Vies brûlées

WOW! Rivetting! The faces of Eduardo Noriega and Lorenzo Sbaraglia fighting and surrendering to their love is pure cinematic art. I left the theatre unable to utter a word. I wanted to revisit their world, no matter how tragic, there was truth in it, twisted, painful truth. PLATA QUEMADA deserves a larger audience. On my second viewing, I forced two friends, who hate subtitles, and are as far removed from the gay world as anyone I know and they loved it. They were seduced by the universe Marcelo Pineyro created for those superb characters to inhabit. More, Mr. Pineyro. More Eduardo and Lorenzo! Bravo!

I cannot forget the images that Marcelo Piñeyro conjured up and was able to capture in this film. Everything, the visuals, the literate script, with its sensitive, sensuous, heartbreaking dialogue, the suspense that does not leave you for a single minute, the violent finale that you expect and still keep hoping it will not happen, the exquisite acting of all the major players, it will all stay with me, forever, I am sure. This is film-making of the best kind: contemporary, mature, it relates to reality but transcends it and reaches a perfectly beautiful, artistic, poetic level. This is also a film that treats a gay relationship with total honesty and truth. The characters have their faults, but none of them has to do with their sexuality. They make, indeed, a beautiful pair, and I wish they would have had a chance to be happy together, somewhere, somehow, at the end.

The relationship between Angel and Nene is one of the most passionate, destructive, uncompromising depictions of love in all its blood-soaked sordidness that I've seen in a long time. These are not nice guys. They are wounded and fierce and protective of each other. So complex a relationship needs time to develop on film and director ,Marcelo Piñeyro, isn't afraid to give it to them. We share the sweltering boredom of their exile, the desperation of Nene's love for Angel and Angel's wordless, psychotic attempts to save Nene. These great actors can say it all in a single look. It is one of the most intensely erotic and romantic film I've seen in a very long time.This is a movie that will stay with me.

An excellent movie where everything is beautiful - from the crumbling, claustrophobic backdrops of the antagonists' hiding places, the actors and the background music.

Besides showing an unusual homosexual relationship, the film also questions the relationship between sex, love and violence - even when the main characters turn "straight" violence and death hang in the air, with scenes sex often interspliced with those of death and agony.

More importantly, you can't help but feel sorry - and yet almost envious - for the doomed (and did I mention beautiful?) lovers as they slide towards their inevitable end, just for the incredible passion they have for each other.

Burnt Money, a provocative, severe crime thriller from Argentina, begins like a Spanish- language Guy Ritchie narrative, with an assembly of criminals arranging a heist. Yet the heist is over in a glance. The lion's share of the story is the impact of the job. So much of this film seems already acquainted, from its appealing crime thriller stylization to its narrative echoes of Reservoir Dogs, Heat and Bonnie and Clyde, that when it takes one of its unprecedented turns it overcomes you. There are a lot of unforeseen detours.

The opening introduces us to Angel and Nene, gay lovers who live in a murky Buenos Aires apartment. A narrator notifies us that they are known as "the twins." After showing how they met, in a grungy public restroom, the narrator distinguishes the one telling way they are similar: "the still eyes, the lost glare." The knifelike center on character relationships, and the novelistic way the story is divulged through sequential narrators, featuring internal monologue, prepares us to pull back to enmesh the "twins" in the heist. Neither they, nor the story, are as they appear.

Leonardo Sbaraglia plays Nene with scorched vigor. He has the loose-hipped walk of a younger Robert Downey, Jr., yet oozing even more with suggestiveness. His underhanded approach to life is not smug or justified, but rather self-assuredly devoid of any overeagerness or vanity. Eduardo Noriega brings a preyed-upon sentimentality to Angel. We feel at first as if he may be slow, and perhaps to some extent he is, but in a way that is lost in emotionally charged internalized delusions, a return to the primordial dilemma. He seems afloat in dissolution, a dream state readily seen. And their emotional holding out becomes a game that neither wins. Where they are intimate, there is peace restored, and there are religious obstacles.

The robbery of an armored car goes awry. The thieves, one of them injured, must stay completely out of sight. Law-sided demoralization and violence are initial drives of the story's turning point though not at the center. The film, which is based on a true story, offhandedly concedes that the lines separating cops from robbers are obscured, but its focus remains tight on the robbers.

One should not write this film off as categorized for a gay target audience. Though it revolves around the two implicitly loving leads, Burnt Money seems to compete with much more vivid heterosexual pairings. Nene swings both ways, and Cuervo, the getaway driver played by Pablo Escharri, has a girlfriend who figures integrally in the plot. After the men flee to Uruguay, police beatings push the left-behind girlfriend to give them up. Their status revealed, the robbers must stay out of sight, pressures mounting. Anti-gay implications add to the enmity. They don't trust each other, everyone keeps a gun at hand, but attachments gradually solidify nonetheless.

Burnt Money could have almost been made in the 1970s, when a film with the promise of spectacle in its subject matter was almost expected to take the more complex way to the end, no matter what the end may be. And yet the film reaches a climax we've seen so many times. Nevertheless, even in its brutal execution which extrinsically offers not much in the way of variation on a device dating back to the original 1932 Scarface, it maintains a theme of dissolution, a dream state made real to them, of feelings taking over, a theme which, in the end, makes the film its own beast.