REVIEW: OASIS
My first exposure to Jorge Ameer's works was last Christmas Eve when my partner and I chanced upon his most recent movie, The Family Tree. Years ago, we decided to ditch watching the holiday classics like The Christmas Story, or It's a Wonderful Life as part of our Christmas eve film viewing tradition and instead focus on similarly themed LGBTQ films. In the early years of our new tradition, the pickings were slim, but now, fortunately, the halls are decked with many LGBTQ movies to choose from. Progress, I guess.
So, watching and reviewing OASIS, which Jorge Ameer made in 2017, I felt a bit of apprehension that I might maltreat this movie. That I might compare it to his latest The Family Tree and that it would come up short of the cinematic brilliance that Jorge's 2020 film has achieved for me. So I hemmed and hawed, gave myself all sorts of excuses not to watch Oasis yet, but eventually, the excuses run out. So cautious self-advice be damned, I'm going to the Oasis!
As the logline said, OASIS is about two friends who embark on a tropical expedition to bury their past. But if you know Jorge Ameer, the way I know him now, a "burial of the past" in his world is never just a mere act or ceremony of burying a past- done, over, let's move on. No. It's unearthing skeletons in the ground you just dug; it's digging up the future; it's discovering that Ameer, once more, set us up with a ticking time bomb that could explode in a second or could be disarmed with the flick of a master storyteller/editor's hand.
At the beginning of OASIS, we see Andrew (Matthew Lynn) arriving in Panama, where through a series of stunning shots of the city, we find out that Panama is much more than just a canal. It's breathtaking beaches, modern skyscrapers, and later in the film, lush tropical rainforests. Andrew is here on a business, but he has a more critical agenda on his pretty mind: to reconnect with his friend Oliver (Cesar de Fuentes), whom he last saw days before his own wedding, which Oliver did not attend on purpose.
When Andrew visits Carlos, he sees all sorts of troubles- financial, emotional, psychological, you name it- in his friend's married paradise and decides to take him away from his beautiful nagging wife to a resort for a weekend of chilling and bonding...and then some. Turns out, Andrew suffers from similar issues, so this weekend boding is really for them to heal, resolve, come to terms with their f-up lives. It helps that before they went on this trip, Andrew bought some synthetic hallucinogenic street drug called "Oasis" from a mysterious gypsy, played with gleeful abandon by Jorge Ameer himself!
"The burial of the past," as I've said earlier, turned out to be so much more than that. In this movie, everything life-changing happens as only Ameer can depict it-with whimsy, with humor, with nudity, violence, and, most of all, with the audacity of pushing the film's premise into a deep and daring burial ground.
I saw Jorge's journey as a filmmaker in this movie, and it's incredibly fascinating. I'm very, very interested in what Jorge Ameer's does next.
