ancapi145

In the drama that was Wilde's life and failure, one always forget one character: Robbie Ross. Reputedly Wilde's "first boy", he was always the faithful, if overlooked, friend.

This movie is, beyond it's moving use of "The Happy Prince", a homage to Ross, the one that fought to recover the rights od Wilde's work for his children, and whose ashes are buried with the body of the author at Pere la Chaise in Paris.

I'm giving this just one star... and I'm being quite generous. I wish I could give it just half a star, or something like –3 stars, but I can't. The two short stories that make up this "thing" are both awful, and quite unbelievable. There are some fine actors here, but their talents are wasted in the poor directing and the schematically written scripts. It's very sad to see a good, intelligent director like Carlos Caridad-Montero signing a piece like this, so complacent to the dearest illusions of the powers that be in Venezuela that it is actually physically painful.

Even Nohely Arteaga, a quite beautiful and talented actress is unbelievably cold and almost dead in this "thing". I really mourn for the lives of the trees that were sacrificed to produce the paper in which this awful double "thing" was written.

This movie really impressed me. I'm not a fan of violent or "action" movies, and usually, Venezuelan films that deal with violence do it with little subtlety and depth. This is quite an exception. The movie is, over all, credible. The script is full of humour (albeit a very dark one) and, most of the time, quite precise, without excesses, and full of twists and turns. The actors demonstrate something everybody knows: there is a lot of talent in Venezuela, but it is seldom that directors find a way to show it as well as Velasco did. Even though some of the limitations imposed by what one might call the political situation of our country are more or less noticeable, this film finds a way to portrait our reality without romanticism or lies. Aesthetically, the film reaches levels I have seen rarely in our nation's production. It's worth the watch.