Deseo

What do you normally expect if you hear a movie comes from Mexico? Kidnappers? Hijackers? Drug cartels? A sensual love story? Well, the latter comes close, but DESEO takes you further.

The movie is based on Arthur Schnitzler's "REIGEN", one of the biggest scandal's on European theatre stages in the 20th century. Just like the original text the film tells stories of longing for love, seduction, power and disappointment reflected in different characters (soldier, school girl, actress, husband.....) with distinct social backgrounds. While Schnitzler's play was said to describe the "merciless mechanism of sex" without actually showing it, the film does have a very erotic/sensual undertone which logically reflects the title in a narrower sense and is beautifully staged in the respective scenes. However, "DESEO" refers to all kinds of DESIRES, not just physically, but in a wider sense to whatever a human being could wish for.

Director Antonio Zavala Kugler manages to cleverly connect each story with the next through reappearing characters and their varying "importance" in different story lines. The wonderful selection of music underlines the stories and sometimes it feels like it's become part of the cast. Speaking of which...the cast, without exception, is a "crème de la crème" selection of Mexican actors, who know how to work and stage their talents.

I think DESEO is a great realization of the original Schnitzler text and Zavala successfully transferred it to our times.

BRAVO!

So I do not know the source material ... I can't say if the movie does it justice then. I do know that the movie is quite the puzzle ... well the pieces of the movie work like a puzzle. You put them together and for some something really amazing comes out of it and others find pieces missing or not connecting with the rest ... another one of those personal taste things.

The erotic, the tension between characters and the way they interact ... you will either love it or find it not attractive enough. The stories are nicely told though and the cinematography and the cast is really good (and beautiful to look at - though do not expect too much nudity in this - very little can be seen to be exact) ... stay for the end credits or rather do not shut the movie off once they start ... there are things to be seen ...

I attached the link to my note of this wonderful film, beautifully produced, directed and starred, with an exquisite selection of music, which leads to images, to explore the interior of the characters. "Deseo" seeks to show characters who are in different emotional ranges, as to the socioeconomic conditions are concerned, in order to face them, and attach them through their more earthly instincts. "Deseo" reduces the human being, to the most primitive and innate: Sexual impulse. It is not surprising that "Deseo" is a film inspired by the famous work of Arthur Schnitzler's "Reigen. Zehn Dialoge " (1896 - 1897), which analyzes the eternal dualities of moral and amoral; of carnal desire (deseo), and sublimated love; of life and death, transported to the current Mexican province, where nothing is different from the rigidity of that Puritan late nineteenth century. Apparently, the original speech by Schnitzler, the human behavior, has surpassed his own time and circumstances; and make it work of this Mexican filmmaker, a proof of that.

http://lecturascinematograficas.blogspot.mx/2015/01/deseo.html

Coming from the producer of MATADOR,it's the much filmed Schnitzler format, once again omitting the original's VD plot.

Some great looking people get it on in various stages of undress, mainly in the lush settings that resemble the TV novella they reference, though there is a brief glimpse of the urban grot that we associate with realistic Mexican films. Maid, son of the house, wife, husband, school girl, actress, young girl.

The film is slight but it has it's moments of invention, style and involvement.

For a film that carefully avoids full frontals - outside a scene of lesbian underwater making out - we get a remarkably erotic effort