Bear Cub is a lovely film that’s just a little heavy on the sugar, and apart from being Spanish and ‘queer’, is not at all similar to the films of Almodovar, films to which it has been erroneously compared.

Pedro (Jose Luis Garcia Perez) is a mature gay bachelor. Also a successful dentist, he’s financially secure, is surrounded by a wide bunch of close friends and never short of little bricks of hash and plenty of casual sex. He seems (understandably) settled in to this life: his smitten flight attendant part-time lover cannot get Pedro to commit. When Pedro’s druggy sister Violeta (Elvira Lindo) takes off for a two-week trip to India, Pedro’s enlisted to babysit his nephew Bernard (David Castillo), a floppy-haired charmer who’s seen it all before from his wild mother’s knee.

Things go wrong in India, and Violeta’s return is delayed indefinitely. Novelty turns to commitment for both Pedro and Bernard as they face living together as father and son for the long term, but Bernard’s bitter grandma Teresa (Empar Ferrer) hovers in the wings, plotting for exclusive custody.

The film illustrates its straightforward story with humour and warmth - refreshingly, it’s light on the slapstick and takes itself reasonably seriously. Where it falls down a little is where it’s just a little too neat. Pedro’s friends are just too lovely, and though the main characters are realised with texture and contradiction, the melodramatic line between good and evil remains clear. No one steps from one side to the other, they’re permanently separated by the film’s obvious sympathies. Interesting plot points abound, but they’re given similarly blunt treatment.

In a telling interview, director Miguel Albaladejo said that in Bear Cub:

no one has any particular difficulty in assuming and accepting his sexual orientation. There is unrequited love, because the main character wants it that way, and AIDS is there, but it is not depicted as that awful scourge. ... it’s not a film about brave heroes fighting for equality on every front, there are no de-facto couples, adoption laws and stuff like that.

Fair enough, but these ideas aren’t upheld in the film, where Pedro is framed very much like a quintessential hero, and his heroism is fused with his homosexuality. His conflict with Teresa is about exploitation, blackmail and justice, and unconventional (specifically, gay) parenting versus traditional, conservative upbringings, while Pedro’s inner conflicts centre around his love-hate relationship with casual and anonymous sex. A couple of times we sense that Pedro probably doesn’t actually want to be single forever, and it’s reductive and predictable to make Pedro a good-old male ‘commitment-phobe’, as it undermines his potential for complexity and turns him towards archetype. Also, personally, I don’t cope well with AIDS just ‘sitting there’ in any film, as for me AIDS is too dramatic and important to be just another bit of backstory, and in any case Albaladejo doesn’t hesitate in exploiting AIDS’ dramatic potential as an ‘awful scourge’ when it comes time to escalate the action late in the second act.

But I guess these are secondary criticisms, after the fact. Looking at it another way, it’s fantastic to see a film about a homosexual man raising a child that doesn’t fall into polemic or rattle the rusty old chains of gay activism. Bear Cub isn’t simplistic, then, as much as it’s strategically optimistic. It’s okay.