Dependencia sexual

There are some movies you start watching with "oh what now?!" and at the end you thank the Providence you did...

I avoid describing formal part - it's something you can discuss for long if you like after the movie and maybe it makes you watch it again "to fully understand". Whatever. Don't forget a wonderful selection of the music - at least for this reason the movie is something to see for those who are not interested for the other reasons.

The importance for me consists in a topic. Let's say it simply - the mentality of a straight-male world. "Oh, they are not all the same." Of course, we talk about those who are. About the chronical misunderstanding between genders - "marry me, let's make children, build a house,..." and the other gender, that learned that "I love you!" is a good way to say "I wanna f..k you" without offending the romantic ideals of the other one. I am not a frustrated woman whose feelings were hurt. I am a gay man - who just watches this never-ending game as a third part (with insight to both sides) and has "fun". Sometimes not so funny-kind-of-fun.

I'd relate it to a movie In The Company Of Men - that was told "to divide times" to Before and After. May it be so. Now perhaps again, from different continent(s) - and with more characters to watch (maybe in different times) - so the image we are served is to be much more "universal"-like. But - it's not Bolivia, it's not America - this is the slight touch to the general mentality what the masculine thinks about what their masculinity is. That men never grow up inside from the age of 15...? They are the hunters in the core? They are expected to be so? What you think? At least consider...

And now time for the point - the movie is a precise composition of the images that will be burnt in your head like a CD. And if not the scenes, not the dialogs, then for sure all the feelings and tunings and small internal shame you'll experience. One of the reasons to recommend this movie is the one mentioned in the title - for me it took days to digest it - even if my opinion was similar before. It HAS A TASTE - maybe bitter - but it's more then nowadays you can expect from the other politically correct and all-is-nice or all-will-be-OK films.

Enjoy it, first feel, then think, admit, then the change will come itself. Let's hope.

With generosity and patience one could appreciate this movie. However, the director's choice of using split screens throughout is an overwhelming mistake that gets in the way of everything else he is trying to do. It becomes annoying, like receiving text totally underlined and in capital letters: not everything is equally important nor do the images on one side of the screen contribute continuously in any significant way to what happens on the other side nor enhance our grasp of the whole. So, we are regretfully left with a boring and pretentious conceit of the sort that should have been outgrown in film school. Rodrigo Bellott is nowhere near being a Peter Greenaway who can manipulate aspect ratios and split screens to profound dramatic effect, thereby creating effective, well-structured wholes (e.g. The Pillow Book, a film only done full justice on a theatre screen where the diverse aspect ratios which occur throughout the film can be shown.... DVD's can't do it).

Better luck next time.... and I truly hope there is a next time for Mr. Bellott. Forcing oneself to ignore his unfortunate aesthetic choice (and this is hard, for there is no avoiding it for the whole frigging movie) one realizes that Mr. Bellott may indeed have something worthwhile to say. I wish him to try again, preferably with a strong, experienced but sensitive producer at his side.

While a lot of the time, I am a mainstream guy - who likes to watch known films with a lot of buzz and famous celebs, one in a while I take myself more seriously, and venture out to explore on foreign terrain. This time, I decided to listen to my gut feeling, and rent Sexual Dependency. While usually, Spanish-language films annoy me - the premise behind Sexual Dependency sounded interesting, especially to me - a guy who enjoys movies with sexual themes.

I was pleasantly surprised by this movie: when I started watching it, and the split screen appeared, with dramatic music in the background - I was a bit hesitant. I though "Well, there starts another tears-filled international drama". In edition, the split screen really confused me in the beginning, and I thought to myself "Where the hell should I look?". But after you get the deal with the filming, you learn to appreciate this work of art: the idea of different perspective to each scene is amazing! Whoever though of showing us this split world is a genius!

Another thing to like about this movie is the collection of people, whose stories interweave amongst each other. Even though some stories are more interesting and unique, and other are a bit more commercial and clichéd - the general picture is quite nice. The end of the movie is highly surprising, though weak, and a lot of ends don't create a tie - yet still, you feel fulfilled after you watch this film.

While it is not perfect, it falls quite closely - thanks to an interesting plot construction, amazing filming, and even a little bit of South American music can't hurt.

If you're into unique work of cinematic art - especially international film fans - you cannot afford to miss this creation.

I think this could have been a good film, but, as others have mentioned, the split-screen 'style' (?) is incredibly annoying over 100-odd minutes of watching, or, in this case, watching TWICE. That adds up to 200-odd minutes of watching five different stories, all while distracting you with camera gimmickry.

In the mid-1960s, a graphic designer from Toronto, Ontario, Canada named Chris Chapman created the split-screen idea for a short film on the Province of Ontario for the provincial government. It was a sensation at Expo '67 in Montreal, and was such a novel idea that Toronto director Norman Jewison (and others) used it in 1960s films.

The idea, predictably, went nowhere. It was trendy, had flair, but was not sustainable over the length of an entire film. Jewison used it sparingly in The Thomas Crown Affair (1968), and it annoyed critics even then. And here, almost 40 years later, we have a director who thinks it would be a great idea to try it again, this time (unlike Jewison, who was far more judicious) over the ENTIRE STRETCH of a movie.

I was astounded that this was done. It defies basic physical laws. The human eye just cannot catch up with a blizzard of jump cuts (and that's what they really amount to) over a feature-length. Instead of intensifying the drama, it instead made me truly irritated.

Repeat: I THINK this could have been a good film. Or is that films, as in plural?

This is not an easy movie to watch. Not only is the topic rather heavy, but the way the director shows the images is in the beginning very disturbing and tiresome: you constantly see two images at the same time, like the screen is split in a left and a right half! Sometimes it's two totally different images from two different story-lines, at other times it's just two different camera-angles of the same going-ons. At first I thought it would eventually turn to one image, or it would just get split-up again when there was some specific reason for it. But when it dawned on me that this would go on throughout the whole 105 minutes, it almost made me turn the thing off. Luckily I didn't, because gradually your eyes and brain apparently get used to this, and I have to say: the movie itself is really good!! It was advertised on my DVD-box as some sort of sequel to Kids or Ken Park movie, which I think doesn't justify it. Sure, it's got the same sense of documentary, young actors going about as if they're not acting at all, and camera's wavering about, and it's as candid in the way the different stories are told and shown. But it's a lot less superficial, you seem to get more into the characters of the persons, which at least enables you a little bit to comiserate and care for them. It's about some 5 young kids who all have reasons for frustrated feelings about sex and sexuality. Some in a very simple way, like the young village-girl with the raving strict father, who's dying for her first experience. Or the young virgin guy who gets forced by his drunk and roaring friends to visit a prostitute. In others it's more complicated: hidden homosexual feelings in a macho latino, or coping with the experience of a rape. The different story lines are cleverly woven into eachother, in a very natural way (witch is helped of course by the splitting of the screen) and somehow I didn't even notice it much when the story brought us to a Spanish or an American spoken scene. Of course you're not to expect any happy ending with this kind of bare, painfully honest movies, and the one here is equally depressing, just giving you the hope that everyone will somehow have learned something from his or her bad experiences. Maybe that's my main criticism: there's very little room for a smile, it's maybe all a bit too pitch-black. However: absolutely worth while. 8 out of 10.