Absent

After watching "The Blond One" (EXCELLENT) and "Hawaii" (VERY GOOD) ...this movie is just "so so." I feel giving it a higher rating would be an insult to Marco's other films.

Infatuation and lust may have bad consequences, particularly if involving an adult and a minor, and it certainly involves misapprehensions and rumors, particularly if involving teacher-student of the same sex. Thus, a good basis for an intriguing film for relatively wide audience? But, alas, the result is a protracted depiction of facial expressions and trivial dialogues, with the main topic in the background, and otherwise spirited Latin Americans behave as those from the Nordic countries... The plot remains indistinct; I usually like to ponder on and over during or after a film, but here, it was no mind-twisting at all. Leaving things open and not explaining things are two different approaches for me.

Ausente could be a play for small niche theatres, but a film for a big festival? I was surprised when I read that the film won "Best feature film" during Berlin International Film Festival.

Really sad and really lovely. Beautifully made.. it's a dreamlike movie.

The story goes slow but the growing tension didn't let it be boring for a second.

It's been made very simple, short, yet absolutely complete.

I don't know what's worst: the casting, the acting or the pointless story.

I have watched Marco Berger's Hawaii, his two short stories and Plan B. In that order, so I have watched enough to know that in his works there are always obligatory shots of men's crutches and long quiet scenes...it works in everyone but "The clock" (his first work). So I knew this one was going to have that but I was not expecting terrible actors with no chemistry whatsoever and that includes the secondary actors (terrible teachers) and the insufferable girlfriend. Am I suppose to think the couple love each other? There is no real connection between the actors. And don't get me start about Martin. Am I suppose to root for this lying manipulative tool? Because I don't care about him and his terrible lessons about butterflies (that was painful to watch). I guess the moral of the story is indulge yourself and give the teenage psycho what he wants instead of acting like an adult...what was Sebastian supposed to be sorry for? The only stupid thing he did was being stupid enough not to see that kid was (poorly) lying all along.

I have just finished watching Marco Berger's "Ausente", and in spite of the Teddy award it won at the Berlin International Film Festival as Best Film with LGBT topic, I confess that all the enthusiasm that I felt when I saw "Plan B" vanished. All the freshness and sensuality of Berger's first motion picture, with actors who seemed to be improvising scenes and lines (or maybe they were really doing it) to give us a sincere reflection on how to reach honest acceptance of our homo-erotic feelings, was here replaced by a flow of contrived, too coldly calculated movements, to create a melodrama (not in the best tango tradition, but more in a soapy middle class mold) which is often more corny than moving. The story of a professor's harassment by his adolescent student, who is trying to seduce his teacher with lies, is slowly displaced by a subplot that pays too much attention to public opinion, prejudice, fear and slander, that is probably more in the mind of the instructor, who in the end is not as transparent as he had thought. Although Berger still favors setting up his camera at the level of men's crotches in underwear while lying in bed, this time those shots seem tamed as he was too much assimilated (perhaps far too much) by the discreet charm of the Argentinean film industry and its frequent pomp (careful, I do not mean the other Argentinean cinema, so independent and liberating- and without Ricardo Darín in the leading role, of course!), with sugary music that even includes a little female voice doing "Aaahhh's" Both Carlos Echevarría as the professor and Javier de Pietro as the student are good, given the material they had to work with.