundrum. A matter-of-fact approach to AIDS and leather sex is admirable and refreshing, but it can also be cowardly, and tranquilisingly retrograde. As a woman sitting next to me at one of the film's sellout screenings at the Sydney Film Festival whispered to her friend "so why does he want to be whipped all the time?
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