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28 • BAY AREA REPORTER • January 12-18, 2012
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Montevideo man by David Lamble
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he beautifully intimate coming out story Leo’s Room is seductively nestled in the tropes of a Latin American slacker film. It kicks off at a Montevideo nightclub where Leo (the angelic-seeming Martin Rodriquez) is enduring one of those teaming-with-bullshit drunken monologues that is as much a rite of passage for the eternal student as pretending to be interested in the subject of your graduate thesis or actually enjoying sex with your partner of the moment. Leo listens in a blissfully inebriated state as the lout across the table rants on that adult life is about the pursuit of the annual 12 minutes guys spend in orgasm. Orgasms aren’t a big part of Leo’s life. In quick order he decides to stop trying to have them with his girlfriend of six months, and stop leaving the room he occupies in
the home of a zombie-like pothead, except to start seeing a shrink recommended by his ex. Uruguayan writer/director Enrique Buchichio isn’t so much concerned with Leo’s turning into a fully functioning homosexual as he is in exploring why the young man has reverted to a socially vegetative state. Picking up guys on the local cruise circuit, Leo at first seems to get with the program: don’t fuck with the machos who are allergic to kissing; do flirt with shy cuties on the bus; and definitely stay with the cheeky dreamboat Sebastian (Gerardo Begerez), who’s into kissing and who tries his best to pry Leo out of his still unpainted, characterless room. The make-out scenes with Sebastian are succulent precisely because they’re not hard core and are framed by witty exchanges between the lovers. But Leo’s real dilemma isn’t
solved by finding a hot boyfriend as much as by a chance encounter with childhood friend Cara (Cecilia Cosero). Cara, whose body language hints at a clinically depressed state, reluctantly accepts Leo’s invite to come to his room to share music and their truncated back story. Buchichio refuses to offer Leo’s shrink time as any kind of magic bullet for unraveling why he’s stuck. His gorgeous lead Rodriquez is deft at slamming his communication skills into neutral so that we become as exasperated as the other characters as to why he just doesn’t spit out what’s bugging him. The film’s funniest moment trips off the lips of the pothead roommate. Pressed by Leo to describe the toughest choice he’s ever had to make, Pipe tokes up and recalls.
“It was a Saturday in the summer, and I was getting ready to watch the Star Wars trilogy on cable. The originals, not the new ones, those suck! I was ready to watch all three
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in a row when a buddy calls. ‘There’s a show with drugs and experimental rock at the warehouse: plenty of beer, d diverse narcotics.’ Here I was: o on the one hand, original Star Wars, on the other, drugs and rrock-n-roll.” “What did you do?” “What do you think I did?” “You’re such an asshole. SStop smoking that shit, it’s d drying your brain out.” “Hey, don’t mess with me. I d don’t ask you what you do in th that room, do I?” Like other recent Latinsscreen slacker dudes from ggems like 25 Watts, Duck SSeason, Lake Tahoe and Y Tu M Mama Tambien, Leo bears the m message that Latin America is ju just as dizzyingly obsessed with n navel-gazing as the US, and th that the end products arrive blissfully, without parental guidance. Bonus features include a study guide with the director’s bio and film notes.▼
Courtesy German Gems
Scene from director Volker Sattel’s Under Control.
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German Gems From page 17
Theatre is intrepid programmer Ingrid Eggers’ “Last Show” in an incomparable series. Following years at the helm of the cutting-edge Berlin and Beyond Festival, this is her last stab at thought-provoking new films from Germany, Austria and Switzerland. For better than a decade I’ve counted on Ingrid to connect me to a new generation of actors, like Germany’s everyman star Daniel Bruhl, so deftly showcased in the morose comedy A Friend of Mine; queer-identified matinee idol Robert Stadlober, as a boy on the run in Tender Parasites; or fresh-faced
David Kross, the battered boy hero of Tough Enough. Or introduce me to exhilarating reinventions of film noir, like Jerichow and Revanche, and to bold debuts by directors from unusual backgrounds, like the Turkish/German wunderkind Fatih Akin. For the last three Januarys, Eggers has put out magnificent swansong programs on her old dime. Saturday’s five films represent a glorious recapitulation of a great career. Arrive early, stay late, enjoy. Westwind Director Robert Thalheim offers a heartfelt trifle in this sweet tale of twin teen East German girls coming of age just before the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Courtesy German Gems
Scene from director Andreas Kannengiesser’s No Way Home.
