Le Colocataire

I saw this film at the BFI Flare LGBTQ+ festival earlier today and was blown away. Quite simply, it is superb filmmaking at the very highest level, with extraordinarily subtle performances from the two leads. Director Marco Berger presents the story of a love affair in a series of uninflected, mostly static shots, letting the camera linger on characters' faces as they register attraction, desire, frustration, jealousy and love. In less skilled hands it could easily be boring or pretentious, but instead it's riveting ... and at times achingly painful. Both lead actors - Gastón Re playing Gabriel and Alfonso Barón as Juan - are outstanding, as it the girl playing Gabriel's daughter. Gastón Re, in particular, deserves to win multiple awards for his beautifully judged performance. Largely wordless, he brings to life the inner life of the shy, yearning Gabriel so fully that I felt I'd known him for years. If you were affected by Brokeback Mountain or God's Own Country then you will surely appreciate this film. Beyond that, if you admire the work of Ingmar Bergman or Wong Kar-wai or Pawel Pawlikowski then you should go out of your way to see this superb Argentinian film.

The quiet scenes could capture all the emotions, sensuality, desire, tension, passion, nervousness and love in the air. Bravo! Both actors are super talented, especially "the blond one". I just enjoyed the whole time watching it, to me it told a love story between two flatmates, the outcome of this story is not as important and amusing as how every details of it happened.

... but still a little masterpiece on the subject of frustrating and even emotionally abusive relationships. I m only giving it 8 stars because of a few unnecessarily long scenes and a pace which is a bit slow for my taste. The performances are superb, though, and the cinematography, consisting of continuous close ups capturing every kind of emotion in all its details, is particularly inspired and effective. The ending is out of this world, literally! It offers an unexpected climax that only adds to the frustration and secures the viewers' empathy. This whole film is romantic drama at its best!

Argentina has really surprised me with its gay themed films, this is another good one, slow a few times but worth seeing how the characters get involved, the end is real and it can be related to a lot gay/bi men.

Solid 8 stars.

It was slow and repetitive at times, with little dialog, but this helped draw out the story somehow. And then you had bursts of dialog here and there, shedding light into the characters. The end came kind of suddenly, at first disappointing, but then surprisingly heart-warming, despite the previous sad development. Overall a quiet, sweet film.