Año bisiesto

A bleak study of loneliness set in a claustrophobic apartment in Mexico City featuring a fearless performance, or a masochistic one, take your pick, by Monica Del Carmen as Laura. Laura spends most of her days and nights in her joyless apartment spying on her neighbors and inventing relationships with them in her mind. She occasionally goes out to clubs and brings home men for unrewarding sex. They invariably leave her lonelier than before. She meets Arturo (Armando Hernandez) who brings a sado-masochistic satisfaction to her sexual life. Meanwhile she ominously checks off the dates of her calendar toward the end of the month marked in red. This film is as explicit as it needs to be and Laura's world is not easy to view. Director Michael Rowe has achieved the film he sat out to make, I'm sure, and the totality of the realism can be uncomfortable as it should be. By setting the movie entirely in the small apartment and by the astonishingly natural performance of Ms. Del Carmen, you feel, smell, and know this movie like it was a fever dream. You want to give Laura a big hug at the end. Not for the squeamish or near squeamish.

Leap year is the story of the encounter or rather the break up of Laura and Arturo. Apparently this is a simple story but it contains a lot of details worth taking a second look at. The Australian director and screenwriter who lives in Mexico submerges us in a visual world that is plain and charmless for Mexican standards and someone might be tempted to judge the film by its visual austerity. But this perspective allows Michael Rowe to explore the solitude of Laura, her detachment from others and to slowly introduce us into her adventures with man, what she searches in them or better said who she would like to encounter in them. After seeing the film a close friend told me it was anti Hollywood. Definitely it does not embody a mass market aesthetic. The dark skinned actors and the unappetizing looks of the apartment where the action takes place are ideal to center the attention of the spectator on what is happening to the main character. Scenes like Laura taking off her bra underneath her shirt, picking her nose while working on her computer submerge us into an uncomfortable bodily intimacy. And there are also the very explicit sex scenes with exquisite violence full of details I don't even feel free to mention here that are not exciting in the usual sense but awaken a deep curiosity for the character. This movie was not shown in the Mexican commercial circuit. What does it mean when society that not willing to see herself in the mirror. When Michelangelo Antonioni answered critics of his movie The adventure (1960) he used these words "Eros is sick, man is uncomfortable and this makes him react but he does so in the wrong way, he explores eroticism and he is unhappy".

So, we've got this chick with a real weird hard-on for the looming February 29th, like it's the expiration date on her sanity, and wouldn't you know it, the whole shebang ends in a climax that's about as pleasant as discovering a hairball in your morning coffee. Mónica del Carmen as Laura exudes flesh and blood for this character and her journey through the personal tragedy, marked by urban solitude and loneliness. She stumbles into some kinky business that apparently glues her body, her space, and her shot at redemption together. Turns out, there's no "do not cross" tape on Laura as she begins to experience transgression and dedicates herself to licentious exercise of sadomasochism.

This is definitely an arthouse character study into a love-lust-and-loneliness casualty. Think of it as the kinky cousin of Jeanne Dielman, a watered-down Hisayasu Sato that kinda smells like the leftovers of Jean-Claude Brisseau, Götz Spielmann, Silvio Soldini, Catherine Breillat, Lars von Trier, Conrado Sanchez, Werner Schroeter, Julio Medem and Fabrice Du Welz's recent Alleluia (which, let's be honest, was pretty damn bonkers). Now, while this film delivers a potent whiff of alienation and an uncomfortably raw artistic realism, this soul-baring cinematic enema, with its troubling eroticism, is supposedly a vehicle of compassion for this deeply messed-up woman. My advice? Maybe skip this one. Seriously, proceed with the kind of caution. You've been warned.

We are introduced to Laura and her sad life. She is a contributor to a business magazine, but spends most of her time in her apartment, wearing pjs. Apparently she took at face value a man to be named businessman of the year for the magazine, wrote the article and it turned out he was a total fraud, but the magazine was already on the stands. She didn't do a background check, since she didn't think it was necessary. So she loses her job, or at least suspended for a time. On her calendar, she marks off the days of the month for February, with filled in red for February 29th. That day has a special meaning which we find out later. She lives in a somewhat seedy apartment (ants, cockroaches) and lives through watching neighbors. It is comfortable for her being there. Other than a brother, she seems isolated, and has numerous one night stands, not wanting to even know their names. One man gets into a rather violent and degrading relationship with her, and it borders on being very dangerous. But she encourages it. As the days count down to the end of the month, just what does she have in mind? She seems to accept the life that she has made for herself, and it is rather dreary and depressing.

"Leap Year" is simple, albeit brilliant filmmaking. There is very little, if any, "coverage" for each and every shot. No close-ups, no pans, no dolly shots, no cranes, no over-the-shoulder, and no reaction shots. The camera remains still and static throughout - time and time again simply letting the drama unfold before our eyes. We are nothing more than a voyeur. It's a bold choice - perhaps born out of budget necessity - but it nonetheless works. What's makes every shot absolutely fascinating is called "life." Human behavior. The success of this film is a tribute to the director, his belief in the story, and most of all, the trust he was able to get from his actors. Although the camera rarely moves, it tells the story better than most Hollywood directors with a much bigger budget ever could.