Life gets messy for Doreen and Isabel when they miss the bus to a Socialist rowing camp nestled in a bucolic part of Communist Hungary. Hitching a ride from two randy West German lads, the girls are offered romantic asylum in Hamburg if they can outfox their Communist minders: a grumpy old coach and a painfully sincere blond-boy counselor whose lovely locks don’t compensate for his “Kumbaya” guitar riffs. While fiendish technology and a seductive mix-tape ultimately carry the day, this dollop of Cold War nostalgia redeems its overly familiar beats through a joyful, fresh-faced cast. (Castro, 1/14, 7:30 p.m., with actor Friederike Becht in person) No Way Home In this deeply unsettling drama about uncomfortable end-of-life dilemmas, an elderly gay man
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True stories From page 21
Consisting of period footage from the early 1980s to the present (including President Obama’s contributions to the fight against AIDS) and interviews with important figures in the scene such as Larry Kramer, Larry Mass, Edmund White, Richard Berkowitz and many others, Sex in an Epidemic succeeds in its mission. This is especially true when the doc addresses the “invention” of safe sex and the rise of various AIDS organizations and programs. DVD bonus features include deleted scenes
tells a sullen male neighbor why ambulance attendants had to pry his hand from its vice-like grip on his freshly dead lover. Director Andreas Kannengiesser follows an elderly woman fleeing her dementiaafflicted hubby to show how the will to survive may trump truly grim circumstances. While gay widower Gunther and anguished widowto-be Hannelore hardly forge a Hallmark Hall of Fame sticky bond, these defiantly stubborn codgers demonstrate how one can resist other people’s ideas on how to live out your days. (Castro, 1/14, 2:15 p.m., with director Andreas Kannengiesser in person) Above Us Only Sky Director Jan Schomburg takes wonderful liberties with the vertigo-inducing perils his heroine, Martha, faces upon learning that her doctor mate is not only dead by his own
hand, but a complete fraud to boot. The lovely Sandra Huller recalls a young Glenda Jackson in her almost whimsical portrait of an instant widow shocked out of her mind who ratchets up her powers of denial. Martha’s sudden bolt into the arms of a history teacher who somehow reminds her of the nowdead Paul exudes a whiff of Francois Ozon’s talent for creating out-ofkilter bonds that seem deliciously right. (Castro, 1/14, 4:30 p.m., with director Jan Schomburg in person) Under Control As one whose introduction to Bay Area life occurred during the 1979 Three Mile Island crisis accompanied by a memorable Jane Fonda-hosted UC Berkeley screening of The China Syndrome, there’s a disturbing timestands-still quality to director Volker Sattel’s eerie, seductively beautiful See page 29 >>
and more. Illuminating and vivid, Cameraman (Strand), Craig McCall’s doc about the life and work of the late Jack Cardiff (1914-2009), is a moviegoer’s delight. Cardiff, the first cinematographer to receive an honorary Oscar (presented to him in 2001 by Dustin Hoffman), began his career as a child actor in 1918 England. Eighty years later, he was a guest of honor at the Cannes Film Festival. In-between, he came to be known as the cinema’s key innovator in color photography. With film credits including Black Narcissus (1947), The
Red Shoes (1948), The African Queen (1951), The Prince and the Showgirl (1957), as well as later fare such as Conan the Destroyer (1984) and Rambo (1985), Cardiff’s work speaks for itself. But how wonderful is it that we get to hear Cardiff’s own words as he regales us with the stories of his groundbreaking career in and on film? Among those singing Cardiff’s praises in interviews are Martin Scorcese, Kirk Douglas, Lauren Bacall, Kim Hunter and Moira Shearer. There are a multitude of DVD bonus features, including an interview with director McCall and Cardiff’s “behind-thescenes” movies.▼